"Patch you up, all nice like, splint, bandage your leg. All very civilized actually. But then. Then. We hand you over."

Helmand in the height of summer. Gary, a British soldier, and Hafizullah, his Afghan colleague, guard an injured young prisoner, Zia, found in the heat of battle. Gary wants answers, Hafizullah just wants to make it through the day and Zia thinks there has been a big mistake. Surrounded by intense heat and violence, the characters' moral codes are tested to the limit.

DC Moore's second play dissects the politics of occupation, home and abroad. With both painful and witty insight, he explores some of the lengths humanity is stretched to under the circumstances of war. The strong characterisation enjoys a healthy dose of humanity and the politically-charged subject is handled with subtlety and atypical nuances.


The Empire is an amusing and sometime shocking insight into life in the Afghanistan war.