How the meanings of words change. Those expecting an evening of jolly japes featuring Bertie Wooster and his chums at the Drones Club will be disappointed. Here are two one-act plays considering the change wrought to the culture of warfare by the increasing use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.

In This Tuesday by Ron Hutchinson and  journalist Christina Lamb, the focus is the growing prominence of CIA-operated drone programs as opposed to military. A number of scenes depict the various attendees at one of the weekly White House targeting-decision meetings: a CIA director whose daughter has just been injured in a car crash, an adulterous White House wonk whose lover keeps annoyingly asking trenchant questions, an army general who finds the personal politics of the committee a more pressing issue than the geopolitics or the Army’s overall role in them. David Greig’s The Kid is a superficially simple four-hander, as two military drone operators and their partners gather to celebrate one couple’s pregnancy only to find themselves distracted by the collateral damage on their latest strike: a nicely ambiguous title covers each perspective.

This assemblage is closely akin to the kind of thematic programmes (such as Women, Politics And Power, or The Great Game about Afghanistan) which Nicolas Kent used to present when he ran the Tricycle Theatre. He takes the same approach here: each half is preceded by verbatim remarks from Clive Stafford-Smith of the human rights advocacy charity Reprieve (played, like the general, by Sam Dale) about the realities of drone attack culture. When Pete in The Kid congratulates the programme on “One civilian death for every 120 terrorists”, we have already heard Stafford-Smith’s testimony that “On average they kill nine innocent children for each person they target”, which throws the subsequent anxiety about the individual kid into sharper relief.

Kent directs the first half with scrupulous unfussiness, and Arcola chief Mehmet Ergen takes the same tack with The Kid, although the cast of six (also including Anne Adams and Rose Reynolds) get more of a workout in This Tuesday. Inevitably, the scope of the presentation and the resultant impact are less than Kent’s previous smorgasbords, but the underlying sense of an obligation to bear witness as a matter of moral citizenship remains.

Written for the Financial Times.