What this book is
A Spell in the Army brings together two play scripts written for and with young people, alongside nine short invocationsthat reflect on youth voice, authority, and responsibility across nearly four decades.
The plays – A Spell in the Army and The House That Jack Built – are not historical dramas, nor are they recruitment stories. They are theatrical explorations of how institutions claim loyalty, how obedience is aestheticised, and how belonging can begin to feel like safety.
The invocations sit alongside the plays as a different kind of text: reflective, polemical and deliberately direct.
Together, the book forms a triptych:
- drama
- parable
- invocation
Each addressing the same question from a different angle.
Why this book exists
The book was published in 2024 against the renewed public rhetoric around national service and conscription echoing debates that first shaped A Spell in the Army in 1988.
Then, as now, young people were being told:
- they lived “in bubbles”
- they lacked resilience
- they needed discipline imposed from outside
This book exists to resist that framing.
The plays, briefly
A Spell in the Army
Devised with the Bramley Bratpack youth theatre in Leeds, this play explores the moment when structure becomes seductive.
Language tightens.
Commands repeat.
Routines feel reassuring.
What begins as order gradually becomes compulsion.
The play stages the spell itself – the point at which authority stops being questioned and starts being absorbed.
The House That Jack Built (by Mike Kenny)
A companion piece that examines how systems are constructed incrementally, through small, apparently reasonable decisions.
Each step feels justified.
Each addition feels necessary.
Responsibility diffuses as the structure grows.
By the end, no one quite remembers who started the process — or how to dismantle it.
The nine invocations
The nine invocations are not scenes, poems, or essays in the conventional sense. They function more like ritual interruptions.
Written across a span of 36 years, they reflect on the lived realities of young people navigating education, work, family, and institutional expectation. They speak to young people, but also past them – addressing educators, policymakers, organisations, and adults who claim authority over youth voice.
The invocations:
- reject deficit narratives about young people
- insist on recognising competence before vulnerability
- expose the persistence of military metaphors in education and business
- challenge generational stereotyping
- interrogate the idea of the “corporate parent”
- and call for genuine partnership rather than managed participation
They are not neutral.
They do not pretend to balance “both sides”.
How the invocations relate to the plays
Where the plays stage the operation of authority, the invocations name it.
Where the plays allow ambiguity, the invocations insist on clarity.
Where the plays dramatise seduction, the invocations articulate resistance.
Importantly, the invocations do not offer heroic alternatives. They do not replace one model of authority with another. Instead, they argue for:
- attentiveness
- humility
- co-creation
- and the courage to listen without managing the outcome
In the context of the wider Confessions series, they are an early articulation of the refusal of manufactured heroism.
Form and tone
The book deliberately shifts register:
- from drama to reflection
- from character to address
- from implication to insistence
This movement prevents the reader from settling too comfortably into narrative distance. The invocations break the spell the plays create — and that is their purpose.
How this fits the wider Nick Owen Publishing catalogue
A Spell in the Army sits at the ethical root of much of NOP’s later work.
Its concerns echo through:
- the Confessions series (institutional pressure, hero manufacture, obedience)
- Mess Theory (systems behaving irrationally)
- TABLOID!!! (power, spectacle, persuasion)
- Confessions of the Ageing Swimmers (authority, surveillance, control)
The invocations, in particular, anticipate the later shift in the catalogue away from distant heroes and toward relational, emergent forms of value.
Who this book tends to find
This book is often discovered by:
- educators and teachers
- youth theatre practitioners
- youth workers and facilitators
- cultural leaders and policymakers
- readers sceptical of tidy hero narratives
It attracts readers who are willing to sit with discomfort — and to recognise how early the pressure to conform is applied.
A final note
This book does not condemn institutions outright.
It asks something harder:
What do we give up — willingly — in exchange for certainty?
And how early do we learn to confuse obedience with virtue?
The plays ask the question theatrically.
The invocations insist that we answer it.