The horrors of war are perfectly and painfully depicted in this FIVE STAR adaptation of RC Sherriff’s Journey’s End by Richmond Shakespeare Society, on until November 3. Simon Collins reviews.
Details
Venue: Mary Wallace Theatre
Dates & Opening Times:
Saturday 27 October to Saturday 3 November 2018, 7.45 pm
Sunday 28th October at 3 pm
Tickets: £13 http://www.richmondshakespeare.org.uk/
Our Verdict
This perfectly designed play recreating the experience of war has been translated into two dozen languages and has been performed continuously at one theatre or another since its first London run in 1928. It is a perennial favourite in Britain, especially in boys’ schools, the very same schools that supplied the army’s stiff-upper-lipped officers in the first place and still do.
There is a single set, a claustrophobic dug-out on the Western Front, where several British officers eat and sleep and drink endless mugs of horribly flavoured tea, wine and whisky when they can, plan their military arrangements, and remember the contented life of England as if it were a dream.
Nothing very much happens in the way of action. Indeed, new arrival, Raleigh, fresh from public school comments on the peculiar silence of war. Soon enough he learns the quiet will be periodically burst to pieces by German machine guns, grenades and shellfire. The production succeeds well in its sound effects. The audience is warned to expect flashing lights, smoke and loud explosions throughout.
This was the war R.C. Sherriff himself experienced for a year before he was seriously wounded and shipped back to Blighty. The three days depicted on stage happened a hundred years ago. Harry Patch, “the Last Fighting Tommy,” died in 2009. Yet that lost era lives on in the play: this is how young officers spoke, chatted and joked, compared notes on women, complained about the food and strove, under mind-ripping tension, not to lose their tempers.
In March 1918, the Germans launched a massive attack, their last desperate throw to win the war. It would last many weeks. Of course, the British knew it was coming. The officers in their dug-out, only 70 yards from the German line, understood they would almost certainly be killed without knowing just when. A mood of impending doom pervades every minute of the play. But life goes on even in the trenches. The respectability of the Home Counties must be maintained whatever the emotional turmoil underneath.
Each character copes in his own way. Osborne, slightly older, adopts an avuncular persona, wearing a pullover and a scarf, smoking a pipe and talking about his garden. Everyone calls him “Uncle.” He provides cosy domesticity despite the rats and lice. Hibbert, whose guts have turned to jelly, fakes neuralgia in the hope of seeing a doctor. Trotter eats. Raleigh innocently hero-worships the upright company commander, Stanhope, the play’s main character, originally performed by a young Laurence Olivier.
Warped to the edge of madness, Stanhope has become an alcoholic. What little scope Sherriff leaves for interpretation is whether to portray Captain Stanhope as more or less sympathetic. In this smooth, powerful production he is less so. Either way, the outcome cannot change.
A month after the ongoing German offensive had begun, Field Marshal Haig issued an order to all ranks: “There is no course open to us but to fight it out. Every position must be held to the last man.”
