Sheridan Morley - 23 September 2005

A Journey still worth making

If All Quiet On The Western Front is the classic film of the First World War, then the greatest play of that conflict is Journey’s End, revived after triumphantly touring the country and the West End.

RC Sherriff’s all-male play is set on the Somme in three days of March 1918, leading up to the most intensive German offensive of the war. We never leave the trenches nor a company of soldiers under severe attack.

But written only a decade after the Armistice, Sherriff’s script neither raises nor resolves any questions about policy or the High Command: the war is taken as an absolute, to be fought because it is there, and Journey’s End is largely about the mechanics of waging it.

In a trench before St Quentin in France, a cross-section of British officers and men are gathered as a group of immediately recognisable types – the courageous young officer drowning his neuroses in drink; the reformed coward; the hero-worshipping lad straight from school; the cheery cockney and pipe-smoking schoolmaster who reads Lewis Carroll.

Despite its moments of personal drama, this was in many ways the first and most English documentary of a war that had not, when first preformed, been chronicled in real detail. And in its detailed observance of characters under the stress of the dugout it is in its own way a small masterpiece.

The lunacy of the war, idiocy of its generals, and failure of its aims are never allowed to impinge upon the nobility that Sherriff, drawing on his own experience, found.

David Grindley’s original production, restaged by Tim Roseman, uses a cast of 10 economically and there’s a sense of tension in what could otherwise easily become a talking shop.

Michael Siberry, as father-figure Osborne, Ben Righton as Stanhope and Robert East as the colonel lead a strong company.

Though there is comedy, Sherriff was clearly writing soon after the event about awful times through which he found men to admire. Journey’s End deserves this revival, not only for what it tells us about the trenches but the mood it reflects of the war. It is not just what Sherriff writes about but the mood it reflects of the war. It is not just what Sherriff writes about but the perspective through which he writes it that gives us the best insight into what happened on the Somme and how it was allowed to continue.