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Charles Spencer - 28 September 2005
THE revival of RC Sherriff’s great play about life in
the trenches during the First World War has been one of the
most gratifying theatrical success stories of recent years.
When David Grindley’s superb production opened at the
Comedy Theatre in January last year, 75 years after its West
End premiere, it was originally scheduled for a six-week run.
In fact, it proved an enduring hit, transferring first to
the Playhouse, then to the Duke of York’s, as well as
going on two national tours. Now recast, yet again, Journey’s
End is back for a further season, and there isn’t a
more powerful or moving play in London.
This is a work that leaves you both shaken and stirred, offering
a harrowing evocation of the horror and the appaling waste
of young life in the trenches, and the celebration of the
resilience and understated decency of the human spirit under
unimaginable pressure.
The play is based on Sherriff’s own experience as a
captain in the East Surrey Regiment, and is set in a dugout
near St Quentin over four days in March 1918, just before
the last great German offensive.
And though there may have been subtler, angrier and more poetic
evocations of the Great War - the carnage is described, with
devastating understatement, as “rather silly”
- I can think of a few with quite the dramatic punch, or the
smack of lived experience, of Journey’s End.
Sherriff is superb at catching the tedium of war as well as
its terrors, the silences that are in their way just as frightening
as the pounding of the big guns and the shocks of mortar fire.
And he draws his characters – for the most part, young
officers heroically struggling to maintain the stiff-upper-lip,
public school ethos on the front line – with vigour,
detail and compassion.
The first half is largely a waiting game, full of tension,
bad jokes and strained conversation, but we come to know the
characters intimately. The result is that, after the interval,
when all hell breaks loose, we really care about the characters’
fate.
The latest company, directed by Tim Roseman, certainly doesn’t
resemble a theatrical Third X1. In the key role of the 21-year-old
Captain Stanhope, functioning only on whisky and willpower
after three nerve-shredding years in the trenches, Ben Righton
movingly captures an instinctive leader who is revered by
his men but corroded from within by trauma and self-loathing.
And though Michael Siberry can’t quite erase memories
of David Haig’s beautiful, almost saintly performance
as the kind, wise Lieutenant Osborne, a middle-aged former
schoolmaster affectionately known as “uncle” by
his young comrades, his gruff decency proves deeply affecting.
There is fine work too from Tom Payne as the raw new 2nd Lieutenant,
who hero-worshipped Stanhope at boarding school. The scene
in which he and Osborne make small talk in the tense minutes
before an almost certainly suicidal raiding party is a masterpiece
of apparently banal dialogue freighted with an extraordinary
depth of emotion, and it is played with exemplary sensitivity
by both actors.
Jonathan Fensom’s meticulously naturalistic dugout setting,
and Gregory Clarke’s thrilling sound design, in which
explosions seem to make the theatre physically shake, both
deserve special commendation, while Grindley’s inspired
final tableau arouses emotions that go too deep for words.
What a shock it is to leave the theatre, blinking back tears
at the courage and futility of it all, to encounter today’s
doomed youth, who 90 years ago would have been in the trenches
themselves, shouting obscenities, chasing skirt, and getting
mindlessly wrecked on cheap booze. Dulce et decorum it ain’t. |
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