Journey's End

by R. C. Sherriff

seen at RADA's GBS Theatre on 2 June 2018

Prasanna Puwanarajah directs Doug Colling as Stanhope, Sabi Perez as Osborne, Kwaku Mills as Raleigh, Joe Mottas Trotter, Saffron Coomber as Mason, Josh Zaré as Hibbert, Ryan Hunter as Hardy and the RSM, Kate Griffin as the Colonel and Saul Barrett as the German soldier in this 1928 play, famously one of the first attempts to dramatise the reality of World War One trench warfare on the stage.

One would have thought that the only way to produce this play was in traditional terms, evoking the period in which it is set - it is after all a classic examination, not to say indictment, of the horror of life and death in the trenches rendered all the more intense by the close scrutiny it brings to bear on a small group of officers (the men are only referred to). However, the director wished to point up the universality of the battle experience, and to disabuse the audience of the now too comfortable option of regarding the play with a sort of distancing nostalgia; interestingly the program notes refer to the co-operation of the Sherriff estate in the enterprise. This was presumably needed because of some significant textual changes (references to PTSD rather than shell-shock, and some much more coarse language than the original could have been permitted), to say nothing of recasting some of the soldiers as women.

The play withstands these changes (though perhaps the post-raid officers' dinner was not entirely successful in being transposed into a more vulgar light). It is perhaps odd to see soldiers in modern battle fatigues and with modern hand weapons still talking about Germans as the enemy; the constraints on communication remain credible, however, given that the soldiers are in a vulnerable forward position, and the hierarchies and styles of discipline may be presumed to be not much changed over the decades. There are interestingly subtle shifts in dynamics with a woman playing Osborne, the older officer (still genially referred to as 'Uncle' by the others) who quietly keeps the rest in order while the charismatic Stanhope desperately tries to hold his demons at bay with whisky and overwork, and likewise the bantering with Mason, the orderly providing the meals, has a different edge. A female Colonel can explore a different take on the stiff rigidity of the higher command in the face of disastrous decisions from HQ.

The principal interest remains the crisis which Stanhope faces when Raleigh, a younger boy from his school, arrives having deliberately wangled his way into post because of his admiration for his older friend (now unofficially engaged to his sister). Raleigh's schoolboy hero-worship is tested to its limits by the encounter, and Kwaku Mills portrays the naive enthusiasm and the pained confusion of the untried new officer very well. Doug Colling gives a great portrait of Stanhope, almost at the end of his tether, humiliated by the idea that Raleigh might despise him, determined above all to pursue what he sees as his duty despite the harrowing personal cost. His relations with the other characters reveal different faces of his predicament, and it remains entirely credible that this occasionally irascible young man should be loved by his men. One sees the loyalty he can inspire in the scene where he talks Hibbert out of reporting sick, overcoming his own distaste for the other man in order to bring the best out of him (a harrowing depiction of almost unbearable stress from Josh Zaré) . One sees his ability to engage with Trotter - an engaging portrayal of an eternal optimist by Joe Mott - even though later he confesses to Osborne that he thinks Trotter has no imagination (meaning, probably, no classical education to 'broaden his horizons'). One sees also his reliance on Osborne to see him through, and one can only marvel that he still has a grasp of the military details on which he obsessively works, considering his intake of whisky. It is obvious that he is in many ways being held together by Osborne's quiet competence (a wry and touchingly understated performance from Sabi Perez), but it is also obvious that Stanhope himself is holding everyone else together; no-one seriously questions his authority or his orders, and this is clearly not a case of unthinking obedience. 

The play is in places intensely moving, and this fine production, with an excellent cast of RADA graduates, shows how the strictures of army life provide a framework for co-operation and loyalty under stress which can give strength even in catastrophe. The situation - a small group confined in a trench bunker - inevitably now draws comparison with the final series of the TV show Blackadder in which the awfulness of the situation was held at bay by inspired comedy. One sees, indeed, that some of the episodes of that series are directly inspired by this play: the dire rations, the joshing of the cook, the deflection of horror by talking of other matters, the conventions of rank. It is a tribute both to the play, and to this production, that it still rises above the comparison and succeeds in its own terms: Blackadder was a tribute rather than a debunking, and Sherriff's play more than holds its own.