The Misfortune of the English

by Pamela Carter

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond on 26 May 2022

Oscar Toeman directs Hubert Burton as Harrison, Vinnie Heaven as Eaton, Matthew Tennyson as Lyons, and Éva Magyar as a tour guide in Pamela Carter's new play The Misfortune of the English, concerning the fateful excursion of some twenty-seven London schoolboys in the Black Forest in 1936, during which five of them died as the result of an ill-adivsed hike into a snowstorm.

Politics swirled around the tragedy, with the Nazi government extolling the role of boys from the local Hitler Youth in rescuing many of the English boys (ignoring the contribution of the adults involved), and the teacher who led the expedition later being exonerated of any culpability though he ignored the advice of locals warning him of the oncoming storm.

The play however is focussed on three of the boys and their immediate experience setting out on the day of the hike. Secure in their Englishness, buoyed up by the inspirational ethos of their school (the Strand School of London, imitating the great public schools in its mission to produce men of good character) and the charismatic flair of their teacher, they reveal a turn of mind all too easy to parody in these more cynical days, but our sympathy is caught by the boys' guileless enthusiasm and amusingly patronising willingness to explain themselves (and their Latin). The encroaching horror of the situation is masked by their breezy assumption that all will be well, and their creeping doubts are tempered by esprit de corps and a fateful uwillingness to display weakness to their fellows.

Dressed in schoolboy grey trousers and maroon jackets (Lyons is still in short trousers, to his mortification), amused by the foreignness of German customs, flattered to be consulted as to hiking plans rather than being told what to do, but completely unaware of the bias in the way proposals are phrased, the boys are a mixture of high hope, woeful naivety and misplaced self confidence. Pamela Carter is concerned to extrapolate from this particular story to a more general exposure of the inherent flaws in the character building so beloved by adults. The damage runs unchecked through the enthusiasms of the boys as they explain how all is right with the world in which they feel that acknowledgement of their privileged position is sufficent guarantee that they will always be safe.

With such a careful evocation of attitudes which most people nowadays would find antiquated, and a general attention to the kinds of ideas the boys would have espoused and the ways in whih they would express them, it was jarring to hear the occasional modern idiom, most notably describing a popular boy as 'cool' and referring to 'out of the box thinking'. Apart from these lapses the period was well observed, while the young actors playing the boys caught the infectious enthusiasms of early adolescence as well as its determination not to admit to weakness or ignorance. With no adults actually embodied on stage (the guide hailed from modern times) the approaching disaster felt cruelly impersonal, as indeed it plausibly might have seemed to the boys who were not really participating in any of the discussions between their beloved teacher and the incredulous locals. The question of adult culpability was not the focus of the play, so it was wisely avoided.

At times there wass too much circumstantial information being smuggled through the boys' repartee, and it perhaps reduced the tension too much to know in advance the fates of the boys on stage, but the play nonetheless hit home in both its general critique of unthinking masculine pride and in the personal tragedy befalling the hikers.