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.
