Journey's End is an extraordinary play even though it's clear from the poster - the haunted face of a shell-shocked boy soldier, so young his features are still androgynous - that the ending isn't hopeful. On stage it's World War I and we're in the trenches. Lots of tired, good-hearted, public school chaps with stripes and epaulettes are trying to make sense of the chaos. Outside, guns are fired, grenades are thrown, shells explode, but it is in the officers dugout that the real drama is taking place.
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| Soldier blue |
Into the band of men comes Raleigh, an 18-year-old officer whose wish has come true: to join the company commanded by his boyhood hero and his sister's fiance, Captain Stanhope. Three years and ten lifetimes separate Raleigh from the Captain: they are a mirror image shattered across time. For the boy life is still 'topping'. For the man, success in the field means he's doomed to remain in France and watch his men die. Whisky is his fuel and his solace: he maintains self control by constantly challenging it. As the moment of battle comes closer, there are difficult decisions to be made.
The sense of inevitability that hangs over proceedings serves to heighten rather than diffuse the tension. What will go wrong, and how? When the dialogue drags it's like being in the bunker in real time, the conversation inevitably circling around food, family, fighting and females. David Grindley's direction ensures every performance is perfectly pitched, each man well rounded and received. Graham Butler as Raleigh has the awkward enthusiasm of a gambolling fawn and James Norton is superb as Stanhope - simultaneously intimidating and frail, a brutalised warrior in a constant state of spiritual combustion.
In conclusion: A terrific piece of theatre for all the right reasons. It's too long, the bunker lighting makes focusing hard from the back, there is a surfeit of GCSE students eating Haribos noisily and the ending is a given, but it's so worth seeing. Take hankies.
References
R C Sherriff, soldier turned famous dramatist
Lyn Gardner in The Guardian, review from Richmond
Osborne? Beautiful performance I thought. Wonderful production, saw it on Friday.
ReplyDeleteThere wasn't a single lead who didn't hit all the markers, Osborne, Trotter... It was the first time I'd seen Journey's End, I was right at the back, and I was utterly absorbed despite the irritating chompers all around me. A wonderful night.
ReplyDeleteI love this play as it captures a realistic snapshot of what life must have been like. I thought Christian Patterson was an outstanding Trotter, believably portraying him as a character who can make the best of any situation without seeming false. Dominic Mafham was an adorable Osborne whom the audience came to regard with great affection.
ReplyDeleteI was sat near to the front, so for me the lighting was excellent and the sound was outstanding. My only criticism would be that Graham Butler's Raleigh was a bit pantomime-esque and over-acted. He, and James Norton's Stanhope, failed to make the relationship between the two one which took the audience with them. It was a bit 'stage-school' and there was a truly cringeworthy moment when Stanhope cries into Raleigh's shoulder which was, for me, the only unforgivable negative in an otherwise brilliant performance.
That's really interesting. I saw Raleigh as an awkwardly enthusiastic teen and my experience of teens is that they often act out emotions to underscore what they're saying. Everything from rage to joy is exaggerated as if for an audience - even conversations at bus stops are delivered like bad scripts. I shall ponder that now.
ReplyDeleteA brilliant night out though, as you say.
I was completely enthralled. Superb set design and use of the full possibilities of the theatre space made this a production to remember.
ReplyDeleteThere are many things to admire in the play, but this time what most struck me most was the off stage action. The focus is held on a dugout, and the war continues out of sight. What we see are the reactions to the fighting, rather than the fighting itself – we are left to imagine the war: with the help of impressive sound effects. Rattigan took the same approach in Flare Path, by setting the entire play in the bar of a pub near an RAF airfield. And this way of handling action is surely better than trying to put war on the stage. Many artistic directors urge writers to show, and not to tell; but a large part of any play takes place in the mind – and the mind is the best place to see trench warfare and a bombing campaign: any staging will fall short of what can be achieved with the imagination. Obviously such an approach to handling war is not a modern innovation – the earliest surviving tragedy, Persians by Aeschylus, depicts the Battle of Salamis from the perspective of the Persian court. The arguments were strong for taking this line 2,500 years ago; and they are stronger now.
ReplyDeleteHC.
Tremendous production, moved my companions to tears. Saw it in Cambridge a few months ago and very happy to have caught it again. The chap playing Stanhope is something else! But the entire cast is uniformly strong. @zuberino
ReplyDeleteTo Jonathan who said that Stanhope's crying on Raleigh's shoulder was a blunder:
ReplyDeleteI think you're wrong.
The two characters must have a scene together where they "have it out," and this is it. Now, there is the dialogue (and well-written, too). But what must come out is the pent-up emotion they are holding back (from themselves and from each other). The moment allows Stanhope to finally explode and let those tears out. He has been holding them back, they are tears for Osborne as well as for himself. The scene opens with that loud, almost hysterical laughter of the officers after Osborne's death in the previous scene. They're all in denial, they have to survive and go on with it. They haven't processed their grief, for they know they would fall apart at the seams if they did. The scene between the two friends allows them to fall apart for that precious moment, and tell the truth to each other.
Giancarlo from Trieste