|
|
|
|
|
A tale of love and war
Waiting for the whistle to go over the top to a likely death Birdsong
Birmingham Rep
**** SEBASTIAN Faulks’s best selling novel is
not the easiest of narratives to distil into a couple of hours on stage
with its huge canvas encompassing pre-war France and the whole sorry
tale of the carnage on the Western Front. Inevitably there have to be compromises, scenes
combined or missed completely, with room and time for only the bare
essence of the story. And, most important, many of the audience will
not have read the book, or know its content, so Rachel Wagstaff’s stage
version has to stand on its own two feet – the huge canvas of Faulks’s
novel is a blank sheet of paper when it comes to the stage version. In the main Wagstaff and director Alastair
Whatley pull it off, helped by a stunning set by Victoria Spearing. With the First World War Centenary moving into
overdrive there is no more evocative sight than strands of barbed wire
and shattered posts left in the rough shape of a broken cross dominating
the stage and silhouetted against the sky in no man’s land. Below them with have a two level stage which
represents the world of trenches on the surface and below the dangerous
and dark world of the sappers, the tunneler Jack Firebrace played by Peter Duncan with his injured officer Stephen Wraysford who is thought to be dead That was the world of Jack Firebrace, a superb
performance from Peter Duncan, an actor first and foremost but perhaps
best remembered as a Blue Peter presenter. His oppos are the lumbering
bear of a man Arthur Shaw, good support from Simon Lloyd, and the Welsh
miner Evans, a multi-talented performance from Samuel Martin who
produces a wonderful tenor voice and plays the violin beautifully.
Into their world comes young officer Stephen
Wraysford played with intensity by George Banks and it is his story we
follow from when he is sent to Amiens by his wealthy guardian to study
textile production at René Azaire’s factory in 1910. There, he discovers, workers are paid starvation
wages and are being secretly helped by Azaire’s wife Isabelle, played
with an elegant beauty by Carolin Stoltz. The pair fall in love and just in case anyone had
any doubts as to what happened next, they indulge in a sort of hard
edged balletic foreplay which involved headboard balancing and even a
spot of furniture moving, a sort of sexual circuit training before
eventually landing on the bed. Azaire discovers the adultery but Isabelle runs
off with Stephen but the affair mysteriously ends and is never fully
explained in any detail. Interspersed with the pre-war love story is
Stephen’s life as an officer in the trenches. Unlike the book the play
flicks back and forth between past and present with the timelines only
coinciding in the later stages as the dehumanizing effect of war is
taking its toll. This can be a little confusing at times but
works reasonable well with Stephen in hospital injured and delirious,
reliving his love affair in 1910, although a simpler transition between
past and present would suffice, perhaps, rather than Stephen’s flailing
about to indicate the scene was heading back to his hospital bed. Scenes in the tunnel were perhaps the most
confusing with Whately perhaps going for realism over theatrical
practicality, with the tunnellers having pinpricks of light on a dark
stage, thus we have a firefight with a lot off s Jack pours his heart out about his son John, who died aged eight from diphtheria with his father unable to get leave to visit his dying child, while Stephen, losing some of the angst for once, talks about Isabelle. Love amid the trenches, Stephen, George Banks, withIsabelle played by Carolin Stoltz The lives of the two became intertwined when
Stephen let Jack off from a court martial for being asleep on sentry
duty, a crime which carried the death penalty - although of 393 men
sentenced to death for it only two men were ever executed. The bond was
strengthened when a lifeless Stephen was laid out with the dead after
the tunnel battle and Jack discovered he was still alive, calling for
help and returned the favour, saving his life. We only find out snatches about the rest. Evans
for all his bluster and bravado talk of keeping the local prostitutes in
business, is still a virgin, a fact we discover only when he is
heartbroken about the death of his brother in the attack. He wonders if
he was as well as if dying a virgin somehow made it worse. Arthur we know little about except that he reads
all Jack’s letters. Jack is illiterate but Arthur makes nothing of it.
Just reads the more and more tragic news from home to him. There is good support from Malcolm James as both
René and Stephen’s immediate superior Captain Gray and James
Staddon as the remarkable pompous Berard, René’s friend, who has eyes,
and much more ,lusting after Isabelle. A good performance too from Elizabeth Croft as
Isabelle’s sister Jeanne while Selma Brook was the pretty Azaire
daughter Lisette, finding her way from childhood to womanhood with an
infatuation for Stephen. Her younger brother Gregoire is played by Jonny
Clarke who also plays the young private Tipper who finally cracks,
unable to take any more in the trenches. Dominic Bilkey’s sound design, linked to Alex
Wardle’s lighting produce some dramatic moments of gunfire – the Allies
bombarded the German lines for five days with 1.5 million shells before
the opening day of the Battle of the Somme – and the explosions of the
mines. It is hard to show the horrors of war on stage,
Journey’s End in its understated matter of fact way, perhaps comes
closest, imagination being far more powerful then special effects, but
Birdsong makes a decent fist of pulling together the threads of a wide
ranging novel into the confines of a stage. It will inevitably disappoint some who have read the book, and it will certainly be easier to follow for those familiar with it, but there is still enough there to engage anyone new to Birdsong and enough to echo the horrors and carnage of a century old war. Roger Clarke
|
|
|
|
s
who dug under enemy lines and set off huge explosions to destroy their
trenches – at least that was the theory.
houting
when it is impossible to see what is going on, although one of the final
scenes when a dying Jack and Stephen are trapped in a collapsed tunnel,
barely visible in the gloom, is perhaps one of the most poignant of the
whole play.