Oh! What a lovely War was brought to Chequer Mead last night in an impressive and deeply moving production by the Company of Friends.
Originally developed by Joan Littlewood at the Theatre Workshop in 1963, it was inspired by a piece about WWI written by Charles Chilton in which facts and statistics about the Great War were interspersed with reminiscences and songs of the period.
Littlewood used this format to produce a show that was a searing and sardonic reflection the realities of a war in which ten million died, 21 million were wounded and seven million were simply recorded as ‘missing’ – many of them soldiers sucked down into the Flanders mud.
It is a quintessentially ensemble piece with a cast who each serve a dozen roles as the War Game is played out on stage.
Michael Spencer presided engagingly over the proceedings, starting out with an avuncular air as the excitement of incipient war seized the populace.
But he ended – grey, sad and embittered – as the cast assembled beneath a shower of falling poppy petals to count the dreadful cost of the carnage.
The searing impact of the show comes in its juxtaposition of jaunty – dare one say mindless? – patriotic songs, and the terrible reality of trench warfare, the piles of stinking corpses and the cries of men dying in agony.
And it creates a growing sense of tragedy as the casualty figures roll across the top of the stage, detailing the thousands of lives lost in actions, followed by the bleak words Gain Nil, as the sides remained stubbornly entrenched often only yards apart.
The average life of a machine gunner in action was just four minutes – the time it takes to boil an egg.
‘It is more terrible than can ever be imagined.’
‘8,236 men lost in three hours. German loss Nil’
‘Somme. 1,332,000 men dead. Gail Nil.
‘Between five and fifty thousand lives being sacrificed in a day…’
And the awful revelation that while men died in mud and agony, 21 thousand Americans who became millionaires on the back of the war, feared the ‘Peace Scares’ which might bring an early end to their profiteering.
The show also delivers a searing judgement on military leaders including Field Marshal Haig, reported as commenting ‘Our casualties are only some 60,000 – and the wounded are very cheery indeed.’
A British soldier’s chance of being killed, captured or wounded on the Western Front was fifty per cent.
And in 1927 there were still 65,000 men in British hospitals suffering from shell shock.
But four years after a war which had involved 80 countries worldwide the slaughter was unsustainable.
Nothing was resolved, and everyone just went home.
Directed by Lesley Lowy who was in the touring cast of the original production, this was an unmissable and thought-provoking evening which left many of the audience in tears.
Oh! What a Lovely war is on tonight and tomorrow night at Chequer Mead.
