Reviews 2005
Reviews 2005
✭✭✭✭✭
by R. C. Sheriff, directed by Christopher Newton
Shaw Festival, Court House Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
May 27-October 8, 2005
"A Powerful Journey"
One function of festivals of classic theatre is to make us aware of how past generations have portrayed problems still with us today. In so doing they provide us with an historical context for current debates. This season at the Shaw Festival a play like Shaw’s “Major Barbara” showcases a seductive devil’s advocate who trumpets the social benefits of the arms industry. In Brecht and Weill’s musical “Happy End”, capitalism is portrayed as just another form of gangsterism. Even in Lillian Hellman’s Chekhovian play “The Autumn Garden”, the author confronts us with a character who lived happily under the Vichy government in France and whose charm and fame licenses any kind of aggression.
But the play of the Shaw’s 2005 season that strikes the clearest chord with today’s events is R.C. Sheriff’s “Journey’s End”. Dealing with the life of British troops in the trenches in World War I, the play’s portrait of the psychological ravages of war are as accurate and relevant now as they were when the play first appeared in 1928.
The plays depicts a representative selection of men of different ranks attempting to maintain a semblance of normality in the totally abnormal circumstances of war. The six scenes are set in a dugout at St. Quentin from Monday, March 18, 1918, to dawn on Thursday, March 21. March 21, 1918, was the beginning of the Germans’ last great offensive of the war. Those in the play’s original audience, would have known that the British Fifth Army, of which the company in “Journey’s End” is a part, collapsed under the Germans’ sudden massive onslaught. Though Sheriff writes in a naturalistic style, the attempt to live a “normal” life in the face of oblivion gives the whole work an existential cast and hence a universality that transcends its specific time and place. Many claim that Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” is the first play to make waiting its subject. But Sheriff’s play, where the majority of the action focusses on the troops’ waiting for the German assault is clearly a precursor. As with Beckett’s characters, waiting in the face of the unknown throws the meaning of everything these men do into question.
The one man suffering the most from this crisis is Captain Dennis Stanhope, played magnificently by Evan Buliung. Stanhope has been in the trenches longer than anyone and has taken to drink to steady himself. He has refused leave because he has become so inured to the awful reality of war he knows he won’t be able to face the “reality” he left behind again. He knows how much he has changed and is afraid to have those who knew him see how altered he has become. Buliung communicates all this. You sense the effort his Stanhope needs to rally himself to set a model for his men even as he realizes privately he is no model to follow. Buliung shows that the tension between the inner man and the outer is the engine, soon to collapse, that keeps Stanhope going.
It is therefore painful for Stanhope that Second Lieutenant Raleigh, an old friend of the family and former schoolmate who idolizes him, should deliberately transfer into his company. Raleigh wants to be with his childhood hero, but Stanhope is oppressed by the memories of the past Raleigh brings with him and by the thought that through Raleigh his present decrepit condition will be known to those back home. Jeff Lillico plays Raleigh with all the naive enthusiasm the part requires, painfully suggesting a newcomer who conceives of war as a kind of sport and who is thus totally unprepared its horrors.
Stanhope’s only confidant is Lieutenant Osborne, a schoolmaster in civilian life, played by Patrick Galligan in one of his best ever performances. Osborne calms Stanhope in his drunken rages and soothes him when he awakes from nightmares with the tenderness of a father with his son. It is even more frightening, therefore, when Osborne, a man we have thought a rock of strength, collapses in despair moments before a sure-to-be-fatal mission. Galligan is masterful here and in showing the lingering fear even after Osborne has pulled himself together when he is discovered in tears.
The chief source of comedy in the play is the cook Private Mason whose wry humour Simon Bradbury catches perfectly. The men pretend mealtimes are a night out at the club and that the food is fine cuisine, a fantasy encouraged by Mason’s deadpan remarks. William Vickers sympathetically plays a representative of the ordinary man in Second Lieutenant Trotter, for whom food is the reality that helps keep the reality of war at bay.
Jeff Meadows paints a disturbing portrait of the malingerer Second Lieutenant Hibbert. The very presence of someone so unafraid of displaying his fear to fight raises the level of tension among the rest of the men who expend so much energy in hiding their fear. As a colonel, Anthony Bekenn softens the cliché of the pompous officer, but still shows how distanced those in command are from the physical and psychological conditions the men face who must carry out their orders. Blair Williams and Douglas E. Hughes fill the smaller roles of the war-weary Captain Hardy and a company sergeant-major.
As with last year’s “Floyd Collins” set in a cave, the Court House Theatre proves an ideal venue for a play with a claustrophobic setting. Designer Cameron Porteous has made the entrance to the company’s dugout unnervingly call to mind a medieval hell-mouth. Louise Guinand’s lighting marvellously recreates various degrees of murk. Christopher Newton has so directed the play that tension grips you from first to last and underlies even the most superficial exchanges. The inevitable climax is overwhelming.
Sheriff’s plays celebrates the heroism of those who sacrifice their lives for their country even as it deplores the waste of those lives and questions the politics that demand such sacrifice. It is a powerful play given a powerful production. No one should miss it.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Jeff Lillico, Evan Buliung, William Vickers and Patrick Galligan. ©Andree Lanthier.
2005-09-11
Journey’s End