Jubilant
Productions at the Mercury Studio, Colchester
11.09.2014
A
Mercury homecoming for this timely anthology; the director and the
performers familiar faces in this house. Devised by the cast and
directed by Ignatius Anthony and producer Jules Easlea, the show
mingles great poetry with the voices of the lads on the front and, in
voice over [Anthony], the carefully preserved diaries of Captain K C
Buchanan, who records with a dry, laconic precision the minutiae and
the horror of life in the trenches. “Dull day with showers,” he
writes, and later, “Beautiful sunny day”. For the death, and
burial, of a comrade.
The
simple setting has a small space for Him [Tim Freeman], mess tin,
kitbag, and a small space opposite for Her [Christine Absalom], one
of Binyon's ”familiar tables of home”, with a brief candle
burning in the sad shires. And, strewn across the floor, diary pages
and letters from the trenches and the home front.
This
was the first British army to be almost universally literate, thanks
to our belated emulation of the Prussian education system. Hasty
scribblings from front line or field hospital made these Tommies the
bloggers of their day, Easlea claims, and it's easy to feel the
intimate immediacy of their words, even across a hundred years.
Their
thoughts are interspersed with contributions from the great and the
good – Kitchener, Ataturk, an acerbic A P Herbert. The women, who
found a new freedom in these dark days, are well represented here.
Pacifist poet Margaret Postgate Cole - “The Veteran”, May
Herschell Clark's pithy “Nothing to Report”, Rose Macaulay's
“Many Sisters” and Sassoon's German mother dreaming by the fire
['While
you are knitting socks to send your son / His face is trodden deeper
in the mud.']
And 12-year-old Inez Quilter, remembering the fate of millions of
horses caught up in mankind's conflict.
The
show's title – from Wilfred Owen – suggests a lighter side, and
there is a leavening of grim humour from the Tommies themselves –
Mr Rat, Trench Pudding and Ragout Maconnochie, the London Skittish,
and Madame la Somme, accompanied on teapot and tin plate percussion.
Rich
pickings indeed from the pity of war, from Helen Mackay's troop train
“Will
the train never start? / God, make the train start!” to Robert
Graves' Armistice Day “flappers gone drunk and indecent”.
No
shortage of Great War entertainments this year. What makes this stand
out is the superb sequencing of the extracts [all scrupulously listed
in the programme] and the contribution of our two actors. Freeman
proudly remembers his great-grandfather, who survived the war,
awarded the VC on the same day, a week before the Armistice, which
saw Wilfred Owen killed in action. Not
readings but heartfelt performances, simply presented, with
non-specific costumes, back projections, and a bonus collage in the
interval - “Postcards Home” - a film by Dai Vaughan.
Merry
it was to laugh there-
Where death
becomes absurd and life absurder.
For power was on
us as we slashed bones bare
Not to feel
sickness or remorse of murder.
