WALKING THE ROAD

Beyond Image Productions at Brentwood Theatre

05.06.10

It's a while since I was close to tears at lunchtime. And some years since we enjoyed professional lunchtime theatre, come to that. Three Cups, 1970s, if memory serves …

Alongside their Place Without Doors, Beyond Image brought Walking The Road to Brentwood Theatre.

The walker is Francis Ledwidge, War Poet and Road Mender. The road is variously his way home to his mother's cottage, and the track he built through rivers of Flanders mud, over the bones of the fallen of the Great War.

Dermot Bulger's moving play follows Ledwige on the journey he never made, back from the trenches to his youth and childhood in Meath. Amnesia, mustard, blackbirds all mingle in a haunting nightscape of memory.

Paul Preston Mills was a believable Ledwidge, his persuasive voice leading us into his political, poetic and private lives: unwrapping his first published volume, starting in the grocer's shop, spooning into the warm sleeping body of his brother Joe. The child, and everyone else Frank meets along the way, was played by the excellent Kiara Hawker: the arty Irish aristo, a cow, WT Daley the shopkeeper who could have been from Llareggub, she brought them all to life in the smoke and the gloom of the Brentwood stage, with the barbed wire behind and the road snaking away into the distance.

Jim Rymer's beautiful production had many superb moments – the pub urinal, the purgatory of No Man's Land, and the powerful closing moments, when Frank and his companion are joined on the road by the dead of all nations, his Meath mates and his younger self, making their way back before the dawn, as Ledwidge dreams of tasting his mother's bread once more.

A pint of Hope and Glory, an appropriate ploughman's, and a memorable 70 minutes of theatre. Beyond Image hope to be back this way again. If they are, you should make the effort to see their work – even at lunchtime.