Theatreguide.London
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The Theatreguide.London Review
Birdsong
Comedy Theatre Winter 2010-2011
First World
War stories have an inherent emotional force to them, and while that is
not the only reason Sebastian Faulks' 1993 novel has become one of the
nation's favourite books, the emotive power of the raw material is the
strongest element in Rachel Wagstaff's generally too languid stage
adaptation.
Wagstaff has inevitably condensed and simplified the book, mainly by
omitting the modern story that runs parallel to the Edwardian plot, but
the focus remains on the pre-war romance and war experience of a young
Englishman.
In France in 1910 he has a passionate affair with an unhappily married
French woman but they are separated. We next see him as an officer in
the trenches, almost killed in battle and, in the face of the horrors of
war, rapidly losing all his faith in an orderly and benign universe, and
there is a secondary plot line involving a soldier whose life keeps
crossing his.
The officer meets the woman again, of course, and there are several more
tear-jerking plot twists before an ending somewhat more ambiguous and
unresolved than in the novel.
It is noteworthy that the single most moving thing in the play occurs
during a scene change, when the passage of time is denoted by the
projection of a seemingly endless list of names of the dead at the
Somme.
That strange
but powerful fact - that it was in this war that the world first really
understood that the central truth of war is that young men die - remains
the legacy of 1914-1918, and is more emotionally evocative than anything
in Wagstaff's dramatisation or Trevor Nunn's production.
If the central story of the novel is the young man's maturing, first
through love and then through war, then Ben Barnes is unable to take us
through that arc, his character leaping too abruptly from callowness to
despair.
The character of the enlisted man he befriends has been stripped down
until he is too sweet and holy to be believed, and Lee Ross can do
little but play him as generic salt-of-the-earth yeoman. Genevieve
O'Reilly's Frenchwoman is a little too English rose to be the haunting
passion of a man's whole life.
The set consists almost entirely of clever projections by Jon Driscoll
and Gemma Carrington that are more evocative of the 1910 idyll than of
the battlefields.
Lovers of the novel may well enjoy this adaptation, but they will be
filling in much of the texture and emotion themselves. Others are likely
to find this a generic war story with no more to it than is inevitable
in the material.
Gerald Berkowitz
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