FORGOTTEN VOICES. To 7 July.
London/Edinburgh
FORGOTTEN VOICES
adapted by Malcolm McKay from Forgotten Voices of the Great War by Max Arthur
Riverside Studios (Studio 2) Crisp Road W6 9RL To 7 July 2007
Tue-Sat 7.45pm Sun 6pm Mat Thu & Sat 3pm
Runs 1hr 35min No interval
TICKETS: 020 8237 1111
www.riversidestudios.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 6 June
Material worth remembering not quite in the right format.
Disease, dirt and detritus: too many mesdamesmoiselles from Armentieres mean VD spreading through the First World War British army (threats to inform sufferers’ families cut down incidents), dysentery-affected troops, and the end-of-war sight of stacked corpses from the beginning, rotted away apart from their boots. These are among the less familiar images thrown up in Malcolm McKay’s play taken from the first of Max Arthur’s books of war-survivors’ personal recollections.
There are more familiar ones, like Vesta Tilley using her music-hall fame to draw men on stage to be enlisted. A man in civvies being given a white feather by a young woman. Or the munitions-worker receiving news of her husband’s death. Even here there are less familiar details. Munitions girls were despised for having an easy life, while the man given a feather here was a wounded soldier home recovering, who had his own reply to the young woman concerned.
And there are memories from the trenches as the story moves smoothly from 1914 to the Armistice, when a German officer kept his men firing till the cease-fire moment then marched them openly away, trusting the English not to shoot. The mix of the familiar with a healthy quantity of the unknown is fascinating.
McKay’s uses a representative Private, NCO and Officer, plus a suitably late-arriving US private and female home-front worker to express the individual voices recorded during the 1950s by the Imperial War Museum, source of Arthur’s book.
Less happy is McKay’s decision to individualise characters. Each enters with a cup of tea, provided by a grateful national Museum in return for their archived contributions. Each behaves as an individual. But the script consists of effective soliloquies. There’s nothing here of the responsiveness of people reminiscing together.
His direction makes a point out of grouping as people slowly come together, the Sergeant last. Timothy Woodward is especially fine, as is Belinda Lang, neat and polite in tight grey curls, making some reality out of silence as, like so many women of her character’s generation, she sits looking with smiles or concern while the men talk around her.
Capt Phillip Newton: Rupert Frazer
Kitty Proctor: Belinda Lang
Private Kidder Harris: Matthew Kelly
Sgt Lawrence Todd: Timothy Woodward
Private Joe Haines: Steven Crossley
Director: Malcolm McKay
Designer: Douglas Heap
Lighting: Gerry Jenkinson
Costume: Maya Degerlund
Assistant director: Sophy Westendarp
2007-06-10 15:36:16