OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR. To 1 March.

Mold

OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR
by Theatre Workshop, Charles Chilton, Gerry Raffles and Members of the Original Cast. Title suggested by Ted Allen

Clwyd Theatr Cymru Anthony Hopkins Theatre To 1 March 2003

Runs 2hr 45min One interval

TICKETS 0845 330 3565
Review Timothy Ramsden 8 February

An independent-minded production mixing incisive moments with some needing more ensemble spirit.Oh, what a tricky piece. Lovely War could change nightly in Joan Littlewood's original Theatre Workshop production. The published script records one specific night's version. In a production with moments of keen insight, Tim Baker tries to restore a sense of a company-owned script. But you can only vary so much, no-one's likely to recreate the ensemble who devised the piece, matching the balance of performer and material.

Lynn Hunter's big-bellied, penguin-suited maestro M/C, for instance, warms us up with some chat in deliberately pompous mode. But the manner becomes restrictive. It lacks punch, like much of the singing and playing. Admirable not to have today's near-omnipresent amplifying of voices and instruments, but there are times some enhancement would – well, enhance the impact.

Yet several women, Jane Quinn especially, provide raucous recruitment singing, making clear the hollow pro-war bravado behind this way of attracting men to government-sponsored death. It's an aptly tough approach. Plenty of people had cooed over war's sorrows: Littlewood brilliantly broke the sensitive middle-class stranglehold on war and pointed the finger as surely as Kitchener in Britain's most famous war poster.

So, the wounded soldiers' return is a key scene. At Waterloo (of all stations) ambulances are for officers only; working-class solidarity's required - lorry-drivers giving up their lunchtimes - to transport blinded, crippled workingmen/soldiers to hospital. Baker adds his own finger-pointing as these men stand around while an officer with a single bandaged digit is chirpily whisked away.

He sums up cheap propagandistic razzmatazz in a tableau of a German bayoneting a brave little Belgian. Their national emblems are whisked away, revealing the whole image as a shabby stunt. And a story I don't remember from previous productions, about an officer and an NCO looking at the stars, succinctly points up the difference between grand strategy and common sense: it takes highly educated men to start a war this big.

A curate's egg of a Lovely War maybe, but no routine run-through: and the play itself is always worth seeing, as one of the most brilliantly-conceived pieces of theatre, possibly the most brilliant, of the 20th century.

The Merry Roosters: Ian Conningham, Sally Evans, Lynn Hunter, Andrew Langtree, Nick Lashbrook, Harry Myers, Alex Parry, Kate Pinell, Jane Quinn, Catrin Rhys, Craig Rogan, Paul Rumbelow, Dyfed Thomas, Bill Ward, Dylan Williams

Director: Tim Baker
Designer: Mark Bailey
Lighting: Nick Beadle
Sound: Kevin Heyes
Music arrangements/Musical Director: Dyfan Jones
Choreographer: Maggie Rawlinson
Dialect coach: William Conacher

2003-02-14 09:22:59