OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR. To 17 November.
Bolton
OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR
by Theatre Workshop, Charles Chilton, Gerry Raffles and members of the original cast.
Octagon Theatre To 17 November 2007.
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat 10, 14 Nov 2pm, 1, 6 Nov 1pm.
Audio-described 7 Nov.
BSL Signed 15 Nov.
Runs 2hr 40min One interval.
TICKETS: 01204 520661.
www.octagonbolton.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 27 October.
It remains a lovely show.
When the world, or at least Bolton’s Octagon Theatre, was young Oh What A Lovely War was almost a new play. It spoke with the confidence of 1960s theatre in addressing politics, history and its community. Just as the Octagon (now aged 40) is very much of, as well as in, Bolton, Joan Littlewood’s Great War collage was very much a piece made for 1963’s largely White, working-class East London.
Yet Littlewood, an elusive genius, combined her experience knocking classics about - Lovely War’s Profiteers fearing an outbreak of peace come straight from Brecht’s Mother Courage - with BBC documentary-writer Charles Chilton’s expertise, to shape archival material and popular songs into one of the finest pieces in 20th-century theatre.
A boxing-match result prefigures the War, an inanely tuneful ditty evokes summer 1914, before the War Game displays history as a parade of childish self-importance, irresponsible in method, tragic in outcome. Battles proceed with surface joviality, enacted as pierrot concert routines that show the War Game as a relentless killing-machine grinding forward, its horrendous statistics displayed with eloquent silence (Richard Foxton’s design incorporates them ironically, as elegantly-bordered silent film captions).
The end has its own pity, with the troops’ reworking of a Jerome Kern love-song counterpointing a slide of soldiers walking away across a battlefield. But this isn’t the pity of sensitive, middle-class Wilfred Owen, whose poetry featured in Benjamin Britten’s near-contemporary War Requiem, composed for a different type of audience in the new Coventry Cathedral.
This is the authentic voice from the trenches: getting by through irony, parody, mockery and closing ranks against the higher-ranking.
Mark Babych directs with ensemble bravura. There are beautiful moments: women in Edwardian dress, swaying under parasols, evoke pre-war life. Later, female garb approaches the coming jazz-age. Individual performances vary, but there’s a lot of good work, Matthew Kelly’s tall figure outstanding in more than one way, as his General Haig stands aloof and alone, commanding the disasters the male pierrots play out below while the female band plays on - Ruth Alexander Rubin especially showing how a true actor-musician can overcome even a dodgy sound-system.
Cast: Ruth Alexander Rubin, Nicola Bolton, Matt Connor, Christopher Fry, Barbara Hockaday, Jeff Hordley, Matthew Kelly, Siena Lloyd, John McArdle, Helen Power, Matthew Rixon, Simeon Truby, David Westbrook.
Director: Mark Babych.
Designer: Richard Foxton.
Lighting: Jason Osterman.
Sound: Andy Smith.
Musical Director: Howard Gray.
Choreographer: Beverley Edmunds.
Assistant choreographer: Shane Gould.
2007-10-31 09:55:28