THE GREAT WAR Liverpool Everyman

Liverpool

THE GREAT WAR

Hotel Modern and De Rotterdamse Schouwburg,
Everyman Theatre, Liverpool 8-10 November 2001

Runs 1hr 20min No interval
Review Timothy Ramsden 10 November

Remarkable evocation of World War I on a miniature scale with maximum impact.De Grote Oorlog as they call it when home in Holland is a remarkable piece, in which the performers don't act – this is a take-over by stage management.

Except it's less stage management than cinematic special effects. The company manipulate models, which are projected on a big screen rear stage - simultaneously showing the trick performed alongside the magic created. The Great War plays with notions of performance and reality.

In its opening section models are moved on a European map to explain the looming conflict. Self-interested alliances are set up: only the shapes of the cigars change. A model car drives around the Balkans, surrounded by seven gloves for Archduke Franz Ferdinand's intended assassins. One by one these are removed as the killers bungle or fail to act, till the car takes an unplanned diversion towards the final glove. It's drawn away to reveal a gun. The moment's satirical tinge is also stunning: World War I very nearly didn't happen.

But it did; the camera zooms-in on Sarajevo then out to show a Europe swarming with artillery pieces. The results fill the next multi-sensory hour. A long trough does for trenches. Earth's forever being re-raked - at once scene-setting and an image of war's repeated routs. The clever tricks we watch are the safe reverse of the booby-traps and snipers the troops didn't see in time: an explosive wine-bottle in a deserted German dugout; a shot in the back while a bladder's being relieved.

Boots squelch in close-up. A tank bounces over rough terrain and the focus switches to the world seen through its narrow gun-hole, deafened by terrific engine noise. Sound and music repeatedly intensify mood, as do the readings from soldier diaries and letters which thread the visuals together.

Eventually the violent images and roar of multiple destruction give way to quiet as the dead are slowly buried under dust and snow, while a corpse in a bare forked branch worthy of Godot disintegrates. The cracked record of a soldier's song plays against the image of a single trooper marching away, in the wake of a remarkable show luckily caught for Britain by the Everyman and surely worth an extended return visit.

Conceived/Performed by:
Herman Helle
Pauline Kalker
Arlene Hoornweg
Music: Arthur Sauer

2001-11-14 11:17:07