Last night I went to see 'Oh! What a Lovely War'.
It was a fabulous show that managed to blend incredibly poignant moments with song and comedy to create something that made me laugh but also ensured I left the theatre thinking hard about war, humanity and, slightly to my shame, the how-tos and how-not-tos of creating a good piece of theatre but, hey! I'm a drama student, it's almost forgiveable.
I was reminded of 'War Horse' which was another brilliant, but much larger scale, production that I saw in London, set in World War I. That, again, encompassed both song and stylised comedic elements to create something that was so passionately moving that, not only did I end up crying at the death of the German General, I also found myself in a state of such high-anxiety that at one point, when a very real-sounding pistol went off on stage, I jumped so suddenly that I managed to elbow the person sat next to me!
I think what both of these productions did tremendously well was to display war, in its raw and most brutal sense.
They did not show anybody rejoicing or gaining any of this "glory for queen and country" malarkey. Instead, they showed human beings crawling through trenches; vast expanses of space between these trenches, piled high with bodies from both sides; woman, in both Britain and germany, sat at home or in factories, worrying and working and praying that their husband, son or brother would be sent home safely; soldiers from either side coming together and recognising that, all this time, they have not been, as they imagined, fighting the enemy, instead, they have been shooting at men who have families and homes and loved ones that they shall never return to.
As someone who is intensely interested in the technicalities of a stage production, I find I have a habit of being overly critical at times. Or else, I will analyse a production to death, breaking it down into its component parts. This is not just a simplistic and reductionist way of looking at these two great pieces of theatre, it is very wrong as it means that all semantic meaning - the very message that the playwright was so desperate to convey - has pushed to one side, as if it were just another cog that makes up a much larger machine.
Rupert Brooke's 'The Soldier' was often used as a piece of propaganda, romanticising and glorifying war. Interestingly, Brooke's never actually got the chance to fight. He died of blood poisoning in [I think] 1915.
I admit that I am not a huge admirer of his poems, however, 'The Soldier' does contain one of my favourite lines from a poem ever:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed.
A.
Is it a bad thing, though, to break a piece up into its component parts? How can something work as a whole if it does not work at a fundamental level?
ReplyDelete(This is Scott by the way)
No, no, it's not a bad thing at all. To break something down allows us to alter anything that could be made better, creating a better piece overall.
ReplyDeleteWhat I was commenting on is my own habit of then forgetting to see it as whole thing as well, as theatre, in particular, loses its passion and emotional highs and lows if not viewed as a solid piece, including all elements of music, staging, writing and acting.