25 April 2018 12:30 PM
As the war on the Western Front draws to its close, one of the characters in Birdsong, Rachel Wagstaff`s stage adaptation of Sebastian Faulks`s novel, says bitterly, “I`ve forgotten why we`re fighting this war". “Why” is not what the play (or the book) sets out to explore - though whatever the plans of the war`s architects, they could hardly have foreseen, or wished that its effect would sweep away four empires and cripple a fifth.
What the play does do is to chronicle the pre-war love affair of a young Englishman with the wife of a French factory owner in Amiens. It charts her desertion of him because of family ties and family honour and his attempts to rekindle the affair as a young officer at the front and in war-torn Amiens.
But it is the war that looms over the play and this is cleverly emphasised as the scenes shift seamlessly between war and peace, tunnels, picnics and trenches. Stunning sound effects drive home the horrors and devastation of the front.
This is a very satisfying adaptation of a complex novel, leavened with flashes of humour, and well worth catching at the Capitol Horsham. Until Saturday – dates, times and online booking here.
As a footnote, another WWI play was produced in Horsham this month. “Keep The Home Fires Burning” was written by Suzzanne Page for Horsham`s Manor Theatre Group. It too brings vividly to the audience the terror, the tedium and the wreckage that the conflict brought to ordinary men and women.
It too chronicles a love affair - the reverberations of which rippled down the years.
It illustrates the point that millions of lives were and still are touched by what happened in France. A century later, who mourns for the empires?
Catch it as part of a double bill at Ifield Barn, Crawley in June. Details here.
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