Journey's End
On Wednesday evening, Nomad and I saw R.C. Sheriff's Journey's End at the Playhouse.
*long slow exhalation*
I must struggle to find words, as to say it was intense is inaccurate. It is unthinkable. It is unbelievable. It is overwhelming. All that a proper drama about WWI ought to be. It is also the most informative piece about war that I have ever seen or read, and it profoundly moved me.
The play is based upon the author's personal experience in the trenches, and it is set in the days leading up to Operation Michael on 21 March 1918, the last great German Offensive of the First World War, a day that saw the deaths of 38,000 men. It is the very serious play which Black Adder Goes Forth parodies, and we could see in the Baldrick-like character of the mess cook the same deadpan ridiculous responses, which go something like this:
"What's the soup today then?"
"It's yellow, sir."
"How about a nice cup of tea?"
"Do we really have a nice cup of tea?"
"Not really, sir. How about a nice onion-flavoured tea, 'cause that's what the pot smells like..."
Amidst this offbeat humour, it is brutal and unflinchingly realistic about the psychological and physical experience. It does not honour war, but honours the stories of men who believed in duty and honour and found unimaginable atrocity and terror.
We meet a dozen men struggling to survive in St Quentin. Men who tell stories, who share laughter and every day scraps of normality amidst ongoing trauma. There are starkly nonsensical moments, litotes about how "silly the war is, really", and their struggle to maintain a twisted sense of national pride made battered and fragile by unbearable bleakness and despair. There is no romance here, no false nobility. Most of the time the character keep their shit together frighteningly well, making the moments where they slip -- a face that fights back tears for 20 seconds and then recovers, or hands that shake too hard to light a match -- shocking by contrast. The characters talk about everything except the war itself, and then they have silences where the unspoken hovers like the smoke of the grenades and bloody dust. (We sat in the fourth row and my clothes reeked from the smoke of their cigarettes.) We watch their coping mechanisms -- eating, drinking, talking, denial, faking illness, and our hearts break.
There is also absolute horror -- moments where the characters are off-screen fighting and we are left with an empty set, and the most haunting sounds flood the theatre, emphasising internal and external, where the tiny narrow world of the trench is the only known safety (even that precarious and filthy), and the world of the Front Line is indescribable. Listening to 5 minutes of very loud gunfire and explosions made me jittery, and I could not imagine how men could hear such sounds for days or months at a time.
Then there are the silences. When there are no bombs, when the sun comes out (we see the shaft of light pouring boldly through the doorframe to illuminate the trench), when... what? Yes, even the birds sing. I could never have imagined such silence, such normal moments... all about the waiting for the next onslaught or the next set of orders, which makes the madness even more difficult to grok.
I was also moved by the moments of kindness -- the story about the German soldier who held his fire and who told the Brits to carry their injured man away from No Man's Land, so they would not have to crawl back with the wounded. (Like the famous story of sharing Xmas drinking and songs, also in NML.) The stories about how they want to go home, and who they want to go home to. How they miss their gardens and playing rugby at school. All the minutiae from earwig races and wet socks and what's for lunch, held captive by the ever-increasing tension and fear, barely held in check, as the guns grow louder and closer...
Did I mention how young many of them are? The captain, who has been on the Front Line for three years, is 21 years old. The newest recruit to arrive is a bright-eyed innocent of 18, trained for battle and completely unprepared for what's about to happen to him. One of the older characters (Osborne, nicknamed "Uncle" as he is a schoolmaster, the father-figure, the "old guy" of the group -- and lo...! He is the same age as me.) These men are from different classes, different backgrounds, different educations, and yet have formed a camaraderie that is admirable and powerful, where the greatest fear is showing one's fear in the first place.
There was amazing dignity and courage, and it was breath-taking because I knew it was real. I knew it was based upon authentic dialogue spoken by the real men these characters were based upon, and that most of these real men had died in this place of unrelenting nightmares. Even the language, the "right-ho's" and the "let's go give Jerry what-for" and the "we can stick this out no matter what's" echoes with a headspace I hope I can never properly understand, because despite the bad things I have survived, there is nothing that compares.
So yes, I was deeply moved by the tribute to those who died and murdered other men, for a pointless endeavour. Yet I can only represent it by this highly inadequate babbling, these fragments of identification and sensation and howling emotion. I was moved by the fact that these men died so long ago, and so very few still exist who were there and saw it first-hand.
A tremendous play. If you can see it while it is on tour, then rush and do. You'll never forget it.