‘Oh What a Lovely War’
Dundee Repertory Theatre
Blackeyed Theatre in association with South Hill Park
Dundee Rep is the only Scottish stop on Blackeyed Theatre’s extensive UK tour of ‘Oh What a Lovely War’, the ‘Musical Entertainment’ first produced at Stratford East Theatre in 1963. The company specialises in touring, often providing opportunities for young actors and stage technicians near the start of their careers and aiming to present exciting affordable theatre. On the basis of tonight’s performance they do exactly that, in this revival of the satire created by Joan Littlewood and her Theatre Workshop cast.
I saw the play at the Royal Lyceum in the late 60s, and remember being astonished at the actors, in their circus garb, chatting to the audience before the performance. There’s some joking and by-play with the cast here tonight, with a 21st century audience less constrained – despite the poster warning about latex in the balloons!
The six-strong cast have a busy time filling all the roles - there were about a dozen actors in the original - but this multi-talented group of four men and two women slide through changes of hats, personalities, instruments and tunes with ease. The deceptively breezy start has us singing along with music-hall numbers, ‘Hold your Hand out Naughty Boy’ and a cheerfully risqué, ‘I’ll make Man of Any One of You.’ The songs the volunteers sing as they go off to war are defiant, ‘Belgium put the Kibosh on the Kaiser’ and wistful ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,’ while the indecipherable Sergeant Major’s instructions bring out the humour in basic training. But all too soon, the tickertape style information at the back of the stage starts rolling – and the numbers of dead are mounting up. At Christmas 1914, ‘Heilige Nacht’ from the German side is answered by the British troops ribald ‘Christmas Day at the Cookhouse’ but shortly afterwards the final verse of ‘Good Byee’, just before the interval, is drowned out by the thunder of the guns.
Two of the cast beating furiously on the big drums produces this fearful noise, and the production, like the original, focuses on low-tech rather than high tech for its sound and visual effects. Early in the second half a satirical look at the home life of the generals depicts a ball where each of them waltzes holding a woman’s dress – representing his wife. Alternating their own and falsetto voices, their petty jealousies and disregard for the lives of the men at the front stand in stark contrast to the battlefield scenes. These scenes become more bitter and satirical: we see the British staff-officers “only playing leapfrog” and the French “baaing” like lambs as they march to the slaughter. Back at home, two of the men swap headgear to impersonate Cockney housewives and German Hausfrauen exchanging the similar rumours and fears. And as the numbers on the ticker-tape mount up, poignant renditions of art songs, Ivor Novello’s ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’, ‘Roses are Blooming in Picardy’ and the ‘Chanson de Crayonne’ point up the longing and despair of individuals. The church parade with parodies of hymns –‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus’ becomes ‘When this Lousy War is Over’ - illustrates how irrelevant the traditional sources of comfort have become. The final shocking statistic “Missing: 7 million” raises gasps, as the company sing the bitter wartime words to a lovely Jerome Kern tune popular in 1914: “And when they ask us/How dangerous it was/ We’ll never tell them/ We spent our pay in some café/Fought off wild women night and day/It was the cushiest job we ever had.”
The irony was that most of the men who came back from the front “never told them,” and their children and grandchildren found out later in life from poems, memoirs and drama what these brave survivors had kept to themselves.
Joan Littlewood and her company started the fashion for touring politically committed re-interpretations of the past, performed with bravado by multi-talented singing actors who could all play an instrument or two. 7/84 in Scotland and England, Wildcat and others reached many people and parts of the UK which traditional theatre never could. Blackeyed Theatre, working in this fine tradition, have been touring quality theatre for the last 20 years, almost all of it funded by their tickets sales, with only a small percentage of public funding. Their opening night in Dundee’s excellent modern theatre went down a treat. Look out for them if they come to a theatre near you!
