Don’t let the jingoists highjack First World War commemorations

Don’t let the jingoists highjack First World War commemorations

When Oh What A Lovely War was premiered at the Theatre Royal in Stratford East in March 1963, it sent its audience wild with approbation.

But at the time many mainstream critics were less than enthusiastic about Joan Littlewood's musical satire on the first world war.

The Guardian noted that "it was as unfair as any powerful cartoon" and The Times wrote that it repeated "the familiar view of the war as a criminally wasteful adventure. A sitting target for anyone who wants to deliver a bludgeoning social criticism without giving offence."

Not only did Littlewood, founder of the legendary Theatre Workshop which has inspired theatre practitioiners ever since, present a completely new take on the history of that horrendous war. She also made an iconoclastic break with West End theatrical tradition.

The show, whose title is derived from the music hall song Oh! It's A Lovely War, has become a marker in British theatrical history. Littlewood used Bertholt Brecht's ideas on the politicisation of theatre to better convey the realities of war.

Using minimal props and Brecht's half-curtain for rapid scene changes, imaginative lighting and sound effects, the audience is transported straight to the trenches.

Littlewood sought the truth in the stories told by ordinary soldiers, their bawdy and irreverent songs and the earthy humour that helped them keep sane in the abattoirs of the trenches.

She contrasted their lives with the pompous pontification of top officers and government politicians at home, totally divorced from reality and lacking any sense of empathy. The piece used facts and statistics, juxtaposed with reminiscences and versions of songs of the time, as an ironic critique of the reality of the war.

Previously WWI had always been seen through the glorifying spectacles of misty-eyed nationalism or the tragedy-laden, fatalistic lines of war poets like Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. And now Education Secretary Michael Gove is trying to wind the clock back once more.

Left-wing myths about the first world war peddled by the TV series Blackadder belittle Britain and clear Germany of blame, he wrote in a recent Daily Mail article. He lambasted historians and TV programmes that denigrate patriotism and courage by depicting the war as a misbegotten shambles.

The conflict, according to Gove, was a just war to combat German aggression. The minister, who has already rewritten the school history curriculum supposedly to give pupils a better grasp of the broad sweep of British history, reserves his greatest scorn for those who have sought to depict the soldiers as lions led by donkeys, a metaphor starkly underlined in Littlewood's musical.

The coalition governmemnt has already pledged £50 million in public money to mark the event, with school trips to battlefields and ceremonies planned over four years, hundreds of hours of TV programming and, no doubt, military parades and exhibitions of the latest military hardware.

The idea for Theatre Workshop's production started in 1962 when Gerry Raffles heard Charles Chilton's BBC radio musical about the war, The Long, Long Trail. It was written and produced by Chilton, who later went on to work with Ewan MacColl - later Littlewood's husband and collaborator - on their famous radio ballads series.

Theatre Workshop developed productions through improvisation and initially the cast would learn the original script but then have that taken away and have to retell the story in their own words for performance. Each member was tasked with learning about a particular topic, such as Ypres or gas.

As the production developed it also used scenes from The Donkeys by military historian - and future Conservative politician - Alan Clark. With his contribution initially unacknowledged, Clark took Littlewood to court to get credited.

Littlewood decided on pierrot costumes from commedia dell' arte as a "soft, fluffy entertainment mode" in ironic contrast to the tin hats which the cast also wore. There is no blood or realistic horror - words and sounds alone provoke the images in the mind. Richard Attenborough's sugary film of 1969 based on Littlewood's musical was, sadly, a travesty of everything the play achieved and represented.

Oh What A Lovely War is undoubtedly one of the greatest anti-war plays ever and its revival by Theatre Workshop in Littlewood's original theatre in Stratford East next month can't come too soon as an antidote to the Establishment's spin on the conflict. One of the theatrical events of the coming year, it's not to be missed.

Josephine and I - fabulous, bravura performance by Cush Jumbo

Josephine and I

Bush Theatre, Shepherds Bush

Until 17 August

The name Josephine Baker will mean very little to today’s generation, but her life provides a colourful and fascinating subject for a one woman show.

Born into a poor black family in Missouri, she is forced to leave home, aged 13, and via work in nightclubs and chorus lines, she is serendipitously spotted by a producer taken with her precocious talent who offers her a job in a new show in Paris: La Revue Nègre. From there she quickly progresses to the Folies Bergère. Her exotic and sensational dance routines transform her into a star of the twenties. She soon owns her own cabaret, and becomes the muse of artists like Picasso and his circle. Working and living in Paris has set her free from the oppressive racism of the USA, and on visits back home, she is again and again confronted with discrimination despite her worldwide fame. She works as a courier for the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation, and sets up her own ‘united nations’ by adopting 12 children from around the world who she houses in her magnificent chateau. She was a vociferous civil rights campaigner and was invited to speak at Martin Luther King’s mass rally in Washington in 1963. She died, aged 68, in 1975 only four days after a final sell-out performance, attended by the likes of Mick Jagger, Sophia Loren and Shirley Bassey .

Cush Jumbo gives a bravura, fast-paced performance interweaving episodes of Baker’s life with her own as a black actress today. She is, like Baker, a multi-talented performer – dancer, actress, singer and comedienne. And she wrote the script! She takes us on an emotional roller-coaster, from comic stand-up, through pathos, to political comment and euphoric joie de vivre. Her final personal rendering of Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are a Changing’ is an apt coda to an uplifting, informative and entertaining evening. Phyllida Lloyd’s tight and imaginative direction, with only sparse props, provides the ideal framework for Cush Jumbo’s very personal take on Baker’s life. The Bush’s cabaret style seating provides the ideal setting.

Love and Information at Royal Court

Love and Information
Royal Court
6 Sept-13 Oct 2012

This isn’t a play in the usual sense, but over 50 mini-vignettes, played inside a small cube of white, tiled walls, reminiscent of a laboratory or institution. As the title suggests, it is about how we communicate and use or misuse information and how information can inform or undermine our love for each other. Churchill is clearly using this form to imitate, and simultaneously as a critique of, the sound bite world we live in; how information comes to us randomly in fragments. The actors play out their scenes, sometimes only seconds long or at most a few minutes, with verve, wit and intensity. We are taken on a rapid-fire kaleidoscope of snapshots from daily life, from a geriatric ward to a cocktail bar, from a mental health hospital to a beach, bedroom or gym. Each vignette focusing on an aspect of communication or understanding, as well their lack. There are strong resonances of Pinter and Becket; you’re continually confronted with existential questions.

What is disappointing is that the many parts don’t really add up to anything more substantial. While Churchill raises questions about genetics, mental health, how the brain works and the use of language, each of her miniscule scenes gives the audience little chance to reflect on the issues raised, before the next scene begins. She also fails to provide any deeper understanding or discussion of the issues she raises. Churchill is a socialist and an intelligent commentator on social and political issues, yet here she appears to have difficulty grappling with the big issues. We are living through the deepest economic crisis any of us can remember, we face environmental catastrophe, and are living through a technological revolution that is transforming the way we relate, yet she treats these fundamental issues with timidity.

While her writing has true wit, and the production does her proud by milking it for all its worth, one is left dissatisfied.  It feels more like titillation, a rehearsal rather than the real thing.

Caryl Churchill is one of Britain’s most innovative as well as progressive playwrights. Drawing strongly on Brecht’s ‘gestus’ idea, she again here uses non-naturalistic techniques and places ideas at the centre. Her intention is to provoke her audience to think, but she has to offer a greater stimulus than this.
James Macdonald has done a great job directing this difficult piece and the actors demonstrate an admirable versatility and flexibility in a situation where they only have seconds to develop any character or personality.
The audience on the opening night gave the production ample applause, but I would have liked fewer nibbles and more meat.
END

Yours for the Asking at Orange Tree

Yours for the Asking
Orange Tree, Richmond London
5 Sept-6 Oct 2012
The Orange Tree has again pulled off a coup with the UK premiere of this play by Argentinean-born Spanish playwright Ana Diosdado, one of Spain’s leading writers. This play was completed in 1973 only two years before the dictator Franco’s death. It dramatises the insidious effect of mass media advertising and news manipulation on the lives of ordinary people. Although these concepts are no longer new, the play has retained its relevance. With the Murdoch hacking scandals, the rebranding of mass-murdering company Union Carbide as Dow Chemicals, sponsor of the Olympics, and the ubiquitous use of sex for advertising, its message is still powerful today.
Juan, a stressed and jaded hack is sent by his celebrity gossip magazine to interview Susi, a young model, who’s been transformed into the image for a new perfume – a ruse by the chemical company to mask its culpability for the deaths of several children, after using one of its a drug products. The ruse is exposed and Susi, an icon of beauty and purity, overnight becomes a vilified outcast. Juan and Susi fall in love, but she is already at the end of her tether and contemplating suicide. But in a clever twist at the end, she fails to go through with it, but he does. I was strongly reminded of the Arthur Miller/Marylyn Monroe relationship. As Juan says: ‘It is the system we live in’ that is to blame for so many messed up lives.
Once again, director Sam Walters presents us with a tightly woven drama, teasing out its deep humanity and dramatic possibilities to the limit, and designer Katy Mills manages, with only a table and a couple of chairs, to transport us into a newsroom, a bedroom, a lift and a living room. A tremendous cast led by Mia Austen as the innocently vulnerable model and Steven Elder as the journalist, are ably supported by Rebecca Pownall as Juan’s wife Celia, David Antrobus and James Joyce.
Perhaps a little too earnest (Dario Fo’s ‘Death of an Anarchist’ with less humour) and at times didactic, but certainly gets under the skin.
END