Oh What a Lovely War – Theatre Royal Stratford East and Touring

Wendi Peters in Oh What A Lovely War at the Theatre Royal Stratford East and Touring. Picture: Alastair Muir

Oh What a Lovely War continues at Theatre Royal Stratford East until 7 February, then tours until 30 May.

Star rating: 5 stars *****

Arguably the greatest achievement of Joan Littlewood’s Stratford East-based Theatre Workshop, Oh What a Lovely War remains one of British theatre’s finest responses to the horrors of war, over 50 years after its initial production.

Revived by director Terry Johnson last year to coincide with the centenary commemoration of the outbreak of hostilities, the Theatre Royal is playing host to a new cast of players for two weeks prior to a national tour.

The show’s conceit, of a troupe of Pierrot-clad music hall vaudevillians portraying the ‘game of war’ while performing soldiers’ songs of the period, is framed by a beautiful arch by designer Lez Brotherston, itself an echo of the Theatre Royal’s own design. It emphasises the show’s starting point as a show-within-a-show, as songs and sketches portray the events that led to war as a sequence of missteps by bumbling leaders.

Among the ensemble cast, Wendi Peters and Ian Reddington stand out. Peters’ two big numbers, the recruiting vehicle ‘I’ll Make a Man Out of You’ and the tongue-twisting ‘Sister Susie’s Sewing Shirts’, could almost have been written for her. Reddington, meanwhile, excels as the Pierrot troupe leader and MC, and then popping up in a variety of roles both comedic and dramatic.

As Britain is dragged into war, the humour becomes blacker and blacker, accompanied by an electronic ticker tape which relentlessly documents the huge scale of British lives lost, and the absence of any military gain.

There is little doubt that the principal target of the show’s ire is General Haig, and his belief that sending hundreds of thousands of soldiers to certain death on the Western Front would sufficiently weaken the German army to enable the British to eventually prevail. Christopher Villiers’ Haig is resolute and stalwart, his decision-making chillingly treating the troops under his command as disposable assets.

The real heart of the show, as one would expect, are the troops themselves. From raw recruits being barked at by Reddington’s consonant-averse Sergeant Major, to a group of soldiers who, at Christmas 1914, are stirred by the Germans’ rendition of ‘Silent Night’ (responding with the bawdily hilarious ‘Christmas Day in the Cookhouse’), it becomes impossible to forget that the millions who Haig and his peers turned into cannon fodder were real people, with stories and lives brought to a premature close.

This is a black comedy, but it is also a supremely angry piece, and one which not only justifies that anger but stirs the blood in its audience. From scenes of near-mutiny in French soldiers, bleating like lambs as they are ordered into slaughter, to the final ticker tape message – ten million killed, 21 million wounded, seven million missing – Oh What a Lovely War amuses, inspires, entertains and enflames. A century after the events it portrays, 50 years after it was first performed, this is a show which has never stopped feeling contemporary.

Scott Matthewman

www.stratfordeast.com/oh-what-a-lovely-war