Forgotten Voices

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“Your Country Needs You!”, the recruitment poster looms large on the back wall of the theatre, Lord Kitchener jabbing at the audience. It’s one of several archetypal first world war images that supports the basic premise of this show: five war veterans have come together to recount their experiences of pain and loss at home and on the western front.

With a script based on oral testimonies of war veterans from the Imperial War Museum’s archives, you’d think this show would provide space to ask disquieting questions about war through vivid personal narrative. Unfortunately, what we have instead is a piece of theatre that perpetuates stereotypes and does more to encourage generalisations than make us question the necessity of conflict.

The confessional dialogue is powerful, and hellish accounts of drowning in shell holes, close-quarters combat and the execution of deserters certainly evoke the horror of war. What undermines this production, however, are the Blackadder-ish stereotypes onstage in front of us. The cutout characters of the Haig-like colonel, the cheery scouse private and the weeping war widow appear as extensions of easy historical over-simplifications. Posh privately-educated officers send working class men to the slaughter; women compel men to enlist; young men are forced to walk towards machine guns.

This show doesn’t seek to tackle the Great War with any particular nuance, and it certainly doesn’t do anything to soothe the voices crying from the shadows. What about the thousands of soldiers from the Commonwealth who died fighting in the British Expeditionary Force? The men of the Merchant Navy who died in the Atlantic? Instead of an exploration of forgotten voices, this show feels more like a perpetuation of the easy myths that surround our perceptions of the titanic conflict.