Defendants: Stage adaptor Rachel Wagstaff, director Trevor Nunn. Original author Sebastian Faulks.
Case for the defence:
Sebastian Faulks' World War I epic Birdsong has been in film development limbo for several years, its subject – the 1910 meeting of a young Englishman and his affair with his French hostess, his subsequent service in the war, and his descendents' lives in the 1970s – has been thought inadaptable. However, Wagstaff does so and despite trimming the 1970s section, this is an epic at around three hours with one intermission and a five-minute break.
The play starts, as we're told on the projector screen, in 1910 in a very conventional play, one that could have been written at the time – a young Englishman, Stephen Wraysford, arrives at a well-to-do family house and is entertained. So far so conventional, but when he hears his host beating his wife, Isabelle, Wraysford's attraction to this older woman grows until they embark on an affair. They are found out and elope, but before long Isabelle tires of their poor life and returns, devasting Wraysford.
Act I ends with the sound of war and the stage comes to life – the moving backdrop is now not just a projector screen but three-dimensional, the trenches. As we return in Act II, we're introduced to Sapper Jack Firebrace, a pious man who has a turn at entertaining the troops in drag, but he angers the-now Lt Wraysford by sleeping on duty. Despite the threat of execution for this, the two become friends, or as close as two solitary types can. Wraysford wants to see Firebrace's tunnels beneath the Bosch's lines and despite attacking in the bloodbath of the Somme stays at the front.
His previous life catches up with him when his unit is stationed in Isabelle's old village and he seeks her out. Finding her, seven years later he still loves her despite her wounds, but Isabelle has fallen for a German soldier and won't return to Wraysford. Nor will she tell him about his son. Isabelle's sister tries to, but it is for nothing and he returns to the front. By 1918 he is down in the mines with Firebrace when the Germans devastate their tunnel network, Wraysford manages to blast his way out, saved by a German soon after the Armistice is signed.
Witness statements:
"Nunn’s direction is sometimes turgid, with unconvincing sing-songs round the piano. The play’s most moving moments are the simplest, with Lee Ross as the sapper Jack Firebrace writing letters to his wife and reading her replies. Thanks to Ross’s beautifully simple and direct performance, the scene when he receives terrible news from home is by far the most moving in the play. It is not an easy thing to play uncomplicated goodness without sliding into sentimentality but Ross resists the temptation and moved me to tears.
"…Nevertheless this stage version strikes me as cumbersome and unnecessary, and never comes close to matching the dramatic power and extraordinary tenderness of RC Sherriff’s Journey’s End, written from his personal experience of the Great War, rather than based on scrupulous research like Faulks’s novel. My advice would be to stay at home and read the novel, or better yet, a collection of the great poems written by Owen, Sassoon and others who actually served in the First World War." – Charles Spencer, the Daily Telegraph
"Wagstaff’s version retains many of the novel’s intriguing elements: its concern with class, its sense of war as an exercise in blinkered bureaucracy, its depiction of an early-20th century crisis of masculinity. It’s poetic, too, and beautiful in places, thanks to John Napier’s clever designs, which make generous use of projections by Jon Driscoll and Gemma Carrington. The sound, by Fergus O’Hare, is also excellent. Besides Barnes, there are skilful performances from Zoe Waites, Nicholas Farrell, Genevieve O’Reilly, and above all Lee Ross as Jack, a tunnel-digger with a quirky music hall sensibility. Yet whereas the novel is often claustrophobic, here there is less visceral immediacy. Events are narrated when they really need to be dramatised. The result is too rhetorical: we’re told what we ought to be shown. Barnes has an elegant way with his expository speeches, but Trevor Nunn’s production is often static, and, for all the gravity of its subject matter, it doesn’t engage us fully." – Henry Hitchings, the Evening Standard
"The weakest part of the play is the first third which deals with the sojourn of a young Englishman, Stephen Wraysford, in the Amiens of 1910. As a working guest in the house of a rich manufacturer, he falls in love with his host's wife, Isabelle: an experience that colours his whole life. But, although we see the affair through Stephen's eyes, this feels like filleted Faulks. The industrial unrest that provides a context to the affair is cursorily dealt with. Even the anguish of the cuckolded husband, who in the book rushes from room to room seeking evidence of tainted bedsheets, is reduced to a single cry of jealous rage. But when the play moves to the western front, from 1916 to 1918, it exerts an emotional grip" - Michael Billington, the Guardian
Findings:
Starting a play with not one but three "as you all know" in the first thirty minutes is an automatic year in the cubes. I don't care that you may be trying to evoke the plays of the period, with the preconception with witty talk and singing songs, it comes across as sloppy.
Despite the background of industrial unrest and illicit love – not punishable, yet – the first act feels like any other Edwardian play. It's not until the sound of war that things change for the better. It's not that the first act is bad, but this is a story about war. Here we can commend the director and set designer for not just the uniforms and props but recreating trench and tunnel warfare on stage.
As a Judge I know no woman, but even for me the romance and love was unconvincing and it seemed more an infatuation than a romance. Once together they had some chemistry, but Isabelle could have equally rejected instead o accepted Wraysford's love.
Regarding Wraysford, he seemed lacking. Ben Barnes played him well, particularly as he is on stage for most of the time, but the script took you places and abandoned them. Twice – with card reading then divining the augers - suggested that some hint of his future was to come about, but to no avail. Finally, the theme of Birdsong, and Wraysford horror of birds – the play starts with him describing such a nightmare – goes nowhere. There is an incident with carrier pigeons but no more.
Finally, and appropriately – even I have a sense of humour – the ending. For a long play it felt rushed and not quite clear on its message and what has come from all this.
Verdict & sentence:
Moving and official Justice Department Commendation for Barnes, but Wagstaff and Nunn, I'm taking you down to the cubes. One year for "as you all know" – correction, one year per "as you all know" – and another two for leading us nowhere. Start singing birdies, hope you like your new cage.
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