The Christmas Truce
Diana Lampen reviews the recent RSC production
The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) recently offered a play for family audiences (children of 10+) at Stratford-on-Avon based on the 1914 Christmas Truce. Sadly, the run has ended, and there is no plan to bring it to London. For my husband and me it raised the question of how to introduce preadolescent children to some of the worst events of the twentieth century. Writers like Michael Morpurgo and Michael Rosen have highlighted the concern about how you bring the past to life without destroying young people’s hope and trust in the future of humankind, and given some models of how to do it.
Last year was our best opportunity to remember the story of the Truce. For the next three years the commemorations cannot provide us with family Christmas theatre carrying a message of hope. Like War Horse and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, this play was an honourable and successful attempt to make history real to young people, showing how its positive and negative elements co-exist, without overwhelming them with gory details. This restraint made it all the more poignant.
Written by Phil Porter and directed by Erica Whyman, it began with a village cricket match in Warwickshire, which was interrupted by the start of the war and the call-up of reserve soldiers and nurses. The main character was a real-life Stratford man, second lieutenant Bruce Bairnsfather, excellently played by Joseph Kloska and with plenty of humour. His cartoons of trench life became famous in the press, and the other main character is based on his creation ‘Old Bill’, the cheery, cynical, indestructible old soldier, beautifully acted by Gerard Horan.
The production lived up to the RSC’s reputation, even putting an improvised football match on the tiny stage of the Swan Theatre. The story moved fluently from that peaceful pre-war world to the front line, with the village benches becoming the parapets and debris. The horror of war was suggested, not shown, but we saw and heard enough of incompetent command, no man’s land, injury and death to evoke it. We learnt about the living conditions, the bad food, the mud and vermin and the humour of the trenches
The play showed a group of men of very different temperaments bonding together under the stress of danger and death. There was a sub-plot showing the struggle of Phoebe (Frances McNamee) a spirited VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment) nurse, to assert herself with a traditional and repressive matron. We know how this could happen from writers like Vera Brittain, but I felt there was something a little contrived about this part of the story.
The first half ended with a hilarious improvised concert to boost the troops’ morale, immediately followed by a dawn attack which we knew would sacrifice many of the men for weak tactical reasons. The nurses provoked a major dressing-down from ‘Matron’ for trying to decorate the ward for Christmas with toilet paper and bandages, but eventually a truce with her was orchestrated. The standstill on the battlefield was beautifully evoked, from the soldiers’ first curiosity, fear, disbelief and shyness to a wistful companionship in which they sang and drank beer, showed their family photos and exchanged little gifts, and kicked a ball about. Both sides knew it would all be swept away on the morrow as they tried to kill one another again. They shared their thoughts about why they were there, the futility of war and whether life could ever be the same afterwards. These halting conversations encouraged us, too, to reflect on why it was all happening.
At the end, the message came across powerfully that soldiers are not the caricature ‘killing-machine’ heroes of action movies, and war is an affront to their and our essential humanity and brotherhood.
