JOURNEY'S END is a must-see — Page 2

Great article on JOURNEY'S END in today's Times:

"AFTER seeing the first 1929 production of the great World War I drama “Journey’s End,” the journalist J. B. Priestly called it “the strongest pleas for peace I know.” A reviewer for The Daily Mirror in London called it “a much better argument against war than sentimental propaganda plays,” and the novelist Hugh Walpole said it “managed to hit the hardest blow in its swollen stomach that war has yet had.”

More than 75 years later a revival of the play, by R. C. Sherriff, is opening on Broadway against the backdrop of disillusion with the war in Iraq, and the play’s antiwar reputation remains strong. The British equivalent of CliffsNotes, the Methuen study guide, baldly asserts that “Journey’s End” is “a message-carrying play with a definite purpose in mind: to make people ponder the stupidity and horrors of war.” So it may come as a surprise that the playwright insisted that his work was nothing of the kind.

Mr. Sherriff, who maintained this view to the end of his life, thought he was celebrating the men with whom he had fought. At the moment of his success — “Journey’s End” made him independently rich — he insisted: “I have not written this play as a piece of propaganda. And certainly not as propaganda for peace.”

Nevertheless his producer, Maurice Browne, a pacifist and conscientious objector who spent World War I in America, took the opposite view. Mr. Browne’s enthusiasm for the play baffled Mr. Sherriff, who wrote, 40 years on, that he had thought Mr. Browne “would have had a violent revulsion against a war play in which not a word is spoken against the war, in which no word of condemnation was uttered by any of its characters.” Yet over the years Mr. Browne’s interpretation has generally prevailed. Which one has the better case?

Little known in the United States, “Journey’s End” has always been popular in Britain, where it is still widely read and performed in schools. But it had a hard time getting that first staging. Then George Bernard Shaw praised the manuscript in a letter, and Mr. Sherriff relayed this opinion to his first producers, who arranged for a two-night run in the West End, in December 1928. Mr. Browne, tipped off by a friend who had seen it, immediately raised the money for more performances, which turned out to total 593, the longest run the West End had then seen.

The show was praised for its extraordinary realism, which fascinated both soldiers who had served on the Western Front and also civilians who had not. That first production starred a 21-year-old Laurence Olivier as Captain Stanhope. The action spanned four days while British soldiers, holding a section of trench line, await an offensive that seems likely to kill every one of them. Within the year “Journey’s End” — Mr. Sherriff’s seventh play but his first to be produced — was being performed in 25 languages. It ran for nearly 500 performances on Broadway. The latest revival is directed by David Grindley, who was responsible for a well-received British production in 2004.

Like Mr. Sherriff, Mr. Grindley does not think that the play is an attack on war, and he is struck by its realism and ambiguities. “Every single character in the play accepts that the war is necessary,” he said recently by telephone during a break in rehearsals, “and that Great Britain is resisting German aggression.” But in London Mr. Grindley’s view was overshadowed by critics who were dazzled by his production. The Daily Telegraph, for example, praised that show as “powerfully capturing the waste and futility of the conflict.”

Why is the interpretation of “Journey’s End” by many modern audiences so different from its author’s? .............."

Click here for the rest of the article