Review: Birdsong, Bristol Old Vic

Sebastian Faulks’ WW1 novel covers some vast terrains – geographically across a swath of war-torn northern France, but more so temporally and emotionally, switching between Captain Stephen Wraysford’s memories of a blissful, lovelorn and tragic visit to northern France near the start of the 20th century, and his return to the same place under very different circumstances during World War I.

And this stage version by the Original Theatre Company and Birdsong Productions, adapted by Rachel Wagstaff, captures that great span well enough. In particular, Victoria Spearing’s impressive set – all blasted buildings, skeletal tunnels and frayed wire – evokes magnificently the desolation of the Somme battlefields.

To keep up the momentum of what is an enormous tale (and credit to Wagstaff for an effective abridging effort), and also to evoke how Wraysford’s mind slips between his nightmarish present and his blissful past, stage changes are kept to a minimum: so Wraysford’s stay in France at the house of a genteel industrialist, and his seduction of the latter’s unhappy young wife, take place with largely the same blasted backdrop. This does, at first, stop you from getting totally immersed in this very different, far gentler world.

After a while, though, and thanks to a sensitive performance from Edmund Wiseman as the tortured hero, you begin to feel your way into Wraysford’s mind, and those remembered scenes acquire some (though not all) of the immediacy of the noisy, chaotic, exhausting and often heartbreaking present.

And that present is rendered very well – in particular the subterranean tunnels dug by Jack Firebrace (Peter Duncan) and his fellow ‘sappers’. Late in the play Wraysford, not one to shirk a challenge for the sake of his men, accompanies Firebrace down into the tunnels – with dramatic results. The sense of fear (the Germans’ own tunnel is just yards away in the blackness), disorientation and claustrophobia is palpable.

Similarly, we feel ourselves totally drawn into the private worlds of each of the soldiers under Wraysford’s command – Firebrace with his shy, polite and tender letters home, beneath which lurk a yearning love and a terrible fear; Tipper (Max Bowden), a teenager who’s lied about his age to be here and who now finds himself totally out of his depth; and the gangling, bawdy Welshman Evans (Alastair Whatley), who hides his own fear and consuming homesickness under a cocksure, man-of-the-world exterior.

The contrast between these men’s internal dramas and their outward bravado, plus the stolid but unbreakable bonds that form between them, make for some of the play’s most moving moments. Unlike with Faulks’ novel (but how much of that sprawling yet subtle tale can be translated into an evening’s performance?), you may not learn anything new about life on the front line – the horror, the companionship, the boredom and jokey bravado: these are commonplaces – but what there is here, is put across articulately and movingly.

However, not everything is this crisp and emotive. Wraysford’s memories of his earlier visit lack energy or any compelling quality – partly through the slightly awkward franglais accents adopted by the French family, and partly because his seduction of Isabelle (a dignified, but slightly underwhelming Emily Bowker) is glossed over too quickly and doesn’t feel believable. No, the earlier chapter of Wraysford’s life feels thin and insubstantial, and as such you don’t find yourself believing that he would look back upon Amiens, and Isabelle, as longingly as he does during wartime.

But you’ll want to see this show, if at all, for its moving treatment of the war as experienced by the men on the front line – grocers, Tube tunnelers and others, thrown into a bewildering and tragic new world, and surviving as best they could.

Birdsong continues at Bristol Old Vic until Saturday, May 9. For more info and to book tickets, visit www.bristololdvic.org.uk/birdsong.html  

Pics: Jack Ladenburg