Here it is. Fifty years late. Oh What a Lovely War was originally staged at Stratford East in 1964. It returns to its birthplace to cash in on this year’s anniversary of the Great War. Sorry, I meant commemorate. The title is so familiar that one overlooks its callow, misanthropic glibness. Does anyone think war ‘lovely’? The show’s narrator sprints through the causes of the conflict, and its chief battles, without offering any historical insight. Music-hall songs and comedy stereotypes trundle past on a conveyor belt of laughter and slaughter.
The show was inspired by angry dogmatist Joan Littlewood, who wanted to sock it to R.C. Sherriff for writing a hit play, Journey’s End, that overlooked working-class infantrymen. But her creation is strangely besotted with nobs. The only figure who achieves a personality is Earl Haig, who comes across as a dim-witted, self-deluding disposer of innocent life. We need a musical to tell us that? The other characters flounder in banality: brave Tommies, sad Belgians, uppity Krauts, sweet flower girls, shouty colonels, scheming war profiteers, poncy Frenchmen. One sketch shows a circle of posh capitalists gloating over their income from munitions and praying that the conflict will endure for ever. But virtually every citizen in the country had a relative killed or injured, and to portray the governing classes as rapacious psychopaths preying on helpless underlings is neither history nor satire. It’s just rage misdirected.
The show’s visual mannerisms are a little patchy. The men’s costumes are disastrous, the women’s stylish and attractive. Littlewood wanted the play to emphasise life, not death and she decreed that the soldiers must dress in billowing white clownwear with minstrel buttons down the front. They flap around in their pyjamas like an identity parade of Andy Pandys.
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