Forgotten Voices

There's something faintly ironic about the title of this acclaimed play in which five Britons recall their experiences of The Great War. After all, the global bloodbath of 1914-18 is unrivalled in the amount of cultural artifacts it has inspired, all of which, in some way, give voice to the experiences of those involved. So the challenge in going over such well-trodden ground must surely be to construct a satisfying drama, which I’m afraid it doesn’t quite manage.

The play itself is consciously spare. As you'd expect of a play about voices, it foregrounds a highly literate text which affords roughly equal temporal and physical space to the narratives of four of the five characters. Of these, it is Belinda Lang's war widow and Rupert Frazer’s posh officer who most engage. Frazer’s almost courtly body language is especially finely observed in contrast with the rather more bluff poses of the lower-ranked men. Lang, too, lends her character a touching frailty that is nonetheless laced with passion remembered from her youth.

Where the play falls down, though, is in the lack of tension onstage. In making what must have been a conscious decision to choose voices that represent a cross-section of war survivors, the playwright might then have gone on to exploit conflicts of class or ideology amongst the group – but he hasn’t. Of course, it could be that the desire to maintain a close fidelity to the actual words that are on record is behind this decision, but, respect for the subject matter aside, the play ultimately fails to convince as drama.

Times: 12 noon, 2 - 27 August