Birdsong

The shift in tone between the first and second acts is dramatic, and Nunn’s seasoning is such that he is able to draw on the tropes of quaint and turgid upper-middle class theatre of the early 20th century for the first, aided by Jon Napier's chintzy rural daguerreotype backdrops and chichi props, and the hammering dynamism of modern theatre for the second. From a piquant unreality to symbolic abyss, with a bodily application through Fergus O’Hare’s soundscape, the crowning achievement of this production team’s efforts is hailed by an incredible moment with the felling of a vast backdrop, billowing smoke over the audience, as the hell and gears of trench warfare rattle above. All this is supported by a spry and sedulous supporting cast, including the ever-excellent Nicholas Farrell as Isabelle’s violent husband and Captain Gray.

Birdsong treads the well worn path between love and war with elan. We get the heightened ache of a tragic love story under the shadow of conflict, and that the words 'carnage' and 'carnal' share the Latin root carnis is a fact taken seriously; any enthusiasm for the war is not shown ideologically but, as Wraysford shows us in his diaries, libidinously fired by descriptions of vast mechanical edifices, as a matter of desire. Indeed throughout the play, which links the desire to represent and the will-to-live with love and procreation, a mixture of Schopenhauerian will, Freudian drive and Bergsonian unity, all find themselves firmly grounded in dynamite spectacle and believable drama.

Wagstaff’s script also shines with social and cultural literacy. Wraysford’s narrative diaries become the voice of modernism, bearing the hollow and angry traces of the war into culture. We get God’s dethronement as a source of ennui, the practical rebuttal of ideological tropes of King and Country, and in the place of these grand sources of meaning we get love, comradeship, discipline, order and brutality. Birdsong weaves a web of the causes of solidarity at the front that is rangy and compelling.

At the same time Birdsong gives no easy way for us to confine this madness to history. Helped by the rounded characters, the love story, the astuteness of the script and the acuity of the production, the play lifts the conditions of warfare out of the trenches and into a particular universal. The symbols of the first war are worn lightly, so that poppy fields might make us think of Afghanistan, the football alluding to the Scottish sectarianism of Northern Ireland. Gregg Lowe as the broken young Tipper delivers a shockingly believable demise, Wraysford’s love for Isabelle and their burgeoning politics are cruelly interrupted by war in a way that any young couple’s might. Rather than a sepia mourning for the lost generation, Birdsong mourns for young masculine life, and by the play’s finale all the young fighting men are in some way broken.

The Shell-shock commission set-up after the First World War struggled with the problem of how to distinguish those brave soldiers genuinely deserving of leave and compensation from the undeserving or shirking sick, and this dichotomy is still with us. Birdsong shows war’s necessary efficiency, its required brutalisation of young men, the informal ideas of masculinity and the rhetoric of “heroes”, all of which continue to leave psychologically damaged men without pride or care. As the term shell-shock was being excised from official military discourse, it was left to culture to have the term popularised. You can have your sanctioned Robbie Williams concert, but I’d suggest that Birdsong at the Comedy Theatre is closer to the reality of hell.

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