A controversial tale from one of the founders of Birmingham REP and a script that has never been performed are among the 100-year-old plays being revived by Midlands theatre company FRED for a production called Friend Or Foe?.
Penned during World War I, the three one-act plays reveal how writers during the period challenged authority and also questioned the roles of men at the front and women at home.
Writer John Drinkwater became stage manager of the newly opened Birmingham REP in 1913. Written three years into World War I, Drinkwater’s X=0: A Night Of The Trojan War finds opposing soldiers openly discussing the folly of war. Its message about the human cost of war soon resulted in a backlash, with the Birmingham Mail stating that Drinkwater was “apparently oblivious of all that England went to war for” and called for the writer to experience the frontline at first hand.
The Munition Worker was published in The Englishwoman magazine in 1917 but there is no record of it ever being staged. The play was credited to Alec Holmes, the pen name of feminist writer Lady Aimée Byng Hall Scott, and taps into the suffragette struggles of the time. Unlike the other one-act plays on the bill, it takes a pro-war stance. A woman factory worker, unable to fight on the Western Front, resolves to work herself to death making bombs as her contribution to the war effort.
Invalided out of military service, actor and writer Miles Malleson was an outspoken supporter of the pacifist cause. Written in 1916, Black 'Ell explores the distance between those at home and those who have experienced the horrors of war. The play was banned under the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) and not performed in the UK until 1926.
FRED’s artistic director Robert F Ball said, “all three plays are fascinating and give us a real insight in to the thoughts and feelings of people who lived through the Great War.
“Especially interesting is the previously unperformed The Munition Worker which presents a woman’s contribution to the war effort that makes us feel distinctly uncomfortable at the start of the 21st century.
“These powerful plays also demonstrate the playwrights of the war have a voice which was equal in strength to that of the more famous war poets.”
The Friend Or Foe? triple bill can be seen at the Bear Pit Theatre, Stratford from Wednesday 23 until Saturday 26 March.