It is 1910, and an impressionable young Englishman, Stephen Wraysford, arrives in Northern France to report on his family’s possible investment in a failing textile factory owned by René Azaire, whose unfeeling treatment of his workers is matched by sexual brutality toward his wife Isabelle.
She is secretly smuggling food to his starving employees. Stephen helps, they fall in love—prompt raunchy sex scene—and run away together.
Fast forward six years. Lt. Wraysford is back on the Somme, haunted by the loss of more than 80 per cent of his men in a suicidal attack, in which he himself is dragged back half-dead from a shell hole. After a recovery worthy of Lazarus, he is determined to find Isabelle again, only to discover that, riven by guilt over their relationship, she first went back to her husband, now a hostage in Germany, then took a kindly German officer as her lover.
Their story emerges many decades later through Stephen’s diaries, researched by his great grandson, but his focus is not on his war-weary, disillusioned ancestor but on Jack, a rough-and-tumble sapper, one of the ‘sewer rats’ whose job it was to tunnel 600 metres under German lines.
The two men had built a special relationship across the well-defended lines of officers and other ranks: Stephen had let him off a likely court martial for falling asleep on sentry duty after one of the latter’s ten-hour shifts, and it was Jack who saved his CO's life by carrying him back from the battlefield.
Telling details in the play and Alastair Whatley’s production, designed by Richard Kent, depict the transformation of the land and its people, a reactionary old councillor talking in 1910 of the Somme "untouched by generations", the red poppies in Madame Azaire’s vase, the superstitious Stephen seductively reading palms in 1910, reading the entrails of a rat in 1916.
The most poignant moment comes as Stephen and Jack are trapped underground, and in its finely individualised portraits of ordinary men in a situation of extraordinary horror, the scenes in the trenches reminded me of R C Sherriff’s classic play Journey’s End.
Despite its tight dialogue and many virtues, Birdsong does not work quite so well, largely due to it being an adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’s novel, rather than an original playscript. The three acts do not hang together well, the first serving only to introduce Stephen’s relationship with Isabelle, with no further part played by her husband, or stepdaughter or the creepy councillor, to each of whom much attention is devoted. And Stephen’s passion for the woman he loves, and the devotion he bears to his men, interwoven by Faulks through nearly 500 pages, is less easy to integrate in the two acts that follow.
That, however, remains a minor criticism of a formidable accomplishment by playwright Rachel Wagstaff, who successfully raises profound questions about loyalty, decency and truth. A trigger point comes as Isabelle’s sister Lisette—a spirited Gracie Follows—urges Stephen to go on fighting "for country, for peace and for God." How we might question those unconditional commitments now, while still honouring those who died for their sake.
The assured James Esler, in his professional stage debut, brings a touching vulnerability to once high-minded, now cynical Wraysford, while Charlie Russell inhabits the desperation, frustration and remorse of the abused, demeaned Isabelle.
Max Bowden is the raucous, irrepressible Jack, the street-fighter with a soft heart, the man not to cross on the Clapham omnibus but the one to drag you out if it crashes. Each of his fellow soldiers emerges with a distinct personality, among them Raif Clarke as Tipper, the 15-year-old who finds it hard to get beyond "Dear Mum" in his letter home, and who forgets, or doesn’t care about, his tin hat before battle.
Sargon Yelda is René, whose heartless righteousness is reinforced by the local pushy bigwig councillor, played by Roger Ringrose, who puts in another brief appearance as the blustering blimp Colonel, who leads the men over the top and dies sword in hand at the first volley.
Jason Taylor’s lighting helps create the appropriate atmosphere through blinds that might be shutters of a industrialist’s home or the boards of a dugout, and Dominic Bilkey’s explosive sound design would be enough to make one jump in the back row of the stalls.
The production's UK tour continues in Bath, Newcastle, Birmingham, Brighton, Aylesbury, Aberdeen and Alexandra Palace until March 2025.