In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present – I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world?
Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations, Book V.
Sherriff began writing his most famous play in the summer of 1927, ‘one August Bank Holiday in one of the railway carriage bungalows at Selsey Bill.’1 He had not written anything since Mr Birdie’s Finger, a year and a half before (a low rate of productivity by his standards during the early 1920s), perhaps because his duties as newly minted captain of Kingston Rowing Club were rather more onerous than those of vice captain, but the itch to write had not gone away, and after the Henley Regatta had drawn the rowing season to a close in July 1927, he picked up his pencil once more.2
Sherriff tells us in his autobiography that Journey’s End started as a novel about hero worship, with young Raleigh in awe of Stanhope at school, but their positions gradually reversing as their lives went on. Finding a novel hard going, he began to think that the war might serve some purpose in the story, and then he began to think in terms of a play:
I had avoided the war in the novel because I couldn’t see anything happening to Stanhope and Raleigh that would have any relevance to the story as a whole. But the more I thought about it in terms of a play the deeper it began to bite.
Once he had worked out the plan and the timing, he was on safe ground, ‘Dialogue came easily: I merely had to write down what people said. … The other characters walked in without invitation. I had known them all so well in the trenches that the play was an open house for them.’3
It is natural to be curious about why he came to write about the war once more, having left Jimmy Lawton and his Memories of Active Service long behind him – and in both cases, uncompleted. In the interview with The Westminster Gazette he remarked:
[The play] sprang not so much from the war as from my association with the post-war generation with whom I resumed rowing and football and who brought to me a fresh outlook. Subconsciously, perhaps, I wanted to perpetuate the memory of the men I’d known, but certainly no divine inspiration came to me.4
Maybe not divine inspiration, but there seems to have been something in the air in 1927 that made the war worth revisiting. Already in 1926 had come works by Ford Madox Ford, T.E. Lawrence and Herbert Read, followed in 1927 by Max Plowman’s Subaltern on the Somme. By 1928, there was a flood of volumes, including Sherriff, of course, and Blunden, Sassoon, Remarque5 and e.e. Cummings. In 1929, it grew further, to include Graves, Hemingway, Jünger6 and O’Casey, among others. Of course the war had been addressed in earlier literature, too. On the stage, plays such as Harry Wall’s Havoc (1923), and The Prisoners of War (1925) by J.R. Ackerley (another play by an ex-East Surrey man first performed by a private society) had been produced, but had failed to find a ready audience. But by 1927, the time seemed ripe. Some suggested it was because the authors had had time to process their experiences (or, perhaps, for those who had not served, their emotions). Herbert Read, for example, in The Criterion in June 1930, reviewing All Quiet on the Western Front, notes a sudden popularity in wartime memoirs, and suggests that:
All who had been engaged in the war, all who had lived through the war years, have for more than a decade refused to consider their experience. The mind has a faculty for dismissing the debris of its emotional conflicts until it feels strong enough to deal with them. The war for most people was such a conflict.7
Hynes adds to that thought the possibility that ‘the presence … of a future war made the telling of the past war’s story both possible and imperative,’8 while Fussell adds a quotation from Jung for good measure: ‘the war, which in the outer world had taken place some years before, was not yet over, but was continuing to be fought within the psyche.’9
So it is possible that Sherriff read some of the war literature that had begun to be produced, or was perhaps simply aware of it. But it is also likely that he had some unfinished business of his own. His attempts to grapple with his own experience had not been satisfactorily resolved, with his memoir rather fizzling out. As we have already seen, Volume II ended just before his return from the Tunnelling Company: before being shelled on New Year’s Day 1917; before the bouts of neuralgia, which became increasingly debilitating; and well before his eventual wounding and return to England. So maybe there were some feelings he still needed to explore – feelings that he felt unable to explore in the format of a memoir, or a largely autobiographical novel. Vera Brittain, in a foreword10 to Testament of Youth, explained the difficulties she faced in deciding how to approach her subject, dismissing both diary and novel formats in favour of a more considered memoir. Perhaps Sherriff went through the same decision-making process before deciding that a play (which, after all, was the format that had thus far yielded him most success) was the best way forward.
Whereas his earlier plays had benefited from being shared with others as he went along, Journey’s End had been shown to no one else. Before he sent it to Curtis Brown (‘I had already tried their patience with a string of other plays that hadn’t come to anything,’11 he wrote) he showed it to ‘two men who seemed most likely to be interested and constructive’ – one a local journalist who had ‘written glowing reviews’ of his earlier plays, and the other, ‘an old army friend who had been with me in France and was now on the committee of the leading dramatic club in the neighbourhood’. The name of the journalist is, unfortunately, unknown: the reviews were never signed. But the identity of the army friend is very obviously David Hatten.
Perhaps as well as looking for comments, he had hoped that Genesta might produce his latest work. If so, he was to be disappointed; neither Hatten nor his journalist friend were very impressed, so Sherriff says that he put it back in a drawer for a while, before finally opting to send it to Curtis Brown in April 1928.12 They replied, in fairly short order, that it was ‘a very fine play’ that they were ‘enthusiastic’ about, and that ‘we shall do everything possible to secure its performance.’13 Albert Curtis Brown,14 in his memoir, recalled that Sherriff was ‘fully aware of the prejudice that prevailed in 1928 against war-plays’,15 but they nevertheless sent the play to Horace Watson at the Haymarket Theatre. Watson agreed that ‘it was an unusually fine play, but thought its grim tragedy would be too much for the feelings of the audiences; and, besides, there were no women in it. Others felt the same way about it.’ So it was agreed that the best chance for it would be with the Incorporated Stage Society, one of the private societies that performed plays on Sunday nights and Monday matinees when theatres were dark.
The Stage Society was founded in 1899 as a society that would produce ‘noncommercial’ drama that had ‘intrinsic merit’.16 It was to give at least six performances during the year, and membership would be by subscription, so that the organisation was classified as a members’ club, and thus immune from the attentions of the censors in the Lord Chamberlain’s office. It incorporated in 1904, with George Bernard Shaw and his wife as the only lifetime members. As well as avoiding the censor, the Incorporated Stage Society (and other private societies like it) offered a showcase to actors, directors and playwrights, and West End theatre managers would come along to observe the proceedings and weigh up the commercial potential of what they saw on stage.17 During its first twenty-five years it had been responsible for promoting the works of many dramatists seen as avant-garde at the time (though now quite firmly part of the theatre canon): Bernard Shaw, Ibsen, Yeats, Chekhov, O’Neill, Pirandello, Strindberg, Turgenev, and many others – as well as novelists and literary figures such as Hardy, Conrad, Henry James, Joyce, Masefield, Bennett and more.
Nevertheless, it lived a precarious existence. In 1922 it had all but come to grief and the hat was passed round for additional funds. In 1927, the society joined with the 300 Club, another private club producing Sunday plays, this one run by Phyllis Whitworth (wife of Geoffrey Whitworth, a drama critic and Director of the British Drama League). It had only started up in 1923, but mounted its twelfth production at the beginning of 1928, in the form of Young Woodley, a play by John van Druten about the love of a young boy for his housemaster’s wife (a play initially banned by the censor, but one that would subsequently transfer to the Savoy theatre, closing only to be replaced by Journey’s End in 1929). One other feather in Mrs Whitworth’s cap was the first production of Ackerley’s The Prisoners of War, although only with some misgivings when she became aware, in advance of its first performance, that it was being talked about as the ‘new homosexual play’.18
This was the society to which Sherriff ’s play was being sent, and its track record was so out of tune with his own preferences that it is easy to understand his misgivings:
The Incorporated Stage Society was a highbrow affair. Most of the private societies that produced plays for members on Sunday nights did so in the hope of discovering plays that would become West End successes and augment their funds through a share of the proceeds. But the Incorporated Stage Society would have none of this. Their declared policy was to produce plays of merit that, while deserving production, had no likely appeal to the general public.19
Sherriff was invited along to a Stage Society production to talk to one of its committee members, Geoffrey Dearmer – a war poet (his poetry remained largely undiscovered for many years, but it is now very highly regarded).20 Dearmer was a significant literary figure, who had written a number of plays himself, and was a firm believer that the society should seek to produce plays of merit, even if they were likely to have commercial appeal. Sherriff met him on 9 July at a performance of Paul Among the Jews by Franz Werfel. This was unfortunately exactly the kind of highbrow affair that Sherriff feared (and it was accordingly slaughtered in the press the next day – ‘The Stage Society at its Worst’, barked the Evening Standard). But he was pleasantly surprised when Dearmer expressed his admiration for Journey’s End, and urged Sherriff to send it to Bernard Shaw for his opinion.21
There are conflicting views about just how much Sherriff needed Shaw’s endorsement. Sherriff himself seems to have thought that the odds were stacked against the play in the committee, but from other sources it appears that the result was finely balanced. One thing that is very clear is that Dearmer was a great advocate for the play. W.S. Kennedy,22 in writing to St John Ervine23 to correct a newspaper article he had written, noted, ‘The play was brought to the notice of the committee, of which I was then chairman, by Mr Dearmer.’24 Ervine had written in his piece that Dearmer had threatened to resign if Journey’s End was not performed, and with the committee evenly split, Kennedy had thus been implicitly forced to deliver the casting vote in favour.25 Kennedy was having none of it. He told Ervine that he had no recollection of any resignation threat, and if there had been, he would anyway not have acquiesced. He said that he had supported the production ‘with mixed feelings. It was only when I knew that no commercial manager would put it on that my own vote was given in its favour. I felt that it was stuff for the commercial stage rather than for the Stage Society.’26
But Dearmer had threatened to resign, not in an effort to influence the committee’s decision, rather to protest its decision to overrule the Reading Committee, of which he was a member, and which had clearly been in favour of the play (in fact, another Reader, the well-known novelist R.H. Mottram, was happy to have his strong support expressed in the play’s pre-publicity, describing it as ‘a very graphic piece of realism, written with restraint and very obvious sincerity’.27) Dearmer’s other concern was with the society’s policy in general. He wrote to Kennedy:
I remember your excitement when reading JE, and I venture to think you rated the play as higher than ‘stuff for the commercial stage’ at the time. I cannot myself subscribe to the view that the business of the SS [sic] has been (in my time at all events) to produce only plays that are not, and cannot be, commercial.28
So it seems that everyone agreed on the quality of Journey’s End; the disagreement lay in whether the ISS should select only plays with no prospect of commercial production.
Sherriff sent the play off to Shaw, at that time holidaying in the south of France, in early September. He was dismayed when he read that Shaw had been bitten by a mosquito that had poisoned his hand, doubting that, in such a condition, he would be inclined to read the play. To his surprise, however, a reply came back on 16 September ‘with Swiss stamps in place of the French ones I had stuck on’,29 and with the French stamps carefully peeled off and placed inside the envelope. More importantly, Shaw had returned the manuscript, and slipped inside its pages was the following report:
This play is, properly speaking, a document, not a drama. The war produced several of them. They require a good descriptive reporter, with the knack of dialogue. They are accounts of catastrophes, and sketches of trench life, useful as correctives to the romantic conception of war; and they are usually good of their kind because those who cannot do them well do not do them at all.
They seem to me useless as dramatists’ credentials. The best of them cannot prove that the writer could produce a comedy or tragedy with ordinary materials. Having read this Journey’s End, and found it as interesting as any other vivid description of a horrible experience, I could give the author a testimonial as a journalist; but I am completely in the dark as before concerning his qualification for the ordinary professional work of a playwright, which does not admit of burning the house to roast the pig.
As a ‘slice of life’ – horribly abnormal life – I should say let it be performed by all means, even at the disadvantage of being the newspaper of the day before yesterday. But if I am asked to express an opinion as to whether the author could make his living as a playwright, I can only say that I don’t know. I can neither encourage nor discourage him.
One wonders quite what Sherriff said in his covering letter to solicit such a response, since it seemed to focus more on Sherriff ’s capacities as a dramatist rather than the merits of the play itself. But Shaw was astute in spotting Sherriff ’s gift for dialogue and journalistic-style observation (something that would be noted subsequently by St John Ervine),30 and he gave the play support, albeit of a qualified kind. So Sherriff took the results to Dearmer, exaggerating Shaw’s support by the age-old West End trick of selective quotation, telling Dearmer that Shaw had said ‘Let it be produced by all means.’ And that, according to Sherriff, was that. In reality, however, the society had probably decided to produce the play anyway: the continuing pressure from Dearmer and the Reading Committee, and the obvious disinclination of any of the professional managers to take up the play meant that the ISS was probably its only chance to obtain a performance. The secretary of the society, Matthew Norgate, wrote some years later that the society had been desperate to find a show to fill its December slot,31 which might also have helped tip the scales in the play’s direction.
Sherriff must have been delighted when the ISS programme for the year was publicised at the beginning of November, with coverage in all of the main newspapers. The first production of the season would be Journey’s End, by R.C. Sherriff, ‘a dramatist who has not previously had a piece produced professionally’, observed the Telegraph.32 ‘Unknown author’s war play’, read the Daily Chronicle’s headline, ‘Trench story with no woman part’: the absence of any female cast members was noted quite widely among the papers. Journey’s End would be followed by Benavente’s The Princess, and Tolstoy’s Rasputin (both in translation, of course), plus a further work by a well-known English author, which would be publicised when difficulties with the rights had been overcome. To those frustrated with the society’s apparent preference for foreign (for which, read ‘highbrow’) over British dramas, and for those mindful of the recent success of another unknown British dramatist (John van Druten, with Young Woodley), the first item on the ISS menu must have looked intriguing.
Journey’s End is set in a ‘dugout in the British trenches’, before St Quentin, and the action begins on 18 March 1918 – on the eve of the Kaiserschlacht. The story is straightforward: the officers of a company on the Western Front await the impending German attack. In fact, Sherriff said he had considered calling it Suspense (‘but this didn’t ring true because I couldn’t honestly claim that it had any,’33 he wrote, although he was being much too self-deprecating), or Waiting (‘but it had the flavour of a restaurant or a railway station’). Instead he called it Journey’s End, a title that, he wrote,34 was derived from the closing words in a chapter of a book he was reading one night. Then again, he told American critic Gilbert Gabriel that he first saw the phrase ‘scrawled in German on a piece of planking over an enemy dugout door’.35 In a letter in 1939, however, his secretary wrote to Aircraftman E.P. Jones:
[Mr Sherriff] wishes me to tell you that the title Journey’s End was not drawn from any special previous reference or use of the words. I am sorry I cannot give you a more interesting reply, but when searching for a title for the play, the one selected came independently of any previous association.36
The main character in the play is the young Captain Stanhope, who has been in the trenches three years, having come straight from school when he was just eighteen. The strain of leading the company is ameliorated by his consumption of whisky, but despite his fondness for the bottle his men and fellow officers feel there is no one better in the line. His second in command is Lieutenant Osborne, known to the other officers as Uncle, a gentle, kindly presence, a schoolteacher and family man in his late thirties. The other officers in the company are Second Lieutenant Trotter, a stout and jovial man, risen from the ranks, lacking in imagination, perhaps, but utterly reliable. The final officer in the company at the beginning of the play is Lieutenant Hibbert, a weak man whose nerves are shot, who lives in a perpetual state of terror, and whose only desire is to escape from the trenches.
Early in the play, a young officer arrives: Second Lieutenant Raleigh is a young man from Stanhope’s old school, who has hero-worshipped him for years, and whose sister Madge is as good as betrothed to him. He had sought out Stanhope’s company, thinking how good it would be to fight alongside him, but Stanhope is terrified that Raleigh will write home to tell them of how far he has fallen. The officers come and go from the dugout as they take turns at their duties in the trench, and we watch them interact over their meals, served, with a dose of humour, by Mason, the servant.
There are three main plots that run through the play:
Stanhope’s insistence that he should be allowed to censor Raleigh’s letters home – although when he finally forces Raleigh to hand over the letter he has written, and Osborne reads it to him, he finds that Raleigh has been full of praise for his old school friend; Stanhope is ashamed of what he has become.
The second is Stanhope’s response to Hibbert’s attempts to ‘worm out’ of his duties and go on sick leave: Stanhope eventually threatens to shoot Hibbert if he leaves the dugout, Hibbert capitulates, and Stanhope confesses that he shares Hibbert’s fears, but is bolstered in his duties by his whisky and the comradeship of his fellow officers.
The third relates to the trench raid that is ordered by the colonel, to obtain prisoners that they might interrogate regarding the forthcoming attack. Raleigh and Osborne are selected to lead the raid, and Osborne is killed in its execution.
After Osborne is killed, Raleigh struggles to accept his death, even as the other officers attempt to forget with a drunken dinner party that same evening. Following the dinner party the play comes swiftly to its climax: as dawn breaks on the morning of the German attack the officers leave the dugout one by one to take their place in the line, while the German bombardment crashes around them. Raleigh is quickly wounded in the back by shrapnel, and is brought down into the dugout, where he dies in Stanhope’s arms. The play ends with Stanhope wearily mounting the steps to face the German advance.
Journey’s End draws heavily on Sherriff ’s wartime experiences, especially his first few days in the trenches, as set out in Memories and letters:
Raleigh’s account of his journey to the dugout mimics very closely the section where Sherriff shared a railway carriage to the front with Abrams and Percy High;
The discussion of Minnies recalls Sherriff ’s own morbid fears of them, expressed so frequently in his letters home;
The opening scene, of Hardy drying his sock in the candlelight, is an almost exact match for the first occasion when he met Douglass, and even Douglass’s nickname (Father) has its counterpoint in the character of Uncle. Trotter’s protests, at the lack of pepper, recall another Douglass incident in the first seven-day stretch in the line.
Of course, Hibbert’s neuralgia is something that Sherriff could speak of with some experience, and even some of the dialogue used in the exchanges between Hibbert and Stanhope – talk of Hibbert ‘worming out’, for example, or Stanhope’s urgings to stand with his fellow officers – is clearly drawn from Sherriff ’s own account.
These, and other examples in the play highlight its veracity (justifying Bernard Shaw’s ‘journalism’ comment), which was, in part, why the managers had rejected the play: based entirely in a dugout, with no women, and a downbeat ending, it was hardly the thing to bring out crowds seeking entertainment and escapism. But what they had missed was its humour and the depth of its characterisation; these were people whom others would recognise and care about. The challenge was to demonstrate to the managers just what they had missed – that, in the correct hands, and with the correct cast, the play had the potential to be powerful and moving, as well as true. And, as it happens, that was exactly what the ISS was about to do.
The Stage Society handed the reins of the production to James Whale,37 who, according to Sherriff,38 was a ‘man-of-all-work in the theatre’, who ‘played small parts, designed and painted scenery, and occasionally got a job as a stage manager, but had never been in charge of a play in a West End theatre and had never earned beyond £5 a week.’ In fact, he was much more experienced than that.
Whale was born into a poor family in Dudley in 1889,39 making him some seven years Sherriff ’s senior. His initial exposure to the theatre came mainly from trips to the Dudley Opera House with a friend whose father could provide them with free tickets. He seems to have delayed enlisting until he concluded conscription was inevitable, and finally joined the ‘Inns of Court’ cadet corps in October 1915, being commissioned a second lieutenant in the 2/7th Worcestershire Regiment in the summer of 1916. He fought, like Sherriff, at Passchendaele, and it was there, on 25 August 1917, that he was captured while leading ‘a stunt on a pillbox at midnight’.40 He was sent to a prisoner of war camp in Holzminden in Germany, and it was there he began to develop his love of the theatre: ‘I sincerely believe,’ he said later, ‘that training [in the camp] meant as much to me as anything I ever learned since. The stage presented really the only possible career for me then.’41
He returned from the war to the Birmingham Repertory, where he worked for a few years before moving to London and Oxford for work – as actor, stage designer, and, occasionally, director, as well as assisting in the general management of various theatres in which he was employed.42 For a couple of years he worked in various roles for the well-known actor-manager Nigel Playfair at the Lyric, Hammersmith, but by May 1927, their relationship had fractured and Whale was left to find work as best he could. In the following eighteen months, ‘Whale acted in eleven productions and designed scenery for fifteen, often labouring under the auspices of the Incorporated Stage Society, where he had become known for his ability to stretch a meagre budget for settings beyond all reasonable expectations.’43 In early November, while the ISS was finalising its plans for the winter season, Whale was involved in no fewer than three productions, all of which ended promptly, leaving him free to take a small part in an anti-war play called High Treason44 at the Strand Theatre. While in his dressing room one evening, Whale received the approach that was to change his life, when Matthew Norgate offered fifteen guineas45 to direct two performances of another war play for the ISS. Reluctant to accept at first, he eventually changed his mind, and agreed to meet the author a few days later.
Sherriff went to see Whale at the theatre, where he was making himself up for that night’s performance. ‘He didn’t seem very enthusiastic about Journey’s End,’ wrote Sherriff, and he said little about the play ‘beyond the comment that certain scenes were too sentimental and would have to be brought down to earth or cut out. I gladly agreed to do anything he suggested. I would have cut the whole play and done it again if this got it any nearer to the West End.’46
For all that Sherriff was worried about Whale’s commitment to the play, he was impressed when he heard of his army experience, and when he saw that he had already read the play thoroughly and ‘knew it backwards’. Ending the conversation just before he went on stage, Whale invited Sherriff to his flat the next day, where he showed him ‘a beautifully constructed model. I had envisaged little more than a squalid cavern in the ground, but Whale had turned the hand of art to it. By strutting the roof with heavy timbers he gave an impression of vast weight above. … There may never have been a dugout like this one: but any man who had lived in the trenches would say “This is it: this is what it was like.”’47
‘Luck followed us through the casting,’48 said Sherriff, noting that none of the leading stars of the time were inclined to take a chance with Stanhope, so Whale offered the part ‘to an obscure young actor named Laurence Olivier’, who at that time was just ending a West End run in a comedy called Bird in Hand. Olivier had been promised the role in Basil Dean’s new play Beau Geste, due to begin in the West End in the New Year, so was not envisaging staying with it in the event of a transfer to another theatre (not that he thought that was particularly likely).49
Luck had followed in the casting of the other parts as well, although Sherriff was not aware of it at the time. Six of the cast had fought in the war. George Zucco (Osborne), had served as a lieutenant in the West Yorks, and had been wounded in a trench raid at St Quentin. Melville Cooper (Trotter) had served with the Highlanders, while David Horne (Hardy) had been a captain in the Grenadier Guards. Percy Walsh (the sergeant major) and Alexander Field (Mason) also served in the Army. H.G. Stoker (the colonel) was the most distinguished of the lot: he had been the first submarine commander to penetrate the Dardanelles minefield (a feat for which he was sure to win the Victoria Cross, except that his ship was captured a day or two later).50 These older men were in their thirties and forties, and generally had quite extensive experience on stage,51 in the West End and elsewhere. Olivier, at just twenty-one – the youngest of the principal actors – was obviously not quite as experienced, but had already chalked up several London appearances. The least experienced – Maurice Evans and Robert Speaight – had just begun to appear on the West End stage that year, but both were quick and clever, and eager to do well. Almost every one of the cast would use their Journey’s End experiences as a springboard to further success in the theatre, with Zucco, and especially, Melville Cooper and Maurice Evans, going on to successful Hollywood careers.52
Given the long track record of Whale and so many of the actors, Sherriff must have been very nervous when he went along to the first read-through of the play ‘in a shabby upstairs room over a shop in the Charing Cross Road. It was a cold November morning, and I found Whale sitting at a long bare table in his overcoat, with a muffler round his neck and the cast standing about around him. They were an ordinary looking lot of men: what you might see any evening on Waterloo station or a train home.’ Sherriff was worried, because he saw Olivier looking ‘bored and restless’. He obviously was: ‘I told James Whale, the director, I didn’t think all that highly of the play,’ Olivier wrote in his autobiography.53 ‘“There’s nothing but meals in it,” I complained. He replied: “That’s about all there was to think about in Flanders during the war.”’
Sherriff was even more put out when the actor who was originally hired to play Mason promptly threw his script on the table, as he’d been given a part in a play that was shortly to begin its run in the West End. Whale had told Sherriff beforehand to take notes if he wanted, but otherwise to sit and say nothing – it was important that their instructions came only from the director. If Sherriff had issues with how Whale was handling things, they could discuss them together later, in private. Sherriff had nothing to say – nor did he even take any notes – but from then on in the theatre he was mindful of the importance of clear communication and direction, and that writers should avoid getting between producers and their actors.54
Even at the first read-through, Sherriff was confident in his cast: ‘as the reading went on it came over beyond a doubt that the team had been perfectly chosen. None had any need to act the parts: they were the men: they merely had to be themselves.’55 Maurice Evans agreed: ‘it became obvious at the play’s first reading that an ideal cast had been assembled by sheer chance.’56 Perhaps not quite by chance. Robert Speaight found himself ‘deeply impressed by the script’,57 and maybe the others, too, felt they might be taking part in something a little out of the ordinary, however uncommercial it might have been deemed to be.
After the first reading, Sherriff went back to Whale’s rooms and together they worked on the script. ‘The cuts and alterations turned out to be very small,’ he wrote, ‘[and] the play went on practically as it was first written.’ Maurice Evans disagrees, however: ‘It only remained for the script to be given the blue-pencil treatment – pretty ruthless cutting in which I took a hand.’58 Given Evans’s relative lack of experience – especially among such a band of grizzled war veterans – it is unlikely he had much of a say in shaping the script, but it is likely that some cuts were made, to trim the running time and quicken the pace of the play. Then it was simply a round of rehearsals, mostly ‘in rooms with the dugout boundaries marked out in chalk on the floor’. Sherriff, however, was unable to attend: he was not (yet) a theatre man, just an insurance man, with duties to perform and his patch to cover.
The Sunday night societies ran their productions on a wing and a prayer. They would take place in theatres that were already running their own productions, so the actors had almost no time to act with their own scenery – usually just a few hours on the day of the first performance, which was also when the sound effects (so important for Journey’s End) could be tried out for the first time. Funds were tight: the cost of ‘building and painting the dugout came to £80’, and uniforms were borrowed where possible. Some of the cast members wore their own old army uniforms (that would work for Zucco and Cooper, both of whom had been lieutenants); Field wore his old puttees; and Sherriff lent his tunic and Sam Browne belt to Olivier, noting modestly that, while his captain’s tunic was appropriate for Stanhope, ‘the MC ribbon had to be sewn on.’59
After a couple of weeks of rehearsals, Journey’s End received its premiere at the Apollo Theatre, on Sunday, 9 December 1928. Sherriff recorded in his autobiography that ‘the only clear memory of the first performance that Sunday night is of the endless stream of perspiration that had to be mopped off from around a stiff uncomfortable evening dress collar.’60 He went along with his mother, his father proudly noting in his diary: ‘Bob’s play Journey’s End performed at the Apollo Theatre London – so at last he has a play on the London stage.’61 Sherriff recounts a feverish evening, prowling around the theatre, unable to keep still, haunted by anxiety: would the performance be up to snuff, would the audience appreciate it? In the end he wrote that he was disappointed in the play’s reception, underwhelmed by the ‘polite and formal’ applause.62
But again, we should not take his memoir at face value. He does like to set up a story arc, and for every triumph there has to be an agonising journey towards it. In fact, we know that the play went down very well indeed. ‘It became apparent on the first night,’ wrote Albert Curtis Brown, ‘that here was a great play, and one that had commercial possibilities, too.’63 At the interval he was buttonholed by Victor Gollancz: ‘Victor saw the performance, and was so impressed that he told Sherriff in the interval that he wanted to publish it.’64 We also know that Maurice Browne first became aware of the play65 when he was phoned at midnight on Sunday by Harold Monro66 (and told, ‘hazily’), ‘that he had just returned from a wonderful, a perfectly wonderful play: it was the most wonderful play ever written; I must put it on at once.’
There was also the very famous West End manager Basil Dean. Having already lined up Olivier for Beau Geste, he took along his co-star in the production, Madeleine Carroll.67 Dean was bowled over. In 1973 he wrote:
The memory of that Sunday night performance is still vivid … I was completely overcome by the play – its humour, its drama and its emotion all expressed in terms of the utmost sincerity. Immediately the curtain fell I … scampered up the dressing-room stairs as though half the managers in London were at my heels. I was introduced to the author by David Horne. I said the production must be transferred, just as it was, cast, scenery, etc., without alteration of any kind.68
Even Sherriff ’s father knew the result of that evening: ‘From all accounts it appeared to have been quite a success and there appears to be a very probable production at a London theatre in due time.’69 There can be no doubt that, before he went to bed that night (while he was scrambling eggs with his mother),70 he knew what a success he had on his hands.
The critics were out in force at the Apollo for the Monday matinee: George Bishop of The Era, W.A. (Bill) Darlington of The Telegraph, Charles Morgan of The Times, Hannen Swaffer of the Express: Sherriff must have been awed and terrified at the same time (hardly crediting that he would go on to be very good friends with several of them). One of the main critics of the time – James Agate, who worked for the BBC – had not been disposed to go. He had missed the first act, ‘after his usual late lunch’, when he bumped into Bishop on the pavement outside the Apollo. ‘He asked me, “What piece of highbrow nonsense” was being played? My enthusiasm induced him to see the two remaining acts and at the end he was as excited as I was.’71
Agate was the first of the critics to make his views known, broadcasting on the BBC that very night. In fact, he had already prepared a script about another show that he proceeded to tear up, substituting for it a paean of praise to the play:
Less than three hours ago the curtain fell on the Stage Society’s production of a play called Journey’s End, and I have to say that since I have had the honour to be your dramatic critic I have not been present at any performance which has stirred an audience so deeply. … I cannot believe that there was any single member of the audience this afternoon who was not only deeply moved but also exalted and even exhilarated by this tragedy.72
And he had words for those who would argue that they simply wanted to be interested and amused at the theatre:
I have seen no audience more deeply interested than was the audience this afternoon. Nor have I often heard more laughter. There was a cook-batman in this play whose every appearance … brought down the house. The piece was wonderfully well played by a company of … fine young actors.
Sherriff ’s dad was listening in:
Bob’s play Journey’s End performed again at the Apollo. Mr Agate the dramatic critic on the wireless tonight gave a most flattering account of the play – in fact he could not have spoken better of it. Says it is too good for the public taste who only require revues, musical comedies or farcical comedies.73
The rest of the critics pronounced the next morning and they were well nigh unanimous. ‘War Play better than Havoc’, roared Hubert Griffith in the Evening Standard.74 Bill Darlington in The Telegraph called it the most realistic play about the war that we have seen: ‘Every man in the … audiences which saw Journey’s End … who had ever inhabited a dugout on the Western Front must have felt almost intolerably moved as the once familiar atmosphere stung his throat.’75 The Manchester Guardian called it ‘the best play about the war that has been written. The power and passion and tragedy of it all make it one of the fine plays of the time.’76 The Daily Mail reckoned it ‘is in some ways the most cruelly realistic of the many war plays. The author … has no direct story to tell; no heroics to appeal to cheap emotions. Nor are there scenes of gore. Instead he presents a study of temperament and an analysis of fear.’77
Almost all of the other dailies, and the weeklies, fell in line. The only slight exception was the great Charles Morgan in The Times, who refused to recognise the play as a work of art. ‘Mr Sherriff ’s study of the front line, though it comes as near as the stage may ever come to precise representation of life in a dugout, is not a work of art with any prospect of endurance.’78 (So much for his powers as a prognosticator!) He nevertheless argued that the play’s substance was in an ‘aggregate of portraits’, and proceeded to spell out the main features of all the principal characters, before praising the performances of the actors to a man: H.G. Stoker’s ‘quiet authenticity’ as the colonel; George Zucco’s ‘beautiful impression of character and the background of character’, whose Lieutenant Osborne ‘towered above the others’. He also commended Laurence Olivier’s ‘extremely able’ Stanhope, and noted that Robert Speaight (Hibbert) and Maurice Evans (Raleigh) controlled their emotions ‘admirably’, while ‘splashing their colour now and then’. Field (Mason), Cooper (Trotter) and Walsh (the sergeant major) discharged their ‘plainer tasks’ with ‘judgment and humour’. Other papers chose to elevate some of the actors over others: some relished the more theatrical performances of the three younger men, while others (especially Darlington) valued the ‘studied and deliberate unemotionalism’ of the older actors, a divide apparently drawn up between those who had lived through it, and those who had not. Anchoring every review was praise for James Whale’s set and direction – and the critics were not alone in that: Basil Dean had offered him a job as his assistant as soon as he saw him after the opening night performance.79
According to Basil Dean, following his enthusiastic endorsement of the play on the Sunday night, Sherriff ‘stalked me down the side of the stalls during a Pickwick rehearsal.’80 Sherriff followed this up by writing to him the next day, drawing the glowing reviews to his attention. ‘I hope you consider the play worth trying,’ he wrote, ‘as I should so much like the production to be in your hands.’81 But Dean was not yet able to commit to a production, being financially somewhat over-exposed because of involvements in both Pickwick and Beau Geste, so he replied the next day, pleading for time:
I would like to make immediate arrangements for its production, but in the present state of public uncertainty, I feel I must hold my hand until we know what is going to happen. Royal demise is always a most unsettling factor in the theatre in this country.82
The issue of ‘royal demise’ was on everyone’s mind, since the King (George V) had been seriously ill with septicaemia since November (and it was obviously one that occurred to Sherriff as well: in No Leading Lady he attributed the initial success of Journey’s End at the Savoy to the announcement, some weeks later, of the King’s recovery)83. But even leaving that aside, Dean was struggling to raise the cash. He had hoped that David Horne might be able to persuade his father to help, but that turned out to be a dead end; nor would his partners in the Beau Geste production prove willing to help. Unwilling to go it alone, he pulled out.
In the absence of any commercial offers, the cast were despondent:
normally, at the end of a play’s run, there is a closing-night party to which the actors hie themselves. … Not so in our case, however. We just stood around on the stage, a forlorn cast of actors, watching the stagehands tear down our scenery … to be hauled off to some warehouse, never, we thought, to be seen again.84
But they were united in their belief in the play, and Evans, having turned down Dean’s offer of a part alongside Olivier in Beau Geste, sought to enlist the support of the other Journey’s End actors to raise enough money for their own production. He was at that point under contract to Leon M. Lion (a well-known playwright, actor and theatre manager), who was in charge of the Wyndham’s Theatre, and since the theatre was dark, Evans cheekily asked if he might rent it for a short while to judge the commercial potential of the play. Lion agreed, but even with this backing, and additional help from others, the actors came up a couple of hundred pounds short of their goal, ‘at which time,’ wrote Evans, ‘we lost heart and gave up the whole idea.’85
Agate had said, in his talk, that he had spoken to three of the best-known managers in London, and they had no confidence that the play could be put on and make money, because they doubted the willingness of the public to attend.
How can there be anything wrong with a theatre which can produce and act plays like this one this afternoon? The answer is that there is never anything wrong with the theatre. The wrong lies entirely with the public which will not support good plays and has a taste only for the bare knees of musical comedy. … It is the public’s fault if it is deprived of work of extraordinary quality and interest.86
All was not yet lost, however, for George Bishop had been busy. By his own account, after the Monday matinee performance he had ‘scoured the West End’ looking for Maurice Browne, a man with wealthy backers who, he knew, was currently in search of a production. Bishop ran him down at the Arts Theatre and ‘told him I had found … the perfect play with which he could start his London management.’87
Maurice Browne was forty-seven years old and had made an interesting way through life. His father had been a successful headmaster, but had killed himself when Browne was just thirteen. He had been to Winchester for a time, served in the Army in the Boer War, and studied at Cambridge with Harold Monro, who married Browne’s sister. In Italy in 1910, he fell for a young woman called Ellen van Volkenburg (known to her friends as Nellie Van), and followed her to the United States, where, without much money, the two established their Chicago Little Theatre, a home for avant-garde theatre, and part of the beginnings of the American Little Theatre movement. But war and economics closed the theatre, and they divorced before Browne returned to England, alone and penniless.
In the 1920s, however, things began to look up, as Browne became production manager at Bronson Albery’s newly founded Arts Theatre. He also began to write for, and act upon, the London stage, most notably acting the part of the soldier in The Unknown Warrior earlier in 1928, in a production directed by Nellie Van at the Wyndham’s. At the request of philanthropists Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst,88 some special performances of the play were given at Dartington Hall in Devon in 1928. Before the play packed up, according to Leonard Elmhirst, ‘we said to Browne, “if he did ever come across some play of such interest as The Unknown Warrior, we might be interested in it, or in helping with it.”’89 At some point after his late night phone call from Monro, Browne got in touch with the Elmhirsts to tell them that he had just found such a play.
At about this juncture the story becomes a little muddled: we know that Maurice Browne eventually acquired the rights to the play, but there are three competing accounts as to how he got them. Sherriff ’s, inevitably, is the most romantic (but his dates are hopelessly wrong)90; Browne’s is the most entertaining (but the picture he paints of Sherriff and Whale is wildly implausible, although funny)91; Bishop’s (backed up by Dean and Elmhirst) is easily the most reliable.
Bishop’s account tells us that, after they had met outside the Arts Theatre, Browne asked Bishop if he knew where he could obtain a copy of the play. Bishop knew that Basil Dean had been making enquiries, and so he went to Dean’s office, only to be told that ‘he had taken no definite steps to acquire the play’.92 Shortly afterwards, Curtis Brown was on the phone to Dean to ask him what he knew about Browne, who had apparently given Dean as a reference: ‘Was he a reliable person to whom a contract for Journey’s End could be safely entrusted?’93 Dean replied in the affirmative. The next day, Bishop obtained a copy of the play from Curtis Brown’s office, and gave it to Browne to take down to the Elmhirsts in Devon. We know from Elmhirst that Browne went to Dartington Hall on 15 December94 to read the play to them. They liked it very much, and asked Browne how much it would cost to stage, and, ‘if not a soul goes to the play’, how much ‘down the drain’ they would be. The answer was £2,000 – so they agreed to fund it, leaving Browne to find a theatre and deal with the production details.
He returned promptly and went to Curtis Brown to buy the option to produce. Browne wrote that Sherriff ’s agents were ‘as friendly as a Chicago blizzard’ (unsurprising, perhaps, given the reputation that Browne appeared to have in London theatre land).95 But he came away with an option in his pocket.96
There was, however, one snag. Browne’s option stipulated that, within ten days, he had to engage a cast and director, and secure a West End theatre where the play would have to open within four weeks. ‘Those ten days included Christmas Day, Boxing Day, a Sunday, and New Year’s Day.’97 Clearly, James Whale was already on board, and all of the cast – bar Olivier – were willing to sign on. And with the offer of four theatres within thirty-six hours, the only issue left to settle was the name of the final cast member: just who would play the part of Stanhope?
Here, again, the story gets a little murky. Sherriff acknowledged that he and James Whale searched far and wide for someone suitable, but to no avail. Maurice Browne commented that they ‘could “see” no one else in the part; they turned down every applicant, vetoed every suggestion.’98 But then, the lessor of the Savoy told him about a young man, who had ‘never played in the West End’, but who would be perfect for the part. His name was Colin Clive.
Colin Clive-Greig was born in France in 1900, son of an English colonel, and a mother who came from the famous Clive (of India) family. He attended Stonyhurst College, and then went to Sandhurst. Although he was just old enough to have fought in the war, he was prevented from doing so by a knee injury. He became an actor in the 1920s, beginning in the provinces, but he eventually moved up to London, where he had been acting in the West End: in 1928, he featured in Kern & Hammerstein’s Show Boat (as Steve, the husband of the Boat’s leading lady, Julie), which was a big hit at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane – although it’s probably fair to say that this owed rather more to Paul Robeson’s debut in the part of Joe (and perhaps to Cedric Hardwicke) than it did to Clive.
Maurice Evans disputes Browne’s account of the ‘discovery’ of Clive, claiming that, when he and the other actors were thinking of financing Journey’s End, he had been tipped off about Clive by Jeanne de Casalis, an actress friend of his, who was Clive’s girlfriend.99 So sure was Evans of Clive’s ability to play the part – ‘his accent, his military bearing, his whisky voice were exactly what the part required’100 – that he made it a condition of his continued involvement that Clive would get the part. Not only that, but he spent a week rehearsing with Clive before he was interviewed, to make sure that he gave Whale exactly what he was looking for.
Clive came to interview on New Year’s Eve, 1928. Sherriff wrote, in a newspaper article ‘introducing’ Clive (in November 1930, when Clive had already made his name in both London and Hollywood), that he had come to the interview more casually dressed than the other actors (‘I’d only just arrived from the country when your call came,’ explained Clive), and that ‘he had not read as well as some of the others, but there was something beneath his reading that we had not heard before. It is not always the actor who gives the best first reading who achieves the finest performance on the first night.’101
The decision on that showing appears to have been a toss-up between Clive and his main rival, a young man named Colin Keith-Johnston, who had been through the war, and won an MC into the bargain – the very embodiment of Stanhope, it would seem. As to which way round the voting went, we are rather in the dark. Sherriff says that he and Whale tried to persuade Browne that they should take Clive over Keith-Johnston102; Browne, on the other hand, swears that it was he who favoured Clive, against the strong objections of Whale and Sherriff. (‘My only contribution to Journey’s End was Colin Clive,’ he said.)103 Whichever way the votes stacked up, on that evening Sherriff suggests that it was someone else who had the effective casting vote – namely, Maurice Evans, whose opinion was the most important, since Raleigh and Stanhope had so many scenes together. When asked which actor he thought was most suited to the part, Evans replied: ‘“Keith-Johnston’s got it here” (pointing to his forehead) – “but Clive’s got it here,” (pointing to his heart).’104 So Clive it was, and given that Evans had been rehearsing with him for a week, the decision was hardly likely to go any other way.
With Stanhope cast, Browne had delivered on the terms of his option. There was now nothing to stop the play going ahead, and on 7 January 1929, the contract between Sherriff and Browne was officially signed.105 For a £75 advance, Browne was granted the British Empire rights (excluding Canada), and he agreed to produce the play ‘in a first-class manner in a first-class theatre in the West End of London within three months’ or he would forfeit his rights. Royalties were pegged at 5 per cent of gross receipts up to £1,000 per week, and at 10 per cent on receipts between £1,000 and £1,500 a week. If the play hit the jackpot and grossed over £1,500 per week, Sherriff would be paid 10 per cent of everything. There were three other important clauses:
Sherriff retained publication rights and amateur rights;
Browne had the option to acquire the US (and Canada) rights, on the same terms as in the UK, if he exercised the option within six weeks of the play’s first performance;
Browne was entitled to 40 per cent of the film rights.
On the very same day, James Agate did yet another radio talk on the subject of Journey’s End. He started by insulting the audience – again: ‘I remember telling you all that none of you would have the chance of seeing this play performed because, quite frankly, experience had shown that as playgoers you weren’t worth it.’ But he had good news, too. The audience now had the chance to demonstrate that it did have the desire to see good plays, for Maurice Browne would be producing Journey’s End at the Savoy Theatre on Monday, 21 January; he had also taken a five-month tenancy at the Savoy (after which the theatre would be rebuilt)106; and he would then take another theatre, for an even longer period, at which he intended to run a permanent company. If the audience were at all interested in watching good drama, they should go at once. If they did, promised Agate, they would have the extreme satisfaction of proving him wrong.
So the news was now out: Journey’s End would have its West End debut, and soon. There would be no change in the set, or in the director, and – apart from Percy Walsh (the sergeant major) who dropped out, to be replaced by Reginald Smith (another veteran of the war) – no change in the main cast, despite Maurice Browne’s interest in playing Uncle.107 According to Sherriff, that was quite a stroke of luck, for although Browne ‘was all right with Euripides’, he was not the man for a ‘down-to-earth play that stood or fell upon its realism’.108
Clive had three weeks from getting the part to playing it on a West End stage, at what would surely be one of the theatrical events of the year. It must have been especially nerve-wracking to be parachuted into a company that already knew the play so well. If we take Maurice Evans at his word (and he and Clive had already rehearsed some of their scenes), that might have eased the pressure a little, although even with that help his reading had been sketchy. Everyone needed him to take possession of the role, but after the first week of rehearsals he was still struggling badly. He apologised to Sherriff, telling him that he ‘had always been slow in getting hold of a part’,109 and this was particularly so in this case, when he was straining to catch up with the others. It was at this point that Sherriff made what he modestly claimed was his ‘most useful contribution to the production’ – namely, encouraging Clive to take a drink or two before the afternoon rehearsal, to relieve the anxiety that was bottling up his performance. Clive duly did so, and returned a changed man. ‘He took command of the rehearsal,’ wrote Sherriff, ‘as Stanhope had commanded the company.’110
While rehearsals were under way, there was time for some further adjustment to the script. Some of the critics at the Apollo performances had drawn attention to some lines that sounded out of place, and Sherriff and Whale themselves were perfectionist enough to have some views of their own as to how the play had worked on its first two outings. Some changes had probably already been made before the ISS production, but from the versions currently available, it is clear that there was some further tinkering before the Savoy premiere.
There are three early versions of the Journey’s End script, which differ from the present text. The earliest version is in the Imperial War Museum, where it was deposited in 1929 by Sir Walter Lawrence, having purchased the manuscript for £1,500 at the 10th Anniversary dinner of the League of Nations Union at the Guildhall in London, on 14 November that year. This manuscript is not, unfortunately, a typed and bound one: the papers are a jumbled assortment of handwritten and typewritten pages,111 with no numbering sequence.
The other two versions are very similar, and thankfully, both typewritten and sequential. One is in Sherriff ’s own papers at the Surrey History Centre (SHC),112 and the other is in the Victoria and Albert Museum Theatre and Performance Archive113: to all intents and purposes, they are identical, except that the former is missing some pages towards the end.114 We can regard these as the original script, and they differ in a number of ways from the version we know today. But the question is: when did the changes from the original come about?
As we have already seen, Sherriff said that very few changes were made before the Apollo Theatre performances, but Maurice Evans disagrees. Maurice Browne appears to side more with Sherriff: after the play opened at the Savoy he commended Whale, who had done ‘a magnificent production, and … some very wise cutting’,115 thus suggesting that the cutting had come after the ISS performances. On balance, it seems likely that there were cuts made both before and after those performances. Some of the changes seem to have been made solely on the grounds of length, and one imagines these being made early on in the process, to speed up the action. But the other changes are subtler in their impact, affecting the tone of the play, and altering the portrayal of the characters; these seem more likely to have been made in the light of experience, and following comments made after the initial production.116
There is one change that we know for sure came after the performance, since one line was identified, in a review of the performance at the Apollo, as almost the only false note in the play.117 When Osborne tells Raleigh that he once played rugger for England, Raleigh replies, ‘How topping – to have played for England!’, to which Osborne then says (in the original), ‘You’re playing for England now.’ Always mindful of critics’ comments, Sherriff changed Osborne’s response to ‘Well, aren’t you, now?’ in time for the Gollancz first edition of the published play. But sometime later he changed it again, to its present incarnation (p.42): ‘It was rather fun.’ As ever, he was very willing (eager, almost) to make changes where he felt they would improve the play, or its reception.
On the whole, the changes do not make a huge difference to the play, but there is no doubt that the tone is affected by even quite innocuous alterations, especially where the character of Stanhope is concerned. The acid test, however, would be the critics. Having been at the Apollo, how would they regard the revised version of the play: would they look at it differently, or would they not even notice that the changes had been made?
The play was due to begin at the Savoy Theatre at 8.30 pm on Monday, 21 January. In fact, the curtain went up a little late, revealing David Horne on stage as Captain Hardy, drying his sock over a candle, just as Douglass had done, in real life, some twelve years earlier. Sherriff was there with his mother, sister and brother-in-law118 (munching egg sandwiches and drinking whisky and soda), no doubt feeling a little skittish, since the dress rehearsal had not gone well. The rickety sound effects, which had worked satisfactorily at the Apollo, had to be upgraded for the much bigger Savoy, and the dress rehearsal had been punctuated with the ill-timed sounds of war. The rehearsal had gone on until midnight on Sunday, with further rehearsals for lighting and effects on Monday morning, and another run-through on Monday afternoon. Sherriff was convinced on his way to the theatre that the performance would be a disaster, and the play would go down in flames. His nerves can’t have been helped by the glittering crowd – a host of well-known names from the theatre world (including the Elmhirsts themselves) and the military.
There were cheers when the first act curtain came down, and Sherriff found himself in a crowd of well-wishers, keeping his fingers crossed that the evening hadn’t been jinxed, since there were several tricky passages in the play still to be navigated. But none of the disasters he feared came about, and eventually the curtain came down. There was silence in the crowd, and when the curtain rose again it did so only briefly, showing ‘twelve figures clad in uniform, standing stiffly at attention and dimly seen against a darkness amid the swirl of smoke’, according to Maurice Browne.119 This, Browne felt, was his second contribution to the play (after the casting of Colin Clive): against the objections of some of the actors, he (backed up by author and director) argued that the impersonality of that final tableau reinforced their wartime theme. Then the curtain rose again – whether prompted by a solitary ‘Bravo’ in the crowd (Sherriff ’s version), or by the applause of the actors behind the curtain (Maurice Evans’s version) is unimportant, for the next time the curtain rose the applause was deafening, and so it remained as the various actors took their bows. When, at last, the crowd had exhausted its expression of appreciation, Sherriff gave a speech – thanking Maurice Browne among others – and then called on Whale to say a few words as well. And then for Sherriff it was home to bed, to await the next morning’s papers.
The reviews were stunning – and unanimous.120 If anything, the critics felt the play was even better than they had thought before. ‘Greatest of all War Plays’ thundered the fearsome Hannan Swaffer in the Express; ‘How Like it All Is’, declared The Times; ‘Stirring New War Play; Trench Life Truly Depicted’, wrote the Telegraph’s Bill Darlington, who was only just recovering from the jolt to his memories that he had received at the Apollo. Different newspapers deployed different adjectives, but the content was much the same: ‘Impressive’ (Daily News), ‘Fine’ (Daily Mirror and Daily Herald), ‘Best War Play’ (Evening News), ‘Triumph’ (Evening Standard) … there was not a single negative note.
There was consensus on the verisimilitude of the play. The Evening Standard review noted:
The effect of [the play’s] actuality must have had, on all that part of the audience that had experience and memory, the effect of something entirely physical – relief, from the soles of their feet upwards, that what they saw was ‘only a play’, relief that their boots were not wet and their clothes muddy, that their heads no longer wore shrapnel helmets, and that it would not be their own turn in a few minutes to go up those steps at the back of the stage into the dawn of 21 March 1918.
In the Daily Chronicle, J.B. Priestley (who knew something of war himself) wrote that this was:
The war as the fighting man knew it – ‘the line’ as it really was – this is presented in stark, harrowing reality in Journeys End. … Real talk. Real emotion. Real men. Mixtures of good and bad, of bravery and cowardice, of saint and sinner, like your neighbour in the auditorium.
Hannan Swaffer in the Express wrote that ‘There is no shirking the facts; there is no concession to fashion. The author has set down what he has seen,’ while the Daily Mirror noted that ‘it shows life at the front, with an unemotional realism which is a much better argument against war than sentimental propaganda plays.’121 Priestley was of the view that the play ‘could and should be translated into the language of every ex-ally and ex-enemy. It is the strongest plea for peace I know.’ Sherriff would answer him the very next day in the Express by stressing that ‘I have not written this play as a piece of propaganda. And certainly not as propaganda for peace,’ but the tussle over the play’s anti-war credentials (or lack of them) would rumble on for months (indeed, to some extent it does so still, despite Sherriff ’s protestations).
There was a generally accepted view that the play was not just an authentic account of a moment in the trenches, but also worked as great drama. It was not, however, viewed as great art. But Darlington did not see that as a criticism:
This play is not a great play, for the very excellent reason that it does not aim at being a great play; but that within its limits it is, humanly speaking, perfect. … A great play about the war must deal with the question: ‘What does war mean?’ … Mr Sherriff, on the other hand, set out to answer quite a different and less fundamental question, ‘What was our war like?’ He has answered that question as fully as any man could within the compass of a play in three acts and a single setting.
The Times, too, agreed that the play was not high art, but seemed to feel that it ought to be:
We do not feel that we have been admitted by art into any individual mood or quality of awe so felt by the author in the presence of his material as to convey the sense of universality through his play. The sweep and gathering force of tragedy are wanting in the faithful and unsentimental account of the conditions of war. … Mr Sherriff has written an exciting play, but he has not made the wonder and the awe felt in the war articulate to ourselves or to others.
Interestingly, a few days later, The Sunday Times122 reviewer took his stablemate to task:
It is not obvious that all this sweeping and gathering could be present only on condition that faithfulness departed. … Surely every work of art is to be judged according to its success or failure in achieving what it sets out to do. It seems to me that Mr Sherriff has succeeded perfectly. Journey’s End is a realistic play, and a realistic play is to be judged by its realism.
All in all, the production was viewed as an improvement on even the high standards set at the Apollo, with some of the script changes noted approvingly, together with the enhanced sound effects. Across the board there were commendations for the acting and the characterisation. The Evening News noted that men in the interval were comparing the characters to men they had known in the trenches. And for the reviewers at the Savoy, much of the credit for that went to the actors: ‘Excellent Acting’ (The Morning Post), ‘Very well acted’ (Daily Herald), ‘The acting is even better than before’ (The Telegraph). Of course, one of the big questions about the acting was whether Colin Clive would prove an adequate replacement for Olivier – again the answer was unanimous. Darlington was the most complimentary of the bunch:
Mr Colin Clive … scores a personal triumph. [Stanhope] was played at the first performance on lines that suggested the theatre rather than life. Mr Clive corrects all this, with the result that his one big outburst, when Stanhope does at last give way to his grief over Osborne’s death, gains enormously in power.
On the Monday evening, Sherriff ’s father wrote in his diary123:
Journey’s End (Bob’s war play) produced at the Savoy Theatre. To have a play put on the London stage must be quite a notable event in our ordinary everyday family – what it may lead to is full of promise and possibilities.
Even surveying the reviews in the papers the next day, none of the family would have had any idea of how their lives would be upended by Journey’s End’s extraordinary triumph.