Missing Presumed Dull
I haven’t tried in this book to tell the story of Sherriff’s writing career after Journey’s End. But he very nearly gave up the theatre. Sherriff was convinced after the flop of his next play, Badger’s Green, that his great hit was a fluke. He would become a schoolmaster and that required him to get a degree. He eventually got an offer, aged thirty-four, to study at New College, Oxford where H. A. L. Fisher was Warden.
Sherriff took his mother with him and they rather sweetly rented a house together and she cooked and shopped while he studied and rowed. He found the swotting difficult. He was offered a chance to go to Hollywood and took it, James Whale having invited him over to write the screenplay for The Invisible Man, produced by Universal. Sherriff returned to Oxford briefly but he left without a degree for a life of writing. He adapted Galsworthy’s Over the River (1934) with Colin Clive and A. E. W. Mason’s The Four Feathers for Alexander Korda. Charles Laughton introduced Sherriff to the book Goodbye, Mr Chips by James Hilton but Laughton lost the part to Robert Donat who won an Oscar for it. It was the most Sherriff-like of his screenplays, a sentimental tale set in a private school. Its great weepie moment is when Chips, during the First World War, announces the roll call of the dead in the school chapel, which includes a former pupil (John Mills) and also the German master (Paul Henreid), killed fighting with the Saxon Regiment. It’s a magical film, as absorbing as it is sentimental and it even came with a civilised message that not all Germans were ‘stinkers’ at a time when Britain was bracing itself for another war.
These films gave Sherriff the confidence to return to the stage with a play about St Helena, about Napoleon in captivity, panned by critics. It put Sherriff off stage-writing for twelve more years. The most significant of his later dramas was Miss Mabel (it starred Lillian Gish in America) in 1948 and Home at Seven (1950), a mystery play (a man ‘loses’ twenty-four hours of his life) and a touring vehicle for Ralph Richardson.
Sherriff vanished from view. In his autobiography he made a mild complaint about being swept away by the Angry Young Men of the Fifties (a common moan among his generation of writers) but his neglect seemed to have caused him no great anguish. He always lived slightly in the past and was happiest when below the radar. Sherriff’s two 1955 films The Night My Number Came Up and The Dam Busters were his last.
Post-Second World War Journey’s End became neglected. It is a myth that the play was constantly revived. There was a modest West End production at the Westminster Theatre in 1950, poorly received by critics although endorsed by Montgomery of Alamein in the letters page of The Times. But in 1972 a new version reclaimed the play. It was staged by 69 Theatre Company and was directed by Eric Thompson, Emma Thompson’s father, at the Mermaid in London before moving to the Cambridge Theatre. It was a big hit. As Stanhope, Peter Egan won Best Actor for the London Theatre Critics Awards and, just as Olivier had, he wore Sherriff’s tunic. None of the cast met Sherriff for a discussion about the play. The late James Maxwell played Osborne. He was by all accounts superb as the natural peacemaker who finds himself at war. The show had the future film director Bruce Robinson as Hibbert (Journey’s End is alluded to at the end of his film Withnail and I) and Harry Landis as Mason.
It was reviewed with renewed admiration, most critics respectfully treating the play as a still serviceable, well-constructed piece of sturdy furniture. In The New Statesman Benedict Nightingale clobbered the idea that the play was an exposé of the war and that to depict it as such ‘was to do so without the consent of the author’.66 It was the first time anyone had challenged the critical consensus that it was anti-war. ‘Sherriff constructed Journey’s End out of letters he had written from the front...you feel you are hearing a man who has it all branded into his heart,’ wrote Nightingale. The one celebrity dissenter in the audience was Kenneth Williams who wrote in his diary that it was ‘reppy, uninspired pedestrian muck’67 and that the director would be best advised ‘to stick it up his arse.’
The general view however, was, that it was a memorial of a play not so much revived as revisited. It went on gathering lichen for another thirty years. There was, however, an enjoyable film version directed by Jack Gold in 1976. The airborne version of Journey’s End, in which Gielgud played the Headmaster who exhorted the boys ‘to play up and play the game.’ (I was a £3 a day schoolboy extra on the film and its star Malcolm McDowell – playing the Stanhope part – signed my football shirt!) Its scriptwriter Howard Barker followed the plot of the play quite closely but the film has the long-haired feel of the mid-Seventies – it strafes the Establishment, skewers the juvenility of the officer’s mess, introduces a note of lechery and exposes the top brass for not allowing the pilots parachutes on the grounds they would undermine fighting spirit.
The play had had just the occasional London outing since 1972. It opened at the Whitehall Theatre in 1988 with the twenty-five-year-old Jason Connery (son of Sean) making his West End debut as Stanhope and with Nicky Henson as Osborne. The show was a commercial venture and it caught some of the glamour of the original. The dugout collapsed in a coup at the end. The production was conceived as a period piece and was very much a star vehicle for Jason Connery then at the height of his fame as a hugely popular Robin Hood on TV.
Then, in 1998, there was a much sharper, small-scale revival at the King’s Head Theatre in London, directed by David Evans Rees, in which Sam West caught the spirit of Stanhope with a very thin moustache and equally clipped tones. Miles Richardson played Osborne. It was impeccably acted and admiringly reviewed, but the show – which bizarrely cut the famous pre-raid recitation of Lewis Carroll – left room for a more expansive look at what Sherriff had actually written. But essentially Journey’s End got its new lease of life only recently – and that through an upswing of interest in the Great War created by the internet. This is partly thanks to family ancestry websites and easy online access to war records and graves (the Commonwealth War Graves Commission has its own search engine) which make tracking down relatives who fought much easier. Tours of the battlefields and cemeteries of the Western Front are now hugely popular.
The Great War was very much in the ether when Journey’s End opened in 2004. It came at just the right time, as hits tend to do. It was such a success that in London its longevity echoed the original show; a provisional eight-week run became eighteen months in the West End with several changes of cast. The same production was most recently revived in 2011 for a long national tour and a further return to the West End. It was directed by David Grindley, who had been an assistant at the Chichester Festival Theatre where he worked alongside fifteen different directors, taking over the running of Minerva studio theatre in the wake of Sam Mendes. His big hit as a director was Joe Orton’s Loot (it transferred to the West End) that in turn led in 2002 to the hit revival of Mike Leigh’s famous Abigail’s Party, which Grindley directed. His Journey’s End came out of a notion that the producer Phil Cameron had to stage it in tandem with Another Country, Julian Mitchell’s 1981 play based partly on the Eton schooldays of the Soviet spy Guy Burgess. The idea was to restage both plays as part of a ‘Lost Generation’ season, which, had it come off, would have been an interesting idea, as the public school system that had provided leadership in the trenches had become by the late Twenties a cradle of treachery. In a short twelve-minute conversation (dictated by a West End parking meter) Grindley convinced his producer he could do the definitive production (a boast he immediately regretted) and was taken on. He used the same team on Journey’s End as he had on Abigail’s Party: namely, Jonathan Fensom (design), Jason Taylor (lighting), Gregory Clarke (sound) and Majella Hurley (dialect coach). That quintet would later be reunited in 2012 on another show – Jonathan Lewis’s Our Boys, a modern army play set on a Woolwich hospital ward full of wounded soldiers.
Grindley, the son of an engineer, has no close family connection with soldiering. But his connection with Journey’s End was a very personal one all the same. He was introduced to it by his younger brother Michael (who died at the age of nineteen) who had loved the play at school. One of the reasons Grindley’s version worked so well was his determination to put himself and the cast entirely at Sherriff’s service and not the other way round. His goal was to get to the heart of the thing based on the belief that the play was about a lived experience. He aimed to get the show to open on the exact 75th anniversary of the show’s first night in 21 January 1929. Grindley insisted they had to make a feature of that anniversary and also that he had to have control over the casting of Stanhope and Raleigh. ‘Ordinarily you would have stars in these parts. But I wanted those two boys to be believably 18 and 21.’ He auditioned virtually an entire generation of promising young male talent. ‘I couldn’t choose between the top two candidates for Stanhope – Geoffrey Streatfeild and Benedict Cumberbatch. Both had been at Manchester University, Geoff had directed Ben in something there so they were very aware of each other. Even though it was a period piece I wanted to make this world in the trenches have an emotional honesty and that would be contemporary and true to the experience. Anyway in the end Geoff got the role after I made him do the revolver scene with Hibbert. He was just tremendous.’
It may have helped a tiny bit that Streatfeild really knew about the army. His brother, Major Richard Streatfeild, is a professional soldier who commanded A Company 4 Rifles with Battlegroup North in Helmand. From there he dictated a series of moving dispatches in his ‘Afghan Front Line Diary’ for the Today programme. A keen blogger, this is what he wrote about his job: ‘My personal leadership maxim is a Marxian one: from each according to his ability; to each according to his need. I try to treat everyone equally by treating them all differently. What I know for sure is that if ever things are a little difficult, and there have been a few of those days, I look no further than Riflemen. Common sense, a bit of humour and to be trusted by them to make the right decision despite the associated risks has inspired me.’ Except for the reference to Marx, any serving officer at the Western Front would have instantly recognised his style.
David Haig, a big hitter, was next brought in as Osborne. Haig’s connection to the play was very deep. Like Osborne, he was a family man. He had been to Rugby and his father (who left the army to run the Hayward Gallery) and grandfather (he won the DSO in the First World War) were both officers. He is also distantly related on his grandmother’s side to Field Marshal Haig. David had written a tender play about Kipling’s search for his missing son called My Boy Jack in which he played Kipling (later filmed with Daniel Radcliffe as his son). Haig’s trademark moustache and demeanour (‘a woeful face that sums up the bemused tragedy of 20th century militarism,’ wrote Aleks Sierz in Tribune) made him a natural fit for Osborne and indeed Kipling. Christian Coulson, making his West End debut, was cast as a very fresh-faced Raleigh, looking more sixteen than eighteen but with some showbiz razzle about him having recently appeared in the film Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Grindley also brought in Phil Cornwell – a brilliant comic actor and impressionist – as Mason the cook. Paul Bradley, a Manchester Royal Exchange veteran and former EastEnders star, shed entirely new light on working-class ex-ranker Trotter. Both these latter parts, traditionally associated with gor-blimey light comedy relief, the director was determined to invest with equal depth to the others on stage. Grindley’s research took him to sites on the Western Front. ‘We felt very strongly it was all based on Sherriff’s experience in C Company and I wanted to travel the route his company had taken.’ He and the set designer Jonathan Fensom – accompanied by Fensom’s father, the show’s mascot – found a chalky dugout at Vimy that they used as inspiration. All dugouts you visit in France are either fake or tarted up but the one at Vimy had, they thought, just the right note of gangrenous claustrophobia. Grindley wanted to compress the dugout on stage to an absolute bare minimum. ‘That visit to Vimy was vital in making us brave enough to make the acting area very small, with just enough space to get around a table and to interrogate a German and no more.’ The footprint for the action on stage was tiny. Like an iceberg, most of the set was out of sight. Latex lining on the floor was covered with gravel and sand. The cast was sprayed with water before they went on so that their trousers looked semi-habitable at best. The uniforms were researched and supplied by Taff Gillingham and Richard Ingram. They had been historical advisers to the BBC 2’s reality show The Trench and later War Horse. The ration meat was impersonated by malt loaf. The whisky bottle was in period but they missed a trick in not making it Haig (the blend owned by the Field Marshal’s family distilling firm).
In the rehearsal process Grindley devised an idea that much of the men’s behavior in the trench was a way of shielding themselves from the grim reality of the position they were in. ‘We decided that each of the characters had at least one displacement activity. For example, Stanhope drinks and works, Osborne listens, Trotter eats, and Mason composes menus. Only Hibbert is unable to take his mind off his fear. In order to keep everything active we decided that at no point does anybody reflect on experience, instead they relive it. What I said to the cast was ‘don’t play fear, play how vigorously each of you is trying to escape the reality of the dugout’. Each character is desperate to occupy his mind with things other than the war.’ This is most easily identified in Osborne’s monologue when he recounts a story of a wounded man being retrieved from no-man’s-land. ‘I decided that Osborne was recounting his own experience and when he’s telling the story he’s reliving it, seeing each moment of it as he’s saying it. I felt that by having clear, image by image pictures of the experience in his own mind, the actor would more successfully plant them in ours.’ It’s fascinating to see how in rehearsals, biographies for various characters emerge. Here in his own words is how the director saw the various main characters in the dugout.
Stanhope: ‘He is the poster child for the ruling class. Very much the head boy, a vicar’s son, a product of the public school system, though with no great sense of entitlement. He’s gone over to the front and existed and managed to run a company but at some point he has this terrifying experience at Vimy Ridge. His displacement is to drink and work – anything to avoid thinking of the cost of the responsibility for these men’s lives. His other world is in his top pocket – it’s a picture of Madge. The light at the end of the tunnel is that he genuinely believes that the war will finish, he will go into rehab somewhere and he will cross the Channel and be the same person he was when he left. The reason he is so obsessed with the arrival of Raleigh is that his arrival totally compromises that possibility.’
Raleigh: ‘He’s perhaps the most difficult part to play. He doesn’t have a displacement activity but he does have a desperate need to reconnect with his childhood. He expects his school holiday relationship with Stanhope to be replicated and it can’t be. He comes in with a Boy’s Own view of the war and the journey for him is an understanding of what the war is. The most difficult scene for Raleigh is that first scene. By the time you get to “the Germans really are decent” you hear Raleigh has got his own voice – that’s when it gets a little easier for the actor playing him. He represents the received view of the war, the success of the propaganda. After that raid he is utterly changed – in our version he comes back covered in viscera – and for him the war is not a game any more. With Raleigh the play is a rite of passage. He arrives a boy and he dies a man. Raleigh is presumably like Stanhope was when he first arrived at the front’.
Osborne: ‘He is all about listening. For him it’s about forgetting himself by absorbing himself in others. As an actor it’s very hard because it appears passive but in fact it is very active listening, as it were. He gets people to unlock so that he can be consumed by their problems and not his own. We imagined he went to somewhere like Seaford College [not far from Stane Street mentioned in the play] where he was a beloved schoolmaster. It felt to us as if he was someone who had witnessed the roll call of the dead old boys he had taught and felt he had to join them.
As the play ran longer and longer Osborne was recast. When Philip Franks took over, he brought to the part the schoolmaster side of the character. Philip is a brilliant teacher of the sort you’d wish you had at school. Then we had Malcolm Sinclair – who was superbly a man of the period. Then in Michael Siberry you could believe Osborne was a very tough rugby player.’
Trotter: ‘How the actors playing Trotter and Mason the servant interpreted those characters were crucial to the success of the show. I felt very aware that the perception was that this was a middle-class drama. But I felt strongly that Trotter was not there just to make us laugh. The British army was very efficient and quick to judge those who were not up to running the show. Sure, many officers were killed. But a lot of the ones who were not good enough were redeployed. It was a meritocracy. Trotter was there because he was bloody good. He deliberately makes himself the butt of jokes to keep spirits up. But he is a consummate, instinctive soldier and Stanhope knows and loves that. But he doesn’t have the relationship with Trotter that he does with Osborne. Trotter has three words which every actor finds a hurdle. When Stanhope accuses him of being unimaginative and always being the same, Trotter says: “little you know.” Behind those words is his untold story.’
Mason: ‘He thinks about menus. He is trying his best. On the night of Osborne’s death he attempts the best thing he has ever done with a jam pudding. For us, the accusation leveled at the play – that it’s patronizing and class-ist and that Trotter and Mason are there to be laughed at is, I think, a travesty. Mason and Trotter are central to the team.’
Hibbert: ‘Stanhope thinks he will crumble when he puts the gun to his head and threatens to shoot him. In the second half of that scene we see Hibbert through Stanhope’s eyes with a new-found respect. That evaporates when he desperately tries to be one of the boys and fails. Hibbert’s behaviour is that of a citizen who hasn’t made the leap into being a soldier. It’s not an anti-war play in that sense. They all know they’ve got to be there. They understand that the war has got to be fought and they’ve got to hold the line. Hibbert is simply the one man who can’t handle the job.’
When the reviews appeared after the Comedy Theatre first night they were glowing. Geoffrey Streatfeild especially came in for many hurrahs. He managed to retrieve the part from its matinee idol glamour and gave Stanhope a hint of what he might have been like when he first arrived at the front. Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph complimented the ‘portrayal of shredded nerves, alcoholic self-loathing, and the sheer grit and ruthlessness that make him such a magnificent commander.’ David Haig was likewise raved for his humane portrayal of the stalwart officer. In the Jewish Chronicle, John Nathan was conscious of a party of schoolchildren in the seats near him ‘for whom the war must be as distant as the Battle of Culloden Moor – were clearly moved and utterly absorbed’. Journey’s End had the immediate force of a really good war poem. But while the play rapidly turned into a huge hit, the play still eluded consensus on what it was saying. Talking to Grindley about this, he summed up its spirit: ‘It eulogises community. It says, “we are on this raft of an island together.” The genius of the thing is its togetherness, which is why the notion of class and snobbery in the play really offends me. It’s about us against the world. It’s a very British thing. We are staying here. It’s do or die.’
Critics saw what they wanted to see; and some wanted to see the First World War in the dock, facing fresh charges of gross futility. Nicholas de Jongh in the Evening Standard talked of ‘Sherriff’s accusatory, politically pointed perspective’ – a remark that would have astonished the play’s author. Matt Wolf in International Herald Tribune declared that, ‘Sherriff’s specific view of the Great War is that it made no sense.’ Toby Young in the Spectator used his column to remind us the war was ‘transparently pointless’ and ‘an utterly worthless cause’ and therefore Sherriff was obviously against it – a misrepresentation of the war, the play and the author in one review! My own review in the Daily Express was a big thumbs-up but I suggested the play worked despite itself, which is nonsense. It works because it works. Paul Taylor in The Independent was the only critic to cite Bernard Shaw’s views on Sherriff’s typescript in 1928 and to point out the play’s crossed wires. ‘What makes the play emotionally wrenching, though, is its divided response to romance...the play manages to be keenly insightful about the awful pressures of being hero worshipped, while itself hero-worshipping Stanhope.’ Robert Butler (Independent on Sunday) who spotted the key thing that Stanhope reveals is ‘heroes are heroes because they overcome their own fears’. How Sherriff wished he had had that ability. Michael Coveney (Daily Mail) thought the ‘play about chaps for chaps is actually a fantastic memoir of the dignity, and futility, of these officers conducting a process far removed from politics and ideology.’ In other words, it was a play about how and not why the war was fought. A long view – and equally hard to argue with – was given by Michael Billington in the Guardian: ‘it wasn’t overtly anti-war but that the final ghostly image of the entire company standing in front of the cenotaph, leaves one feeling overwhelmed by the wasteful horror of war.’
War for Britain never stops. The production opened less than a year after 46,000 British troops were sent to Iraq. This was not mentioned in any of the first batch of notices except by Alastair Macaulay in the Financial Times: ‘I hadn’t expected to find it so undated, mainly these men talk much as men might talk today, and I watched wondering how closely the conditions described in this play resembled those experienced by my army nephew in Iraq last year.’ A couple of years later, the Iraq war would spectacularly invade the theatre in the award-winning play Black Watch, devised by Gregory Burke who walked into a Scottish pub, got the squaddies talking and wrote down what he heard. It remains easily the best modern play about the British army and the front line.
Grindley’s was faithful to the Journey’s End script, but the key difference from the original 1929 production was his ending. The stage direction requires the dugout to collapse in a shell blast. Grindley and his team didn’t do that. Too expensive. So they devised an ending with Stanhope going out as the barrage builds, the light falling on Raleigh’s body in the dugout, followed by a blackout in which we get thirty seconds of machine guns and deafening surround-sound shellfire. That then turned into the sound of birdsong followed by the ‘Last Post’. The cloth then lifted to reveal the actors frozen like a muster of ghosts, unbowing in front of a stone panel of over 7,000 names (including East Surrey men with characters from the play inserted) from the 54,000 on the Menin Gate memorial to the missing in Ypres. The memorial is at the start of the Menin Road down which endless singing columns of British troops marched into the horrible gloom of the Ypres Salient, that muddy expanse in which so many lives evaporated. The memorial was unveiled in 1927 with the words, ‘He is not missing; he is here.’ As Grindley put it, ‘the idea of having the memorial on stage was to say “you’ve got to know eleven men here tonight but they are representative of all these others behind them.” It’s the right ending to the story. It’s the end of the journey.’
When J. R. R. Tolkien was a young officer in the trenches, the men in his care were mostly Lancashire weavers, amiable, short and very fond of their rations. He later turned them into Hobbits. Sherriff on the other hand kept his characters fully human, eating, drinking, doing their duty and thinking endlessly of home as they faced danger. It is almost unimaginable that war. We owe Sherriff’s generation. Not just the men who fought but also the thousands of courageous families back home whose lives were blighted by grief. Journey’s End’s lasting qualities are its healing compassion and its sense of remembrance. The anniversary of 2014 would be the ideal date to bring it back.
66 The New Statesman, 26 May 1972
67 Kenneth Williams, My Diaries, p.202