Forgotten Voices From The Great War

Archive Listings for Forgotten Voices From The Great War

T903035215 (TWOS03) Company Two's Company. Director Tricia Thorns (Black OE11 and Brigade Exchange). Director Ian Talbot (Company). Design Christopher Richardson.
14 Oct 03 to 16 Nov 03	Pleasance, Inner London :: V276 listing details L0223237613

Details

Play :: Company, Brigade Exchange and Black OEll headline the first part of a gripping new season of plays about and written during the First World War. Although the poetry of the Great War is celebrated and widely known, the plays of the era are almost all completely forgotten. In an extensive research period, Graham Cowley, producer for Two¹s Company and Out of Joint, managed to find several plays, long out of print and not performed for decades, which are as passionate, authentic and direct as the work of the best of modern playwrights. This thrilling and unusual body of work consists of three different stories about soldiers, all performed in one evening. OD¹ Company by Miles Malleson is set in a barracks in Malta in the first two months of the Great War where a fresh-faced territorial battalion is waiting for orders to move. News starts to trickle back that even then the fighting is harder than expected. Brigade Exchange by Ernst Johannsen is a view from the other side, and towards the end of the War ­ telephone operators in a dug-out in the German trenches are desperately trying to keep communications open in the face of a heavy Allied attack. Black OEll, also by Miles Malleson, begins with a family at home anxiously waiting for their son, decorated for bravery, to come home. He returns, but not as they expect to see him When first produced in the 1920s, Brigade Exchange was known as 'the German Journey's End'. When Company and Black OEll were first published in 1916, all copies were seized by the police. Miles Malleson became well known later in life as a character actor in British film such as Kind Hearts and Coronets, but served in the army as a young man. His plays are based on his war experiences. G.W. Pabst¹s film Westfront 1918 was based on Ernst Johannsen¹s novel Vier von der Inafanterie. This season will continue in the autumn of 2004 with plays about recruiting officers and conscientious objectors as well as soldiers; plays set in Russia, Ireland, Yorkshire and Flanders; plays about women ­ munitions workers as well as wives and mothers; and plays which highlight the contradictory attitudes of those at the Front and those at home.