“Journey’s End”

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 660, 11 May 1929, Page 26

“Journey’s End”

> One of the Finest Plays Of this Age WAR PLAY BY MALE CAST After the arrival of Sherriff’s war play, “Journey’s End,” it is difficult to recognise the dreary theatrical season about which everyone has been I tediously grumbling, writes J. Brooks Anderson in a New York exchange. This young insurance assessor, who now finds himself acclaimed as a reI markable dramatist, has written the | finest play of the London and New j York dramatic seasons, and one of the | finest plays of our age. j Mild In its British manner, it is | nevertheless abidingly and deeply j moving—a thing of great tragic beauty | that commands respect and wins affecj tion. It Is written out of a full heart; Jit is acted with rare and sensitive j understanding. j When you come to analyse the j forces that move you so profoundly. , : you realise that the war, which Mr. | Sherriff has been careful never to ex- ! ploit, overwhelms every line in the | dialogue and forces its way into every episode in the play. The war is the ! sole protagonist. The war has brought these Englishmen out of their peacetime employments at home and thrust them, contemptuously, into a foul, humid dug-out at the front line, j The war has made a hard drinker of I the naturally temperate Captain Stan- i hope. The war has made a snivelling coward of Lieutenant Hibbert. j REALISM OF WAR By accepting the war as the prem- ■ ise of every detail in the play, Mr. | I Sherriff gives his characters a ; j stature that no trumped-up dramatic ! story could equal. “Journey’s End” I accordingly tells us more of his affectionate understandings of character than of his invention. Not that he makes no active use of the war in his narrative. Even in the first scenes of the play the shriek and whine and detonation of shells put his setting into its true perspective as a wretched haven in a fiendish world of death; and the last scene, during the beginning of a German drive, crowds ! the air with thunder. Moreover, the j tautest scene in the play is trench warfare at its most hazardous. Lieui tenant Osborne, a fatherly, humorous schoolmaster, and Lieutenant Raleigh, disarmingly boyish, have been | detailed to lead a daylight raid across No Man’s Land to capture a i German prisoner. Judging by the i horrible fate of previous raids, even j ! the colonel knows that their mission i is practically murder, for the Ger- j mans dominate the situation so thor- j oughly, that they mockingly tie red < rags beside the gap in the wire where they know the raid is bound I to come through. Now, what is most remarkable j about “Journey’s End” as a whole is Mr. Sherriff’s ability to underwrite every scene, to suggest black pel’ll behind the casualness of the dialogue, to let heroism make its own way into the Imagination of the playgoer. And into the eight minutes that remain before this foredoomed raid leaps away. Mr. Sherriff has achieved the most writing of his play—doggedly whimsical, full of suppressed excitement, vibrant with a mute determination. Conveyed with magnificent poise by Allan Quartermaine and Derek Williams, the firm beauty of this scene will linger in the memory, vividly, long after the details have been forgotten. HUMAN BEAUTY There was in “What Price Glory?” none of the fineness and limpid, human beauty that distinguish “Journey’s End,” not only among war plays but among all plays as well. The numbing horror of warfare strikes deeper when the playwright merely directs the imagination. With the Rabelaisian bedlam of “What Price i Glory?” still rumbling in your ears, you can hardly believe that two Bri- i tlsli officers, one old and heavy-hearted, j one young and fresh, start off together j on a fatal daylight raid with the j following exchange of affectionate ! civilities: Osborne: I’m glad it’s you and 1 —together, Raleigh. Raleigh: Are j'ou —really? Osborne: Yes. Raleigh: So am I—awfully. Osborne: We must put up a good • show. j Raleigh: Yes, rather! (There is aj | pause.) Osborne: Let’s go along, shall we? Raleigh: Righto. But, then, you must hear Mr. Quartermaine and Mr. Williams speak iliese lines before you can realise how ■ much anguish, terror and gallantry | i they contain.