All Quiet on the Western Front

Published Monday 13 October 2008 at 13:20 by Pat Ashworth

There’s something about raw and unaccompanied singing by men that conveys defiance in the face of whatever life can throw at them. It permeates Giles Croft’s brilliantly revised staging of the First World War classic, along with a monstrous soundscape of war created by the heavy dropping of trapdoors on an iron gantry and a staccato rattle along corrugated iron walls.

Ammunition boxes in the setting of a bombed-out munitions factory serve as everything from school benches to communal latrines, shell-holes, troop transports and hospital beds where boys die in their comrades’ arms. These lads are barely out of school, and no-one looks more vulnerable than James Alexandrou as Paul Baumer, the narrator.

There is a defining moment, a nightmare scenario when he is lost in No Man’s Land and trapped in a shell-hole with a soldier he has killed face-to-face. He cradles the corpse at once softly and wildly, babbling promises to visit his family, even take on the dead man’s profession. His narrative can be unconsciously poetic and he cries out at one point, “I am drowning on dry land”.

Behind the lines, tension dissolves into banter and comic episodes mitigate the graphic terrors of the Front. It’s a fast-moving ensemble piece where the all-male cast play the women as well, from nuns to ladies of the night, and even a pair of defiant geese evading the pot. But as the last mother’s son falls, fierce anger is still our overarching response to this powerful and enduring play.