A tortured idealist doing his duty in the hell of the Western Front: QUENTIN LETTS first night review of It Is Easy To Be Dead

Published: 01:09 GMT, 22 November 2016 | Updated: 03:04 GMT, 22 November 2016

e-mail

View
comments

It Is Easy To Be Dead, Trafalgar Studios 2

Rating:

World War One has been extensively mined by playwrights, film-makers and poets. Do we need another play about it? Perhaps not. But Neil McPherson’s It Is Easy To Be Dead is well crafted, well staged, well acted.

If it touches the heart less than expected that may be down to over-exposure, at this time of year, to 20th century-war grief.

It Is Easy To Be Dead is well crafted, well staged, well acted. If it touches the heart less than expected that may be down to over-exposure, at this time of year, to 20th century-war grief

Alexander Knox, in a fine central performance, plays British infantry officer Charles Sorley. Charlie sends letters from the Western Front to his parents (Tom Marshall and Jenny Lee) in Cambridge.

The play opens, powerfully, with Mr and Mrs Sorley opening the telegram telling them that their boy has been killed in action. In due course they start to re-read his letters and as they do so the words are spoken by Mr Knox. Most engaging he is, too. Captain Sorley was a reluctant warrior.

We learn of the time he spent in Germany before the war, when he fell for a married women and for German culture – and even German patriotism. ‘I never had an inkling of that feeling for England,’ he admits.

Sorley is an romantic, atheist idealist, as no doubt many became during the misery of war. He takes pride in writing a non-patriotic poem and he wonders how long it will take ‘the pawn to realise he is a pawn’. And yet, despite these stirrings of rebellion, he leads his men into battle.

Alexander Knox (pictured), in a fine central performance, plays British infantry officer Charles Sorley

Playwright McPherson does not gnaw much on that dilemma but that may be because Sorley’s writings - on which the play is based – glide over it.

The show includes handsome period songs, accompanied by live piano. On the back wall we see occasional images of the battlefield and of friends of Sorley, many of them fellow Marlburians, who died in the war. The evening ends with the Sorley poem which gives the play its title. Its pessimistic conclusion is that ‘Great Death has made all his for evermore’.