Review by Simon Jenner, June 12th 2025
Identity Theatre never flinch from challenges and huge ensemble pieces. It’s as if Browning’s dictum that people’s “reach should exceed (their) grasp” is tattoo’d on their collective soul. Then often proceed to reach it. And none come more ambitious than seizing Joan Littlewood’s Oh What a Lovely War at Brighton’s BOAT (Brighton Open Air Theatre), directed by Identity Theatre’s Nettie Sheridan and Gary Cook till June 14th.
Photo Credit: Miles Davies
Here, unlike their previous Under Milk Wood with its exquisite moments blurred by lack of mics, this production sings with them. A fifteen-strong cast glows in Pierrot costume. We’re told a terminally tired seaside touring troupe, The Merry Roosters, is performing its last ever production of this timeless, but for them jaded classic.
It explains why – with Pierrot players even mutinying and ducking into the audience – the first half seems slightly jaded. Then the second catches the Pierrots by the throat. This second half is something else: the dances are drilled, the pathos and Beverley Grover’s effects striking with Sheridan’s choreography and blocking more various (gas, blind men, slow-motion deaths); the solos, well the solos. It’s as if the whole troupe are jolted into remembering what it is they’re doing. They’ve had fun before, the first act’s exuberant and affecting; but performances now will start tears. A few things happen in the second act I’ve not seen done better in any production.
From an original 1962 Armistice BBC broadcast with Charles Chilton’s compilations of 32 songs with threaded commentary, Littlewood and partner Gerry Raffles with the original company fashioned a post-Brechtian parable: tightly organised with (here) just one Brechtian scoreboard at the end. A few more stats would have helped, despite the outdoor challenges; it’s part of the Littlewood/Brecht approach.
This doesn’t of course just feature the trenches but the use of sex and ostracization in wartime recruitment: Joana Ackroyd’s memorable in ‘I’ll Make a Man of You’ for enlisting: less saucy than some, but a ringing voice. ‘Belgium put The Kibosh on The Kaiser’ led by Carrie Lambe is more exuberant, almost delirious. But there’s vignettes for Sophie Sullivan, the outstanding Laura Scobie with her ‘Hitchy Koo’ and Joana Ackroyd to turn the Home Front into lists of missing and another munitions’ “girl blown to bits”. Lambe and Ackroyd perform a beautifully harmonised duet of ‘Keep The Homefires Burning’.
50 women were killed in the February 1917 Newcastle explosion through managerial incompetence. But many munitions women were working-class suffragettes who’d blown up empty houses and a dock in 1914. You bet, with new-honed explosives expertise and fear of revolution, women got the partial vote by 1918! It wasn’t through breaking windows. We’re not told that.
Divided into The War Game Parts One and Two, Theatre Workshop don’t hesitate to deploy Brechtian commentary on the then-neutral U.S. with Switzerland and other manufacturers making millions – several thousand US citizens became millionaires during this war – suggesting the U.S. had to enter the war to protect their betting millions on the winning side. The U.S. effect even spreads to Field Marshall Haig who wanted the Battles of Arras (April 9th 1917) and Passchendaele (31st July 1917) where thousands drowned, to win him the war before the U.S. could make a difference.
Ensemble. Photo Credit: Miles Davies
There’s plenty of fruitless allied rivalry and British monolingual arrogance where Haig refuses to put himself under French direction (he did offer, eventually, in 1918).
This is above all though a quasi-musical ‘entertainment’ and is at times heart-stoppingly poignant. The three most affecting occur in the more densely-populated (21 songs) second half. Maria Dunn’s outstanding keyboards throughout might seem initially ubiquitous, but in fact is judiciously pared as the performance continues. She’s given fine support by Sheridan on drums, Andrew Wesley on harmonica and Phil Nair-Brown on bugle.
First the outstanding moment of the evening when Carl Lovejay sings ‘Roses of Picardy’ with a stillness, poise and ringing tenor with just the right characterisation that’s overwhelming. And would be in the West End. ‘Far Far From Wipers’ is performed by Jimmy Schofield; ‘And When They Ask Us’by the ensemble. Even when you recall them, they’re deeply affecting. ‘Goodbyee’ and the wonderful ‘When This Lousy War is Over’ are both taken by Phil Nair-Brown (after his bugle moment). ‘I wore a Tunic’ features James Bolton and Schofield in a fine duet. Bolton is another who impresses with a few ringing characterisations. Joseph Bentley radiates a jaded MC like Osborne’s Entertainer, rallying for a last time.
The male/female duet ‘If you want the old battalion’ is hauntingly rendered by Scobie and Gerry Wicks.
The women in this production are as a group even more impressive. Apart from those mentioned, Cathy Byrne and Olivia Jeffery impressed in singing roles and badinage – the munitions workers or home-front moments both poignant and highlighting women’s roles.
There’s virtuosic comic numbers too, with part-singing in ‘The Bells of Hell’ or more knockabout ‘They Were Only Playing Leapfrog’ (“when one staff officer jumped over another staff officer’s back” with po-faced innuendo). There’s poignant ensemble with two singing ‘Hellige Nacht’ as the British in Christmas 1914 respond with ‘Christmas Day in the Cookhouse’ (with Schofield and Lovejoy deliberately roughing it up) concluding 1914 with affirmations of friendship never allowed again. The ensemble perform those literally in those trenches surrounding the stage. It might have been even more effective upstage but it’s a real coup to involve such natural assets.
But uniquely here Theatre Workshop’s aesthetic is revived when the audience (clapping only) joins in with Suse Crosby’s tongue-twisting ‘Sister Susie’s Sewing Shirts’ towards the end. It also proves how beautifully-placed each song is, each variation in this almost stupefyingly long song-list – sometimes snatches. Here when even the audience’s attention might just fade for a moment, is a way to enliven: so the energy’s up for the last three numbers. It’s difficult to listen to the ensemble ‘And when they ask us‘ without being silenced.
General Haig and others are guyed here (I’ve provided a historical note below the review). Despised for being “in trade” Haig was royally-connected through his wife with one vignette swirling the dance of politics, as generals dance with dresses, who’s in who’s out, with General Henry Wilson cutting a forlorn, truthful charmless figure. Littlewood’s satire is again evoked with minimal resources all the more telling for being twirled in a twist of cotton. Graham Hammett, an oleaginous American plutocrat, morphs into a chaplain for good reason.
There are omissions. Whilst the Newcastle explosion wasn’t much-recalled at the time, the British Etaples as well as French mutinies of 1917 go unreported (more mutinies just post-war combined with police strikes in 1918-19 caused a crisis hastily covered up).
Here we get a sketch of threatened mutiny soon stopped. Just as we get one of the newbie Royal Irish Fusiliers too-eagerly advancing and being shelled to oblivion by British artillery (blue on blue, blow on blow). When each tries to return to alert their comrades, they’re shot. The abiding memory though, is the sheer misery, suffering and torture of trench living turned to black comedy. The German leg propping a parapet a staff officer wants removed.
(Personally I remember one soldier Dr Jack Hartsilver telling me he drew fresh water from under a French helmet for months, till the helmet slipped and revealed a bearded Frenchman.).
But in this two-hours-twenty show so much is packed that we’re mostly entertained, occasionally stupefied and ultimately moved in an immersive war-as-vaudeville that doesn’t for one moment let us think the jollity’s not subverted. By using propaganda tools against themselves, Littlewood and her team posit stark warnings against misreporting by officially-sanctioned and state media machines. The effect on the audience is rapturous.
This is as Andrew Kay says so eloquently: “A tragedy with songs”. We’re still uplifted, and plunged into loss: despite the war lessons, the numbers killed (over 57,000 casualties on the Somme’s first day). There’s two reasons this is a must-see.
First this needs seeing in schools and anywhere people need telling. Particularly when the government urges rearmament against forces we’re never going to fight, and plan on starving us so they can stay in power though jingoism. Second, the second half of this production is superb, as planned (with some bravery). Weariness and fraying routines fall away. The Merry Roosters forget who they are and come together, awed by the transcendent theatre they’ve invoked. See it.
Dance Captain and Assistant Director Joanna Ackroyd, Production Assistant Laura Scobie, Effects and Lighting Design Beverley Grover, Construction Assistant Andrew Wesby, Hair & Make-Up, Publicity Photography Miles Davies, Headshot Photography Gary Cook, Wardrobe Identity Theatre, Harveys of Hove, Properties Identity Theatre with thanks to Southwick Players, Thanks to BHOS, Paul Sheridan, Liz Cook, BOAT FOH.
Notes about Generals
There’s been attempts to rehabilitate Haig before and since, but in 1962, after Alan Clark’s 1961 Lions Led by Donkeys the stock of generals remained at an all-time low till revisionists in the 1980s. Otherwise people would continuously dislike wars. Though Haig learned slowly in 1918, he sacked General Rawlinson (who’d warned where the March 1918 Push would occur) to avoid the sack himself: “or it’d be me, so I thought it had better be him”.
And credit for the August 8th 1918 Push lies with General Monash, who being both Australian and Jewish, isn’t celebrated here as is he is in Oz. Rupert Murdoch’s father – newspaper tyro Richard – famously tried to have him removed by the Colonial Menzies government because he was Jewish. That might have set the war back but sanity prevailed: Monash is celebrated and it’s a reason anti-Semitism is less prevalent in Australia.
The balance should lie with World War One career officer and military historian Basil Liddell-Hart, who resigned from the BBC’s 1963 Great War series in protest at ‘balanced’ defence of Haig. He was there and wrote the dispatches. In Littlewood’s and Raffles’ characterisation, Haig, here in Wicks’ assured, stentorian hands, puffs across for what he was deemed at the time by (opportunistic but not inaccurate) Lloyd-George who appointed him: “intellectually and temperamentally” unfit.
Photo Credit: Miles Davies
