by Joan Littlewood
Theatre Workshop & Charles Chilton
Directed by Albert Schultz
A Soulpepper Production
at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts
March 17-April 10, 2010

   Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop was a left-wing group with sharply distinct sociopolitical leanings. When it premiered Oh What a Lovely War almost fifty years ago, the English theatre scene received a powerful punch to the solar plexus, for this musical entertainment was not merely buoyantly musical but devastatingly wrenching as well. It was an anti-war piece that presented its perspective with exuberant joie de vivre (as its title suggests), using documentary statistics and illustrations, parody, music hall numbers, vaudevillian comedy, and expressionism that had disturbing edges. It was stylized but not simply aesthetic. It dropped its hand grenades as if they were bonbons, but no one in England was fooled. Audiences knew that under any sugar coated moments had bitter or acid realities below the surface, as the show sparked new interest in documentary theatre and the Great War, the war that was broadly and wrongly thought to be the war to end all wars. People laughed at the foolish and dangerous villains (officers all) responsible for the mass slaughter of hundreds of thousands of young soldiers, not because they thought the war was comic or the show irresistibly alluring but because the motive was the destruction of myths responsible for the hideous pity of war.

   Albert Schultz’s Soulpepper version often loses sight of the show’s prime motive. It dresses itself prettily in clown getup, and the music is competently played by the performers on instruments they don’t seem to have learned lately, the songs well delivered by the males in the ensemble (few of them able to understand the period), and the comedy fairly skitters along, especially when Oliver Dennis is on hand in various guises, but most especially as a pompous, authoritative drill sergeant whose barked orders are overwhelmingly incomprehensible. The show also gets wonderful support at times from Michael Hanrahan (though he is surprisingly weak in projection early on), Ins Choi, George Masswohl, and Mike Ross in the front line of soldiers who go to their deaths like lambs to slaughter. The women, however, are generally disappointing, falling into sentimental postures, singing without any sense of period style (except for a couple of numbers, one being the duet “Roses of Picardy”), and certainly lacking the darker satire required for the show’s points. In other words, this production lacks a self-justification. Prettiness and sentimentality become vain, vulgar nostalgia when their didactic edge or undertone has gone, and death loses its sting in the awful waste of war, without generating real pathos or anger.

photo: Cylla von Tiedemann

pic (L-R): Brendan Wall, Oliver Dennis, Gregory Prest





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