REVIEW: Oh What A Lovely War – at the Festival Theatre, Malvern, from Monday, February 16 to Saturday, February 21, 2015.

SADNESS and anger in equal measure still sweep across this legendary musical satire which has been revived to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the First World War.

Currently on its national tour - prior to heading for the West End, it is once again an excellent but deeply moving theatrical experience dealing as it does with the folly and futility of war – evoking sadness as it laments over the tragic deaths of so many millions of young men and the anger at how those lives were seemingly regarded as cheap cannon fodder.

It was the general feeling and the feeling about the generals who led the Allied troops in the trenches on the Western Front of France and Belgium as a neon news display regularly flashed up the spectacularly rising loss of life – on one occasion 13,000 in three hours! And this, so hard to comprehend, is the size of many of the crowds who pack into stadiums to watch football matches...

When it was all over the lives lost numbered around 10 million, with three times that figure wounded!

So alarming to visualise as well as come to terms with. And there’s always that question - just what did this huge-scale slaughter really achieve? All those countries involved suffered great loss but the world appears to have learned little with other conflicts flaring up in the ensuing century.

Joan Littlewood’s original production, which premiered back in 1963 at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, was as vicious an attack on our war-time leaders and generals as was the fighting at Ypres and the Somme, and this is quite a faithful reproduction down to its splendid staging as an Edwardian pierrot show.

It is also scathing of the multi-national businesses that made millions out of the war – blood money in every sense as many dealt in munitions, but it is the generals, and Haigh in particular, who get both barrels.

Haigh is splendidly played by Christopher Villiers – dithering and determined in equal measure, and he’s not a bad song and dance man either. Excellent performances too from Wendi Peters, a familiar face in Coronation Street, and Ian Reddington, who has also been seen on the cobbles as well as in the East End. She’s both matronly and bubbly as she links the Home Front with the Western Front, while he is solidly professional as he drills the audience as well as the troops in his care.

Director Terry Johnson also teases out a gripping and enthusiastic reaction from the rest of a fine cast, and there’s further quality below stage from the band under musical director Peter White.

 

The real stars of the show, though, are the evocative songs from the trenches – Keep the Home Fires Burning, And When they Ask Us and others, and all of them testimony to the memories of the men who gave their lives and limbs for their country 100 years ago.