Writer – Rachel Wagstaff
Director – Alastair Whatley
It’s been 30 years since Sebastian Faulks’ seminal love story burst onto the scene, taking the literary world by storm and amassing over 20 million fans. It was originally produced for the stage in 2010, directed by Stephen Daldry using Rachel Wagstaff’s script and has now been reworked in a new production by Alastair Whatley.
It’s a sprawling and highly intense love story that’s set around and during World War One. It’s centred around Englishman Stephen Wraysford (James Esler,) who is sent to France on behalf of his guardian and employer to investigate a factory they may be investing in. Here, he falls in love and starts an intense affair with Isabelle (Charlie Russell), the factory owner’s second wife. The war starts, and Wraysford, now a Lieutenant in the British Army, is with his troops in the trenches, and what starts as a love story becomes one of wartime survival.
In Wagstaff’s adaptation, the play is split into three distinct acts: pre-war, wartime, and post-war. As with the novel, it is bookended by a modern-day narrative of a young man seeking to find the grave of a soldier he was named after. Wagstaff’s play is impressively faithful to Faulks’ original but does so at the cost of dramatic impact and cohesion.
In aiming to mirror the novel, there’s a lot of action that, whilst giving colour and depth, is not developed enough to make it feel part of the core narrative. In Act One, for example, the key story is that of the shifting relationship between Wraysford, Isabelle and her husband Rene (Sargon Yelda). The inclusion of town councillor Bérard’s flirtations or Lisette’s schoolgirl crush on Wraysford feels annoyingly surplus to requirement. Similarly, in Act Two, as the focus shifts from Wraysford to trench-digger Jack Firebrace (Max Bowden), the inclusion of scenes of the soldiers’ day-to-day life gives a powerful and, at times, harrowing sense of life in the trenches, but is overwhelmingly distracting.
The result of Wagstaff’s script is less a three-act play, and more two separate plays pushed together. Whilst Act Three aims to tie it all together, there’s not enough emotion or narrative structure to keep Birdsong from feeling like a collection of vignettes. And the presence of John (Tama Phethean) as the man trying to find his namesake’s grave is yet another nod to the book that just gets in the way.
All this said the show is far from unenjoyable. The acting is first-rate, with Bowden and Esler particularly strong. Whatley’s gives solid direction and makes the three hours almost skip by, and Richard Kent’s overall design, when coupled with Jason Taylor’s lighting, is hugely effective, particularly when representing the trenches.
Acts One and Two, as standalone stories, work well, but bringing them together is less successful. Fans of the novel will, in all likelihood, come away disappointed, feeling more like they’ve seen an adaptation of the Wikipedia page rather than the novel. Those new to the story will, no doubt, be entertained and certainly affected, but will ultimately be frustrated that neither story is as fulfilling as it could have been
Runs until 5 October 2024 and continues to tour