Writer: Steve Darlow
Director: Joe Malyan
The fly boys of the Second World War are remembered as tragic heroes and the romance of their sacrifice, of the ‘few’, remains imprinted on the British collective memory. Steve Darlow has constructed a new play, Their Finest Hour performed at Waterloo East Theatre, from the written testimonies of those pilots, creating a dramatic montage of their experiences within a chronological frame. It has a solemn sentimentality about the men and women it represents but Darlow’s wide-ranging research and approaches to dramatisation provide some momentum.
Their Finest Hour is described by director Joe Malyan in the programme notes as a ‘forgotten story,’ although it isn’t really. In more than a century of military flight, this period that has received the most attention from aviation historians, not to mention the numerous film treatments that cover the same key Second World War moments that Darlow includes – Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and, later, the Dam Busters. And theatre too has often focused on the Second World War airmen including the recent Jack Absolute Flies Again at the National Theatre not to mention a fair amount of Terence Rattigan’s work, himself an RAF man. But there is, of course, space for more.
Darlow has combined the remembrances of more than 100 separate characters, drawing distinctions between fighter and bomber pilots as well nurses, WAAF personnel, commanding officers and prisoners of war. It’s framed as a personal story, a family finding the effects of their recently deceased grandfather in the attic and spooling back in time to learn about his life, except not his life specifically but Jamie Dunlop (Patrick Lock) becomes instead a co-narrator, helping to navigate between these separate extracts to create a single story.
It works well on the whole with Peter Pearson providing gravitas with war announcements, key dates and even embodiments of Chamberlain, Churchill and Eisenhower. And there are some well dramatised moments as the play lingers on Dunkirk, Cologne and the Battle of the Rhur, using lighting and sound to imply the burning chaos beneath the frightened aviators, as well as diamond chair formations as a squadron goes into the air, model planes recreating some of the action and even a shadow puppet aircraft flying over Europe.
Their Finest Hour does convey a huge amount of information however, slowly picking its way through the war years, but at 2 hours and 15 minutes it could be tighter, slimming down the various digressions that take the story away from the direct experience of the pilot. It frequently laments the cost of war with the huge attrition rates for the RAF as well as the effects on civilians in the UK and Germany, but in honouring the pilot it rarely engages with their motivation while the text lifted from their writing doesn’t always convince as dialogue.
It is fascinating to hear about their exploits but theatre is also a place to explore how and why they kept fighting despite everything they saw and experienced, and what was it about the nature of flight that drove men to sign up. A singular member of the ground crew appears towards the end of the play, but little is said of life on the airbase, the camaraderie and the extraordinary contrasts of great danger while flying and relative safety when grounded.
Their Finest Hour is an enjoyable narrative history using a small cast that incorporates poetry and music, performed by Tabitha Baines, Alex Cosgriff, Laura Hannawin, Emma Kemp and Alice Moore along with Lock and Pearson, that seeks to reinforce the heroism of the Second World War pilot. It certainly does that, but it could go further in using its theatrical style to explore what it all meant as well.
Runs until 26 March 2023
