It is 10 years since the playwright John McGrath died; 46 since this play was last seen in London. Both the man and his work are honoured in this superb revival by Robert Hastie of a piece that, like Arnold Wesker's Chips with Everything, uses National Service to expose the futility of our so-called military preparedness.
McGrath sets the action in the British zone of Germany in 1954. A nervous 18-year-old, Lance-Bombardier Evans, is put in charge of a group of six gunners whose mission is to guard an obsolete weapon. Evans simply wants to get through the night without incident but he is tested to the limit by a manic Irishman, O'Rourke, who gets blind drunk in the knowledge that, if he is put on a charge, Evans's return home on leave will be ruinously delayed.
What's impressive is how many interwoven conflicts the play contains. Evans's innocence is pitted against the collective experience of the disgruntled gunners; among the soldiers there is also tension between north and south, English and Irish, Protestant and Catholic. But behind the play lurks the big issue of what these men are doing in Germany. O'Rourke subversively asks: "Is it tonight we are expecting the Russians to attack?" And it is he who eventually points out the absurdity of defending a weapon that would be useless in the event of war.
Charles Aitken brilliantly invests O'Rourke with a mix of fierce intelligence, sardonic humour and wild self-destructiveness. Phil Cheadle as a bitter Ulsterman and Michael Shelford as a narcoleptic west countryman also stand out, and Lee Armstrong nicely conveys Evans's fumbling naivety. The production is as good as anything you will find in London theatre. And it's salutary to be reminded that McGrath was one of our finest postwar political dramatists.
