You can applaud a play’s intentions without enjoying its execution. That is how I feel about Irwin Shaw’s anti-war drama, first staged in New York in 1936 and clearly influenced by European expressionism. Shaw’s paean to life is admirable but his play, even at 90 minutes, soon becomes predictable.
Shaw sets the action in “the second year of the war that is to begin tomorrow night”, and his premise is that six dead soldiers obstinately refuse to be reburied. Appeals are made to their patriotic duty but the bulk of the action consists of pleas by a succession of wives, mothers and sisters for these resurrected corpses to return to their graves. The men’s protests about the pointless sacrifices made to gain four yards of bloody mud has chilling echoes of the first world war, but the conflict between the dead and the living falls into a repetitive pattern.
Only one section moved me, which was when a downtrodden wage-slave stirs his wife’s sympathy by announcing that he wants to “take heaven out of the clouds and plant it right here on Earth”.
Rafaella Marcus stages the play cleverly in a tiny space with the corpses rising out of a metallic grave. In an 11-strong cast, the men are good but it is the two women who most impress. Sioned Jones is striking as a beleaguered wife, living off a pitiful pension, belatedly recognising her husband’s capacity for resistance, and Natalie Winsor is quietly touching as a bereaved girlfriend happy to live off her memories. It’s decently done, but Shaw all too clearly sets out to prove a preconceived point.
At the Finborough theatre, London, until 24 November.
