Soldiers and war have long been the subject of theatre, but just how close have they got to telling it how it is?
WORDS: PAUL F COCKBURN
Were you force-fed Shakespeare at school? Chances are that you hated every blank verse line the guy wrote, yet it’s arguable that a lot of his writing is about people just like you. Many of the Bard’s most famous stories – and also those by his contemporaries – take place against a background of military conflict and are full of soldiers. Even his so-called comedies (though you do wonder where all the jokes are hiding) have dispossessed knights and gentlemen judged against the standards of soldiery duty.
Two years ago, Lieutenant Colonel Simon Banton, Commanding Officer of 2nd Battalion The Mercian Regiment (Worcesters and Foresters), was among a group of soldiers and RAF personnel invited to a production of Henry V courtesy of the Royal Shakespeare Company. “I think Henry V has huge resonances for the modern soldier,” he said after the performance. “The summons to blood, and the band of brothers’ idea. There are times when soldiers are facing the worst of situations and it’s to their mates on their left and right they look. They need to believe that their friends will be there with them when they go into danger.”
War plays a big part in Shakespeare’s four biggest tragedies – Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and ‘the Scottish Play’. OK, these may be stories about the ethics of revenge, of social caste, loyalty, race and ambition, but Hamlet is nevertheless a warrior prince promised a full military funeral, Othello is employed by the Venetian state precisely because of his brilliant leadership in battle, and the actions of both King Lear and Macbeth ultimately lead to brutal civil war.
ON A WAR FOOTING
None of this should be surprising; war – or the threat of it – was an everyday part of the Elizabethan and Jacobean world. Surrounded by numerous hostile European neighbours, England was also just a few generations removed from a cruel civil war quaintly called the War of the Roses. It would’ve been surprising if theatre – the only real public art form of the time – hadn’t been strongly focused on military matters.
Of course, you can say that the reality of war is distanced in such plays. Shakespeare’s big tragedies are largely located within royal palaces, forts and castles; they are populated by kings, warrior princes and chivalric commanders discussing affairs of state and military strategy in what is increasingly seen as a highly stylised language.
In most cases, the battles and those who fight on them are conveniently off-stage, represented at most by some sound effects or the occasional messenger and spear carrier. Only when they are required to be the sounding board of kings and generals – as in Henry V – does the common soldier make it centre stage in Shakespeare, and even then they are likely to be overshadowed by a rousing speech:
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’
THE ORDINARY – AND NOT SO ORDINARY – SOLDIER
Such rousing speeches do happen in real life, although the fact that people still talk about Colonel Tim Collins’ quasi-Shakespearean oration in 2003 (to around 800 of his men before he led them across the Kuwait/Iraq border) suggests that they’re perhaps rarer than we might think.
In any case, given these democratic, meritocratic times in which we live, modern theatre is seldom about generals. The National Theatre of Scotland production Black Watch – a play which toured around the world to glowing reviews – is a case in point; it may tell the story of the famous regiment – and its final tour of duty in Iraq before its controversial amalgamation into the Royal Regiment of Scotland – but it’s voice is unforgettably that of the common – or, rather, uncommon – Scottish soldier.
Indeed, writer Gregory Burke deliberately dramatises the interview process he carried out while researching the play, portraying himself as a naive playwright nervously lobbing questions at a group of mocking, mistrustful and sometimes menacing ex-squaddies. These scenes in a Fife pub, deliberately counter the sweltering boredom of Camp Dogwood, where the troops’ joshing macho humour proves to be the only psychological defence against constant mortar attacks and suicide bombers.
THE REALISM OF THE UNREALISTIC
Theatre lacks the ‘realism’ we’ve come to expect in film and TV drama, but Black Watch’s potent combination of docudrama and stylised physical theatre remains a lesson in how seemingly stylised techniques – mime, for example – and inventive use of props (such as a pool table which becomes a cramped personnel carrier) can draw audiences into the story being told.
For the trick of all great theatre –Shakespeare knew this just as well as people working in British theatre today – is not to attempt some picturesque realism at all; instead, it’s to work with the unrealistic nature of what you have, to suggest rather than replicate, and let the audience’s imagination do the rest.
Take the recent National Theatre production, War Horse. Based on Michael Morpurgo’s 1982 children’s novel, the play followed the story of Joey, a country horse sold into the cavalry at the outbreak of the First World War. Given a lack of sufficiently skilled equine actors, all the main characters were portrayed using life-size puppet horses, each operated by three clearly-in-view puppeteers. Such was their skill in moving the puppets, however, audiences looked past the wooden frames and translucent skins and saw the horses they were meant to be.
Theatre will never be able to show the battlefield to the same degree as film drama or, of course, our rolling news channels. But it can certainly suggest, and the best dramas have ensured audiences leave with some understanding of the camaraderie, bravery and attitudes of those who fight.
