All _______ on the Western Front (You Decide) (NYC/play)
AFTER seeing the first 1929 production of the great World War I drama “Journey’s End,” the journalist J. B. Priestly called it “the strongest pleas for peace I know.” A reviewer for The Daily Mirror in London called it “a much better argument against war than sentimental propaganda plays,” and the novelist Hugh Walpole said it “managed to hit the hardest blow in its swollen stomach that war has yet had.”
More than 75 years later a revival of the play, by R. C. Sherriff, is opening on Broadway against the backdrop of disillusion with the war in Iraq, and the play’s antiwar reputation remains strong. The British equivalent of CliffsNotes, the Methuen study guide, baldly asserts that “Journey’s End” is “a message-carrying play with a definite purpose in mind: to make people ponder the stupidity and horrors of war.” So it may come as a surprise that the playwright insisted that his work was nothing of the kind.
Mr. Sherriff, who maintained this view to the end of his life, thought he was celebrating the men with whom he had fought. At the moment of his success — “Journey’s End” made him independently rich — he insisted: “I have not written this play as a piece of propaganda. And certainly not as propaganda for peace.”
Nevertheless his producer, Maurice Browne, a pacifist and conscientious objector who spent World War I in America, took the opposite view. Mr. Browne’s enthusiasm for the play baffled Mr. Sherriff, who wrote, 40 years on, that he had thought Mr. Browne “would have had a violent revulsion against a war play in which not a word is spoken against the war, in which no word of condemnation was uttered by any of its characters.” Yet over the years Mr. Browne’s interpretation has generally prevailed. Which one has the better case?
Little known in the United States, “Journey’s End” has always been popular in Britain, where it is still widely read and performed in schools....
Read entire article at NYT
More than 75 years later a revival of the play, by R. C. Sherriff, is opening on Broadway against the backdrop of disillusion with the war in Iraq, and the play’s antiwar reputation remains strong. The British equivalent of CliffsNotes, the Methuen study guide, baldly asserts that “Journey’s End” is “a message-carrying play with a definite purpose in mind: to make people ponder the stupidity and horrors of war.” So it may come as a surprise that the playwright insisted that his work was nothing of the kind.
Mr. Sherriff, who maintained this view to the end of his life, thought he was celebrating the men with whom he had fought. At the moment of his success — “Journey’s End” made him independently rich — he insisted: “I have not written this play as a piece of propaganda. And certainly not as propaganda for peace.”
Nevertheless his producer, Maurice Browne, a pacifist and conscientious objector who spent World War I in America, took the opposite view. Mr. Browne’s enthusiasm for the play baffled Mr. Sherriff, who wrote, 40 years on, that he had thought Mr. Browne “would have had a violent revulsion against a war play in which not a word is spoken against the war, in which no word of condemnation was uttered by any of its characters.” Yet over the years Mr. Browne’s interpretation has generally prevailed. Which one has the better case?
Little known in the United States, “Journey’s End” has always been popular in Britain, where it is still widely read and performed in schools....