Horrible Histories: Frightful First World War at UK theatre
Just days after Henry Allingham, Britain’s oldest surviving First Word War veteran, was honoured by Fance as officer of the Legion d’Honneur, it’s pleasing to find a theatrical endeavour that raises awareness of that devastating conflict. The Birmingham Stage Company’s Horrible Histories series, based on Terry Deary’s books, has been delighting and enlightening families for three years. This new show and its touring companion, Woeful Second World War, tackle 20th-century events with a darker tone that acknowledges both their awful scale and their proximity to our own troubled times.
Not that there isn’t plenty of gruesome glee. Our guide, in Mark Williams’s adaptation directed by Phil Clark, is the 12-year-old Angelica, played a little too shrilly by Perry Lambert. Stuck indoors on a rainy day, she finds an old history book. Frustrated by its dry account of the Great War, she goes online in search of a version that includes “the horrible things! The terrible, truthful things!”. By some technological magic, she is sucked into the website and unable to return home until she has experienced the horrifying realities of war.
The show’s first half, with video design by Jacqueline Trousdale, engagingly mixes historical incident with human detail. The shooting of Archduke Ferdinand and the escalation of hostilities, conveyed here in a multinational boxing match, are offset by a gorily entertaining scene in a field hospital, an introduction to trench cuisine (all turnips and rock-hard, rat-nibbled bread) and a sequence exposing immoral recruitment practices in which a boy of 15 is encouraged to lie about his age and briskly signed up.
The second half is livelier still, with the introduction of 3-D special effects for which you must put on special glasses. The action becomes startlingly vivid; vermin swarm among the audience, shells explode under your nose and the doomed Lusitania cruises right into the auditorium...
Read entire article at Times (UK)
Not that there isn’t plenty of gruesome glee. Our guide, in Mark Williams’s adaptation directed by Phil Clark, is the 12-year-old Angelica, played a little too shrilly by Perry Lambert. Stuck indoors on a rainy day, she finds an old history book. Frustrated by its dry account of the Great War, she goes online in search of a version that includes “the horrible things! The terrible, truthful things!”. By some technological magic, she is sucked into the website and unable to return home until she has experienced the horrifying realities of war.
The show’s first half, with video design by Jacqueline Trousdale, engagingly mixes historical incident with human detail. The shooting of Archduke Ferdinand and the escalation of hostilities, conveyed here in a multinational boxing match, are offset by a gorily entertaining scene in a field hospital, an introduction to trench cuisine (all turnips and rock-hard, rat-nibbled bread) and a sequence exposing immoral recruitment practices in which a boy of 15 is encouraged to lie about his age and briskly signed up.
The second half is livelier still, with the introduction of 3-D special effects for which you must put on special glasses. The action becomes startlingly vivid; vermin swarm among the audience, shells explode under your nose and the doomed Lusitania cruises right into the auditorium...