★★

“The play is a streamlined version of the book, but this production does not bring out the pain and inhumanity of war”

Alexandra Palace Theatre is the final venue for Birdsong, after its long regional UK tour.

Alexandra Palace Theatre is London’s oldest new theatre, originally built in 1875, falling into disrepair and eventually re-opening in 2018 after a major refurbishment bringing the huge auditorium back to life in arrested decay. It is a big theatre to fill and with a lot of the seating on the flat it is lucky the stage is high. The slopping seats are a long way back from the stage in this vast space. But it is beautiful and majestic.

Now to Birdsong… This production marks the thirtieth anniversary of Sebastian Faulks’s epic and searing WWI novel – and fifteen years since the West End premiere of the stage adaptation by Rachel Wagstaff.

After seven months on the road, this current production is tired and needs to be put to sleep. The cast, most playing several characters with several dodgy accents, have been allowed to stretch out their lines and pauses – it needed desperate tightening by the director Alastair Whatley, and at over three hours this production is too long.

The opening scene is in present day Amiens, France, with a young man looking for a WWI soldier’s grave. It then moves to the bourgeois charm of pre-war Amiens where Stephen Wraysford (James Esler) is a guest staying with René Azaire (Sargon Yelda), his wife Isabelle (Charlie Russell) and his teenage daughter Lisette (Gracie Follows) to learn about Azaire’s textile factory. The factory is failing, the workers are rebelling, the Azaire’s marriage is toxic, and Stephen starts a passionate affair with the unhappy Isabelle. The affair is discovered and Act One closes with them running away together.

Act Two opens in the 1916 trenches in France, with hammy acting and singing Hold Your Hand Out Naughty Boy, a music hall favourite, sung by the sappers and infantrymen of the British Army, covered in mud and showing their camaraderie. We meet various characters including Jack Firebrace (Max Bowden) a sapper who digs the dangerous tunnels under the battlefields, and learns of his young son John’s death, in a letter from home. Stephen is now a lonely, cold-hearted lieutenant, who dissects dead rats. In flash backs we discover that Isabelle had left him. Firebrace saves Stephen’s life when one of the tunnels collapses in an explosion. The act ends in silhouette as the soldiers climb up the ladders out of the trenches into No Man’s Land and certain death.

Act Three in the tail end of the war, Stephen and Firebrace are again trapped underground. This time Stephen desperately tries to save Firebrace’s life, but he dies before a German Jewish soldier breaks through – it is the end of the war and peace is above ground. The play bookends back to the present day and we discover that the young man searching for the soldier’s grave has been looking for Jack Firebrace’s grave; and he is in fact John (yes named after Jack’s dead son), Stephen’s grandson.

The set by Richard Kent, works well to create multiple locations including the claustrophobic underground tunnels. The lighting tonight was maybe too dark and there was continuous smoke billowing, which worked for the factory and battle scenes but not for the gentle French countryside and house scenes.

The theatre acoustics are flat, meaning the cast are heavily miked with individual head mikes and the sound is overly loud. The microphones also pick up the fact that the maid’s shoes do not have rubbered soles, and on this stage her noisy clackety clack steps were heard throughout, especially when she exited stage left and ran round backstage to make a quick re-entrance stage right.

There was no chemistry between lovers Isabelle and Stephen, and in their graphic sex scene Stephen is naked, as any ardent lover should be. However, I was left wondering where his mike pack might be hidden.

Birdsong ends with the sounds of the soaring titular birdsong.

The play is a streamlined version of the book, but this production does not bring out the pain and inhumanity of war, or dying and surviving in a living hell, nor the horrific psychological effects of war.

Read the book.

AN ALPINE SYMPHONY

Royal Festival Hall

★★★★

“An Alpine Symphony is a sonic spectacular”

The London Philharmonic Orchestra were in fine form for this evening’s An Alpine Symphony.

The evening opened with the European premiere of Pasajes (Passages – 2022), composed by LPO Composer-in-Residence Tania León. The composer describes the 14-minute piece as “flashes in my memory”. A musical experience of León’s Cuban childhood memories and sounds including birdsong and the rhythm of the Carnaval. Instead of conga drums, here the kettle drums pick up the Latin American beat. The orchestra felt underused with the eight double-basses mostly plucking on one note.

Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor, Op.16 (1870) is the only concerto he completed, but it is still one of the freshest-sounding and heroically emotional piano concertos of the Romantic era. In a last-minute change of artist, tonight it was played by one of Britain’s most treasured musicians, the pianist Steven Osborne OBE, who replaced the remarkable 18-year-old Alexandra Dovgan who suddenly “had to withdraw from this concert due to visa difficulties”.

The Concerto is in three movements and opens with one of concert music’s most famous and dramatic openings, which is always breathtaking. The lyrical Adagio unfolds with just strings playing the ravishing main theme and unfolds with a deeply touching expressivity before plunging into the thrilling last movement with its beautiful flute solo (Juliette Bausor), lovely duet with piano and first cello (Kristina Blaumane) and its vigorous Norwegian folk tunes.

Osborne’s performance had him bouncing off his seat and with his staccato hands it was technically brilliant but, one felt that he missed the ambiguity of Grieg’s melodic contours, and in bringing out the emotions of yearning and melancholy as well as the joy and vitality – Grieg is never straightforward. At full throttle, the large orchestra slightly drowned out the piano, but you certainly felt all their emotion. In complete contrast to the Concerto, Osborne played a short encore with a gentle blues interpretation of Danny Boy.

After the interval the full London Philharmonic Orchestra, 120 stunning musicians under the baton of Principal Conductor Edward Gardner put their heart and soul into playing An Alpine Symphony, Op. 64 (1915) by Richard Strauss. The piece plays straight through, and you can literally visualise the journey up a snowy mountain from night to the sunrise, with the ascent up through the woods, past mountain pastures and waterfalls, wrong turns through thickets, going higher on to the glacier and up to the summit. Then comes the calm before the storm, then the thunder and tempest, to the descent as the sun is setting to night again. It is a massive play, and Strauss literally throws everything at this majestic piece. The French horn fanfares tonight came from an open doorway halfway to the back of the auditorium, then with a quick sprint backstage they joined the orchestra on stage. The whole orchestra is kept busy throughout; particularly the full timpani and percussion team who get to play everything from cowbells in the meadows to the incredible climactic storm atop of the mountain with wind machines, thunder sheets and symbols. The strings take up the rain and drip, drip, as the storm abates. Until then, the organ had been used more to prolong the notes of other instruments but came into its own strength towards the end as the descent begins before being joined by the deep and rich sounds of the brass section as the sun sets to night again.

I did not find the organ a comfortable instrument to listen to being played with a full orchestra. Sorry. It has such a different tone to the other instruments. But to have 120 of your band mates down below you on the stage and you hidden in between the crowded audience in the choir seats of the Royal Festival Hall, must truly be the loneliest gig in the world. Only able to see your fellow musicians and his conductor through his rear-view mirror, as his back is to them and the audience, facing a wall of organ pipes.

I loved the piece as a visual treat visualising twenty-four hours in the life of a mountain. However, it appears that Strauss might have had a different character for his symphony, drawing on the Neitzschean philosophy, writing in his diary in 1911 that he wanted “to call my Alpine Symphony, The Antichrist.” So maybe that is the answer as to why he put an organ in his symphony….

An Alpine Symphony is a sonic spectacular and the orchestra bowed to the front of the auditorium and turned and bowed low to the audience in the choir seats behind them – but I like to think they were bowing to their lonely fellow musician up top on the organ.

World class playing by the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

BIRDSONG

Alexandra Palace Theatre

★★

“The play is a streamlined version of the book, but this production does not bring out the pain and inhumanity of war”

BIRDSONG

Alexandra Palace Theatre

Reviewed on 28th February 2025

by Debbie Rich

Photography by Pamela Raith

Previously reviewed at this venue:

BIRDSONG

BIRDSONG

BIRDSONG

AN ALPINE SYMPHONY

Royal Festival Hall

★★★★