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”

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.

BIRDSONG

Alexandra Palace Theatre

Reviewed on 28th February 2025

by Debbie Rich

Photography by Pamela Raith

Previously reviewed at this venue:

AN INSPECTOR CALLS | ★★★★ | September 2024

THE GLASS MENAGERIE | ★★★★ | May 2024

A CHRISTMAS CAROL: A GHOST STORY | ★★★★ | November 2023

TREASON THE MUSICAL | ★★★ | November 2023

BUGSY MALONE | ★★★★★ | December 2022

BIRDSONG

★★★★★

“to praise each element of Equus individually is unfair, because it is the tandem of these parts that makes the production truly divine.”

It isn’t uncommon to see a play emotionally move an audience – to make them feel the pathos or joy that the characters are experiencing. However, I could count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen theatre physically move an audience – to make them lean forward, gasp, and let their jaws hang for extended periods of time. It’s a testament to the power of Equus, then, that the audience member sat next to me – along with many others – barely seemed to even be in their seat, so moved were they by the ferocious and sinewy stallion of a play that was taking place.

Equus centres on Alan Strang (Ethan Kai), a seventeen-year-old boy who blinded six horses over the course of one night. It rests with psychiatrist Martin Dysart (Zubin Varla) to uncover the motivation behind the crime, although in doing so he is also forced to interrogate his own beliefs on religion, passion, and purpose. The story is framed chiefly around this patient-doctor dynamic, although a host of other characters are implicated in Martin’s analysis, including Alan’s parents Dora (Doreene Blackstock) and Frank (Robert Fitch), forming a claustrophobic and tense psychological drama. But the true genius of Peter Shaffer’s writing (also of Amadeus fame) is that this paradigm is only one of the levels on which Equus operates; bubbling under the scientific surface is a much more non-secular interrogation of the social and cultural values that cultivated the environment in which Alan could be compelled to carry out such acts as he did. Shaffer’s rhetoric can be transcendentally poetic, weaving metaphor upon metaphor into a textured tapestry that cuts to the very core of what it means to be alive.

The writing never strays into the territory of being overly-ruminative though. Ned Bennet’s visceral and kinetic direction ensures that the intellectual complexities of the play are being constantly physicalised and theatricalised, with the help of Shelley Maxwell’s inventive and raw movement direction; Alan’s bed being used as a trampoline on which he is brutally flung around under a vicious strobe light, for example, serves to manifest the emotional realities of the character. This is heightened tenfold by the soul-searing strings of the sound design (Giles Thomas), the unnerving, subliminal lighting (Jessica Hung Han Yun), and the slick and stripped back set design (Georgia Lowe). The performances, too, are roundly sublime – Varla especially is revelatory, fully owning the hefty language of his many monologues, immaculately delivering the thematic nuance of the speeches with drive and agency. Credit must also go to the transportive ensemble and animal work, as many of the cast also embody horses during the play, particularly Ira Mandela Siobhan as Nugget.

However, to praise each element of Equus individually is unfair, because it is the tandem of these parts that makes the production truly divine. The quality of the writing exacerbates the direction, which exacerbates the performances, which exacerbates the design, and so on ad infinitum. It constructs a whole reactor of impeccably crafted atoms, all meteorically colliding with each other in a seamless symbiosis that creates the nuclear level of theatrical and spiritual energy that is transferred to the audience and galvanises them to move. Equus is utterly celestial.

Reviewed by Tom Francis

Photography by The Other Richard

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

Trafalgar Studios

Reviewed – 15th July 2019

★★★★★

“to praise each element of Equus individually is unfair, because it is the tandem of these parts that makes the production truly divine.”

Reviewed by Tom Francis

Photography by The Other Richard

Equus

Trafalgar Studios until 7th September

Last ten shows reviewed at this venue: