‘WHITAKER: Blue patrol to Red Leader…Blue patrol
calling Red Leader…Are you receiving me?…are you
receiving me?…Come in, Red Leader, come in Red
Leader…Over.’
This creates a feeling of insecurity in the audience, it causes them to think that Blue Patrol may be stranded and by keeping this suspense in the background of scenes, Hall controls the amount of tension within the audience; the more times Whitaker calls Red Leader with no reply, the more anxious the audience become.
The Character of Bamforth is also another excellent way Willis Hall manipulates tension in his play. Bamforth is a character who we first see as a rebel, a person who insults everyone and does not accept his ‘duty’ to his country. But as the audience get to know Bamforth, we see beneath his sarcastic tone, his arrogance and his contempt, and we see a man whose patience has been pushed to the limit. He is very aware that he has just been pulled out of normal life, and put in a world full of frustrations and apprehension. Bamforth’s background exists in the slums of East London where he grew up learning to stand up to bullies, therefore, Bamforth does not take kindly to being put under the command of men who like ordering and threatening their soldiers. This creates tension because Bamforth stands up to Johnstone and fights him, as well as constantly making snide comments that leave Johnstone and Mitchem, especially, on edge. Bamforth makes the audience aware of the war and makes the audience think that the soldiers in this war are in fact real people; these soldiers could have been members of the audience, simply pulled out of their lives and placed in the midst of battle. This concept makes the play seem increasingly real.
In the Long Short and Tall, Hall uses the speech of the characters as an effective way of manipulating tension. Immediately when faced with Macleish (the Scotsman), Evans (the Welshman), Whitaker (the Tynesider) and Bamforth (the Cockney), the audience base the characters on what they perceive to be stereotypical Scots, Welshmen, Tynesiders and Cockneys. However, Hall meant for this to happen as the characters suit their accents and therefore their stereotypes. Macleish is perceived as a tough and aggressive Scotsman.
‘MACLEISH: Are you looking for trouble Bamforth? Because if you are you can have it, and no messing.’`
Hall uses Macleish to create tension within the audience in fights between characters by his strong Scottish accent making him seem quite compelling to the audience because of their own prejudices against him.
Evans is portrayed as a typical Welshman:
‘BAMFORTH: …Only good for digging coal and singing hymns, your crummy lot.
EVANS: Shows how much you know, boy.’
This quotation contains Evans using ‘boy’ on the end of a sentence, this is a characteristic Welsh figure of speech. The quotation also proves that Hall wishes his characters to be stereotypical, the Welsh valleys, coal mining and the villages Methodist churches. . This image is reinforced by Bamforth starting a fight and Evans retaliating with an aggressive comment, showing a stereotypical Welshman’s simplicity in dealing with violence.
Whitaker is the Tynesider a North Easterner, and the stereotypical Tynesider is tough and quite assertive. An example of a Tynesider’s peculiarity of dialogue is:
‘WHITAKER: Why don’t you keep quiet, Bamforth man!’
Whitaker’s use of ‘man’ at the end of the sentence is very much like a stereotypical Tynesider would, so his accent and regional use of words creates prejudice in the audience. The audience imagines a Tynesider to be a workingman, industrial with a tough life and sarcastic sense of humour.
Bamforth is the London Cockney; he is violent and has a rude sense of humour. He uses rhyming slang and an example of his cockney figures of speech is:
‘BAMFORTH: …Show him a rice pudding and he gets the screaming ab-dabs.’
This quotation shows Bamforth insulting Whitaker; his use of cockney insults inflicting anxiety on the audience as their prejudice of Bamforth causes them to fear him, especially when he is angry.
As well as this, Hall uses slang from the Army, such as ‘…Fred Karno’s mob.’ or ‘…bint’. These slang words are unique to the soldiers and the men within the play use this type of slang with pride. This causes the audience to believe in the characters and situation a lot more than if they used formal English because the audience feels that they are being let in to an exclusive group. Using army slang also taps into some members of the audience who were in the war and remember the terms. This allows these members of the audience to connect much more successfully with Hall’s characters and they can see the conflict and hostility between the characters and be able to witness the pressure weighted on the characters more effectively.
As well as Hall’s characterisation and use of language, the actual setting of the play imposes tension on the characters and the audience receive these feelings passively. They are in a war situation so there is always that uncomfortable feeling in the back of each member of the audience’s minds. Hall also uses the soldiers’ hideout as a device of creating suspense. To begin with, the soldiers see the hideout as suspicious, they investigate it, expecting there to be Japanese soldiers waiting to ambush them. But when they find the hideout to be empty, the men and the audience think of the hideout as a sanctuary. At the end, Hall changes the hideout to a place the soldiers are trapped inside, unable to leave, unable to stay.
‘MITCHEM: …this place will be rotten with Nips…we haven’t got a snowball’s chance in Hell of getting back…’
By changing even the mood of the same set throughout the play, Hall manipulates tension to the finest point; this captures the audience’s interest in the play and makes the situation seem worse than if the soldiers were constantly changing set.
The Long and the Short and the Tall, begins with a highly tense atmosphere and ends on one too. Throughout the middle of the play, Hall manipulates tension skilfully, causing the tension to rise and fall; Hall generally chooses to have times of low tension before he plans times of high tension. This is so the audience go from calm to incredibly apprehensive, and because these are contrasting moods, the audience feel more concerned than if Hall simply had high tension throughout the entire play. The play starts with high tension, when they are checking over the hut, the audience is in suspense, asking questions like ‘is there any Japanese soldiers waiting to ambush the soldiers?’ ‘What is inside the hut?’ When the soldiers relax the tension lessens as the audience accept the hut as a hideout. Conflicts between soldiers raise the anxiety slightly but the tension is generally low until Bamforth fights with Macleish. Here the audience is kept in apprehension until Mitchem eventually takes control. Another moment of extremely high tension is when the prisoner is captured and the soldiers debate what to do with him. After these points the audience are kept slightly aware of the hostility running between several of the soldiers and feel they cannot relax completely because of the amount of tension until much later in the play. Finally, the play ends with an enormous amount of pressure and anxiety put on the audience, by doing this the play overall has a significantly greater impact on the audience.
Overall, The Long and the Short and the Tall, can be described as an extremely apprehensive play. The characters, plot and situations all add to this tension, and Hall manages to manipulate it cleverly in order to maximise the impact of tension on the audience. The characters are ingeniously created, their characteristics designed to clash with the others’. Language is used to intensify the levels of tension that can be achieved, by connecting the characters with the audience and tapping into the audience’s prejudices. War clearly is intrinsically tense and puts people on edge, yet Hall manages to deepen the anxiety about it within the audience by discussing the moral matters of war. Such as, how the murder of killing a man in war situations is masked by the war itself.
The Japanese prisoner in the Long, Short and Tall, was first treated as an obstacle, nothing more. Bamforth was even ready to kill the Japanese person at first sight, but as the soldiers got to know the inanimate, de-personal ‘enemy’, as the prisoner gradually became a person with a background and a family, it became impossible for Bamforth to kill him. The first sign of this was when the soldiers discuss the awfulness of stabbing the prisoner. They hated the thought of this because they would have to ‘look into his eyes’. In other words they believe that killing with a gun is easy because the bullet kills the person not the person shooting the gun or even the gun itself, this idea distances the murderer from the crime. In the same way, war masks the fact that thousands of people die, when there is a war, we expect there to be casualties and deaths. But because these happened in a war they seem so much less personal than if someone died in a fire or in a car crash, however the Long the Short and the Tall is saying that these are people who die in wars, not just soldiers, they are people with families, lives, friends and their own ideas about their pasts and their futures. The question Hall is trying to make the audience ask themselves through all this tension is one of human dignity; is it acceptable to kill people in a war situation? Are the soldiers who kill, murderers or people ‘doing their duty’ for their country? And lastly why should people who have been forced to abandon their lives also be forced to either kill or be killed? Is this not against even the most basic human morals?
