How Does Sherriff recreate for his audience the tension and fear suffered by the men at the front, in his play, 'Journey's End'?

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Leo Teeney

How Does Sherriff recreate for his audience the tension and fear suffered by the men at the front, in his play, ‘Journey’s End’?

‘Journey’s End’ by R.C. Sherriff is filled with very tense scenes throughout the play, which endeavours to educate the audience about the true horrors of life at the front.

Sherriff, who was wounded at Passchendaele in 1917, wrote from his experience of the war. He creates scenes that are very realistic, and because of his experiences, it helps the audience to believe the play more and understand the difficulties the soldiers faced.

The title, ‘Journey’s End’ creates a negative image immediately. It implies death, the end of life and the loss of innocence. The War was the end of life as people knew it, due to the massive loss of life and the death of most of a generation. Almost everyone lost someone that they knew and the War affected people in a way that no previous wars had.

The setting of the play is in the British trenches days before the massive German assault at St. Quentin, in 1918. It is against this threatening and tense backdrop that the play opens. It runs across only four days so there can be more detail put in about the day-to-day routines of the soldiers without the play becoming too prolonged. It is these minute details that cause some of the tension, like the extra detail put in about the conditions, which may have been omitted if the play was set over a longer period of time.

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When the audience sees the set for the first time, they can start to feel the mood of the play. The set is quite dim, as the stage directions state, “flames of candles,” and, “gloomy tunnels,” showing the brooding atmosphere in the dark, dank trenches. Another source of tension made apparent through stage directions is sound effects. The stage directions describe, “Earth walls deaden the sounds of war,” as the shelling and machine gun fire were a constant reminder for the soldiers of the doom that hung over them. Tension is further created from the fact that there is the ...

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