To start off with, people believe that they would be fighting the glorious war, which would last no longer than Christmas 1914. When recruiting stations opened in Britain, men came flooding in to join the army because they believed they were fighting for King and country, and that the war would be over so quickly that if they did not join up straight away, they would miss their chance to be part of the glorious cause.
Christmas 1914 came and the war was still being fought ferociously with no sign of it coming to an end. Many people had died and many others had been wounded. Volunteers were becoming fewer and fewer as more about the war began to leak out. Finally, in 1916, conscription was introduced, so every healthy man between 18 and 41 had to fight. The war had become even more ferocious and bloody. More people were dying every day, and on one day, the 1st July 1916, over one million people died at the battle of the Somme.
After the Somme, the Germans never really recovered, which led to them surrendering in 1918. Millions of people died during World War 1, but others, including R.C.Sherriff lived to tell people what really happened.
After the end of the war, and well into the mid 1920’s people did not talk about the war, they were just glad that it was over. After many years people did eventually start talking about the war again, but in terms of reality, not the terms of propaganda. R.C.Sherriff decided to use his journal that he had made in the trenches to write a play of the reality of the life of the officers in the war. He based the characters on people from his own life as a captain in the British army. His truth about life in the war was what made the play such a great success, because people, who had finally come to terms with the loss of family and friends, wanted to know what the life in the war was really like, not the luxury that it was when being advertised as by the government.
In this look into R.C.Sherriff’s ‘Journey’s End’, I intend to look at the message that Sherriff was trying to put across, and whether the way he did it was successful, or did the British public just enjoy Journey’s End as a good, interesting play?
About ‘Journey’s End’
R.C.Sherriff originally wrote ‘Journey’s End’ as a play to raise funds for his rowing club. The rowing club rejected his play, for it was too complicated for the members to perform. Sherriff had an interest in amateur theatricals, so he spoke to different groups to see if they would perform his play. After rejection from many different groups, the Incorporated Stage Society finally accepted his play and gave it a single Sunday evening performance. This went ahead on the 9th December 1928, 10 years after the end of the war. The cast was:
Stanhope Laurence Olivier
Osborne George Zucco
Trotter Melville Cooper
Hibbert Robert Speaight
Raleigh Maurice Evans
The Colonel H. G. Stoker
The Company Sergeant Major Percy Walsh
Mason Alexander Field
Hardy David Horne
German Soldier Geoffrey Wincott
The play went well, and G. B. Shaw was adamant that it should be performed at the Savoy Theatre. Just over a month after the original performance took place, a showing was put on at the Savoy on the 21st January 1929, produced by Maurice Browne.
The Savoy Theatres production of ‘Journey’s End’ was so successful that it made over 600 performances in two years and tickets were sold out months in advance.
What is the setting of ‘Journey’s End’?
R.C.Sherriff used war for the theme of his play, because the members of his rowing club were male, and there were no females in the war. Sherriff set his play in a trench dugout, near St. Quentins. The play is about the few days leading up to the Kaiserschlact, the Germans final large offensive.
The characters know that dying is inevitable so instead of complaining, they do not mention death; they avoid talking about any issue to do with the war. An example of this is on page 70 just before Osborne and Raleigh make the raid on the German trenches. Raleigh is a relatively new officer and is rather excited about being picked to make the raid, so talks about nothing but the raid. Osborne is a more experienced officer and is trying to avoid talking about the raid as we can see when he goes off on a different subject at every available opportunity. In the end he starts reciting Lewis Carroll’s poem ‘The Walrus said’. On the line of: ‘and whether pigs have wings’, Osborne says ‘we’re off, lets talk about pigs’. This shows how much he wants to avoid talking about the war.
The officers also talk about their homes, and what they would do if they were there. When talking about their homes, the officers never talk about them in a bad way, because they would much prefer to be at home, than fighting the war, however they are unable to be at home with loved ones, so the men talk about their homes and pretend and wish that they were there.
Another subject that the men tried to avoid was death. This was so they were not afraid of seeing people killed, knowing that their turn would come soon enough. When someone had died, instead of confronting the issue, the officers would tell the men that the dead person had ‘gone west’. The reason that the officers said this was so the men were not too scared to go over the parapet of the trench into no-mans land, when it was time for them to make an attack.
The trenches were not the cleanest places for the men or officers to be. This is portrayed when Trotter says, “have your revolver to shoot rats”, showing that the dugout and trenches have rats in them, and rats like to live in dirty places. It would have been difficult for R. C. Sherriff to show this on stage, because the director could not have had live rats running about on stage, but he may have had squeaking and scuffling on a soundtrack in the background. This would create an image in the audiences mind, even though they would not be able to see the rats, or any other creatures inhabiting the trenches and dugouts.
Differences between the original ‘Journey’s End’ and the 1995 BBC production:
In the original ‘Journey’s End’, the director would not have been able to show certain scenes on the stage, such as it would not be possible to have live lice or rats running around on stage, so this would have had to been shown through the characters speech, and through a soundtrack that would be played in the background.
The play is completely staged in the dugout, and although the characters go up into the trench, the audience never get to see it. In this way the audience do not see the raid, where Osborne dies, or any of the other characters dying at the end of the play, although we do see the dugout collapse on an already dead Raleigh. It is probably a good thing that ‘Journey’s End’ was shown only in the dugout, for it would be impossible to show the dead bodies and mud, that was sometimes knee deep, on the stage.
Although there were drawbacks of having ‘Journey’s End’ produced on stage, such as not being able to have rats running about, or not being able to show much detail of the dugout, there were also many advantages such as dim and flashing light effects which would create the idea of having shells, grenades, and other explosive items blowing the trench to bits. A soundtrack would also play to create different sound effects including rats scuffling about and squeaking, explosives blowing up and shots being fired, all of which would have been very common in World War 1.
In the original production of ‘Journey’s End’ the director did not show the raid that was performed by Osborne and Raleigh, and all we hear of Osborne’s death is
COLONEL: Oh – er- what about the raiding party- are they all back safely?
STANHOPE: Did you expect them to be all safely back, sir?
COLONEL: Oh - er – what – er –
STANHOPE: Four men and Raleigh came safely back, sir.
COLONEL: Oh, I say, I’m sorry! That’s – six men and – er – Osborne
STANHOPE: Yes, sir.
COLONEL: I’m very sorry, poor Osborne.
STANHOPE: Still it’ll be awfully nice if the Brigadiers pleased.
COLONEL: Don’t be silly, Stanhope. Do you – er – know what happened to Osborne?
STANHOPE: A hand-grenade – while he was waiting for Raleigh
(Page 76)
This is all that we hear of Osborne’s death until Raleigh argues with Stanhope at dinner about him being able to drink champagne and smoke cigars while Osborne is laying dead out in no-mans land. Stanhope then replies
STANHOPE: My God! You bloody little swine! You think I don’t care – you think you’re the only soul that cares!
RALEIGH: And yet you can sit there and drink champagne – and smoke cigars –
STANHOPE: The one man I could trust – my best friend – the one man I could talk to as man to man – who understood everything – and you think I don’t care –
RALEIGH: But how can you when -?
STANHOPE: To forget, you little fool – to forget! D’you understand? To forget! You think there’s no limit to what a man can bear?
(Page 85)
This is the last we hear of Osborne. The way that Stanhope reacts is a sign of the pressure that he is under. Another sign is the amount of alcohol that he drinks. On page twelve it reads
HARDY: How is the dear boy? Drinking like a fish as usual?
OSBORNE: Why do you say that?
HARDY: Well, damn it, it’s just the natural thing to ask about Stanhope [He pauses and looks curiously at Osborne.] Poor old man. It must be pretty rotten for him, and you, such a quiet sober old thing.
OSBORNE: He’s a long way the best company commander we’ve got.
HARDY: Oh he’s a good chap, I know. But I never did see a youngster put away the whisky as he does. D’you know, the last time we were out resting at Valennes he came to supper with us and drank a whole bottle in one hour fourteen minutes – we timed him.
This is a contradiction of what Raleigh knew of him when he was at school Stanhope apparently gave some students ‘a dozen’ (twelve hits) with the cricket stumps just for having a bottle of whisky. (Page 19)
In the 1995 BBC television production of ‘Journey’s End’, instead of performing the raid offstage, we see the whole event, including Osborne being killed by a hand grenade. This would not have been possible on stage, but due too advance computer technology, it is possible to see certain scenes that would not have been able to be performed on stage, without someone being badly injured, but are able to be performed in the form of film. While being performed on stage, the audience would have to imagine some of the horrors i.e. a soldier being killed, whereas in the film it is possible for the audience to see it.
The main difference with the two productions is that in the 1995 BBC film production, we see all that goes on, in the trenches, the dugout, and in the colonels headquarters, however in the original stage version, all that is seen is the things that go on in the dugout. We do not see the men being mowed down by machine guns, and we do not see Stanhope talking to the colonel, trying to persuade him to call the raid off. In the original, the play was about how a group of six officers lived together, and how they reacted when one of them died. In the BBC version, the play is about the same thing but with added extras such as what conditions in the trench were like.
The message of ‘Journey’s End’:
In all productions of ‘Journey’s End’, Sherriff is trying to put across the same basic message, and that is ‘war is bad’. In 1928, ten years after the war, Sherriff had his play performed, and the reason it was such a great success was that it told the truth about war, it did not give the idea that war was in any way glorious, it showed that war was a bad and brutal affair, and that nothing good came out of it.
The way in which Sherriff does this is by building up a kind of relationship between us and the characters, and then at the end of the play, all the characters we get to know throughout the play, get killed. The characters seem to know that this is going to happen to them, so to keep themselves sane, they use black humour about other people that died, for instance on page 10, Osborne and Hardy are talking about a dugout that was blown up and collapsed on the men. Hardy is saying that the men were very annoyed at getting dirt in their tea, however the dugout collapsing would have killed the men. Osborne acknowledges this by saying that there is nothing worse than having dirt in your tea. In World War 1, black humour like this would be common between the officers, for two reasons.
1: In the officers’ opinion, the standard soldier was a lower class than himself, and it did not matter if he died, it was only a soldier, and it was fine to use soldiers who had died in ‘jokes’.
2: The black humour helped the officers to keep sane and stop them going mad with fear of death.
He also avoids talking about the war throughout the book, so it shows that there is so much fear inside the characters, that they are scared of the thought of that fear.
In my opinion ‘Journey’s End’ is a good play with a simple meaning, ‘no good comes out of war’. With this play, Sherriff managed to help fuel the peace movement, to minimise violence. Unfortunately, World War 2 started, killing many people, however after Germany’s second downfall, the peace movement managed to help raise Germany to the country she is today. We have a lot to thank R.C.Sherriff for, not only did he write us many great plays, and screenplays, he also fuelled the peace movement so that violence on a world scale like in the World Wars, is highly unlikely today.
Bibliography:
Journey’s End R.C.Sherriff
Journey’s End York Notes Amazon publishing Ltd
www.penguinpublishing.co.uk
www.coursework.info
www.courseworkbank.com
www.google.com
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www.londonplaygroup.co.uk