Journey's End Review

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                                                         Journey’s End Review

Journey's End by RC Sheriff is based on Sheriff’s own experience during the First World War and is set on the Western Front in March 1918, in the days leading up to a big German offensive.

The play is confined throughout to a claustrophobic dug-out immediately behind the frontline trenches and focuses mainly on five company officers. They range from the young Captain, Stanhope, a respected leader who drowns himself with whisky to erase a horrible sense of panic and pain that haunts him daily, to a second lieutenant, Hibbert, who is a admittedly a complete coward and is desperate to escape the horror of trench life around him.

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I found that the play started very slowly and during the first half not much happened. But there are long stretches in war when very little happens either and the play manages to capture the tension of anxious waiting and nervous conversations, while telling us the background of the characters' lives and the tensions between them.

As a result, when battle starts with first with a raid on enemy lines, then with the big German attack - I felt as if I knew all the characters well and I genuinely cared about what happened to them all.

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