Brighton Year-Round 2025

Birdsong

Original Theatre Production and JAS Theatricals

Genre: Adaptation, Drama, Historical, Live Music, Mainstream Theatre, Theatre

Venue: Theatre Royal Brighton

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

Adaptations of novels count as some of the grimmest theatrical evenings you’ll come across. Dour, threadbare, energetically fatigued with a hard-working cast. And they suck out original plays. Birdsong is grim, and it sucks out air: for good reason. So stunning is this piece of theatre that even many well-made play lacks theatricality by comparison. And there’s singing. Directed by Alastair Whatley Birdsong plays at Theatre Royal till February 8^th.

Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong might well be the finest adaptation – even theatre – you’ll see all year. At three-hours-ten, it’s certainly the longest, but every minute will absorb you. If you saw the 2013 production here, Rachel Wagstaff’s original (shorter) adaptation has developed beyond all recognition.

 The story’s now one of the most familiar but still proves fresher, different to other World War One novels. Partly because after a present-day opening it spools back to Amiens in 1910, and great grand-parents. How a young Englishman, Stephen Wraysford, falls in love with Isabelle Azaire, wife of an unsympathetic factory-owner he’s been asked to visit there. We move forward to 1916. Stephen’s now a Lieutenant attached to Sappers or miners, whom we grow to care about (particularly Jack Firebrace). Then 1918, and aftermath. There’s an epic feel to this play now, landing it squarely as the successor to Oh! What a Lovely War. And the end’s breathtaking.

A defter hand infuses Wagstaff’s now three-act play. It touches on the present day at the opening of the first and third acts, which also briefly sashays through part of the finale (adding a further generation since 2009, hence great-grandparents); but doesn’t clunk at the end. It’s an outstanding vision of the narrative. 1916 doesn’t start at the beginning of Act Two, but seeps in from 1910. The same happens in the last act to 1918.

John Wraysford (later watchful strike leader Lebrun (Tama Phethean), starts narrating to Levi (avuncular Joseph Benjamin Baker) the 1910 narrative. His great-grandfather Stephen (a passionate, reserved James Esler who unbends thrillingly) arrives, an orphan dispatched by a guardian to meet nonplussed, callous factory owner Rene Azaire (Sargon Yelda, later a sympathetic Edinburgh-born Captain Gray, always bucking up his lieutenant). Though Azaire’s daughter Lisette (a winning, breathlessly excited and cast-down Gracie Follows) is attracted, it’s not her Stephen falls for. This is Isabelle, Azaire’s second wife (Charlie Russell, known for her work in The Play that Goes Wrong).

Russell like Esler shudders from reserve – mixed with fear – to love. Even when abandoned Russell’s performance is shadowed with consequence.

They bond initially over her clandestine help of the workers’ cause through Lebrun; the love-scenes are rapt and explicit (credit to intimacy and fight directors Yarit Dor and Enric Ortuno).  There’s fine work too from Roger Ringrose, thoroughly sexist paterfamilias Berard (later old-school Colonel Barclay). Stephen forms an important bond with Isabelle’s elder sister, energetic, forthright Jeanne Fourmentier (Natalie Radmelll-Quirke relishing this), who from their first acquaintance receives his prophesy of happiness and freedom. Indeed Jeanne represents a freedom not granted to other characters; and with Jeanne there’s something more.

Apart from shrinking, observant servant Marguerite (Sulin Hasso) the three other actors with minor parts emerge in 1916: Fifteen-year-old Michael Tipper (Raif Clarke, making an impact as a terrifed child), James Findlay’s cheerful Brennan, and Dave Fishley’s stentorian Turner and Military Policeman.

Baker returns on superb form as infuriating Welsh lech Evans. You sometimes want to put a mine under him. Elsewhere there’s enormous power in reserve and affect in Max Bowden’s former London Underground tunneller Jack Firebrace: both his slowly-growing bond with Stephen, whom he saves; and his tender friendship with former Sheffield miner now sapper Arthur Shaw, Phethean’s major part. They read each other’s letters aloud. Jack’s anxiety over his son, and premonitions, yields the most touching camaraderie, even relationship of the evening. If Stephen can draw and read rat entrails, Jack can draw too.

Richard Kent’s semi-abstract design is a miracle of vertical natural wood shutters, eight slats attached upstage that resemble the trenches’ slatted boards. Just once are they scaled. Here they echo green-painted ones like a French house shutter rising from below to almost meet them. That’s it, bar props, one red blossoming reveal and smoke at certain points when an Amiens bedroom morphs to a sapper’s tunnel sixty feet underground. It’s energetically minimal, lending a sweep to fluid scene-changes. Jason Taylor’s light scoops out love in one corner, clogging dust elsewhere starred with desperate mining lamps, the Somme dappled with tree shadows and birdsong, bourgeois North French interiors, grim factory corners. Dominic Bilkey’s sound dials up from delicate birdsong to deafening crumps, but its discretion is equally wondrous: there’s magical silence too. Sophie Cotton’s music, arranged by Tim Van Eyken still haunts throughout.

The cast, as indicated, is universally superb. Singing, led by cast member and music director Findlay helps raise this work of individual love to an ensemble of yearning, a plea for peace, love, ordinary lives. Faulks’ words have long morphed into Wagstaff’s (as Faulks happily acknowledges) and Wagstaff’s continual work has wrought a masterpiece of her originally fine version. A few pauses need tightening; the production slightly overruns. It hardly tells and will speed up. If you think on peace in these distracted times, love theatre, can absorb it at its most epic, then this will thrill and overwhelm you. A must-see.

Casting Director Ellie Collyer-Bristow CDG, Music Director James Findlay, Associate Director Bethany West, Military Advisor Tony Green, Dialect Coaches Frankie Aaronovitch-Bruce, James Aitken, Violinist (recording) Jessie May Smart.

Published February 6, 2025February 6, 2025 by Simon Jenner