Drama and WW1

The dramatic representation of the First World War poses distinctive challenges. How do you stage trench warfare? How do you represent mass death in a medium designed for living bodies? How do you create the sounds, smells, and physical sensations of combat in a theatre? The plays that have attempted to answer these questions — from R.C. Sherriff's Journey's End (1928) to Joan Littlewood's Oh! What a Lovely War (1963) — represent some of the most innovative and powerful responses to the conflict.

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The Challenges of Staging War

Challenge	Detail
Scale	War involves millions of people, vast landscapes, and events that span years. The stage is small, intimate, and bounded by time
Violence	The most devastating events of the war — artillery bombardment, gas attacks, machine-gun fire — are almost impossible to represent realistically on stage
The body	Drama uses living actors. The central reality of war — death, injury, the destruction of the body — is profoundly difficult to represent with performers who must get up and take a bow at the end
Time	A play typically covers hours or days. The war lasted four years. Dramatic time must be compressed, focused, or fragmented
Perspective	Poetry can be the voice of a single speaker; the novel can enter multiple minds. Drama must create perspective through dialogue, action, and staging

AO2 Insight: The very limitations of the stage can become strengths. Confinement to a single set (as in Journey's End) can enact the claustrophobia of the trenches. The presence of living bodies makes death more shocking, not less. The conventions of theatrical performance — curtain calls, interval drinks, the audience's comfortable seats — create an ironic gap between the world of the play and the world of the auditorium.

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R.C. Sherriff: Journey's End (1928)

Journey's End is the most performed and most studied WW1 play. Written by Sherriff — himself a veteran who was wounded at Passchendaele — it was initially rejected by London producers who believed audiences would not want to watch a war play. Its success, when it finally reached the stage in 1929, was immediate and overwhelming.

Setting and Structure

Element	Detail
Setting	A single dugout in the British front line trenches, March 1918, during the lead-up to the German Spring Offensive
Time span	Four days — from the arrival of 2nd Lieutenant Raleigh to the final German attack
Unity of place	The entire play takes place in the dugout. The audience never sees No Man's Land, the enemy, or the attack. Everything happens offstage — reported, anticipated, or implied

Characters

Character	Role	Significance
Captain Stanhope	Company commander; 21 years old; a public-school hero turned alcoholic	The central figure. Stanhope holds himself together through willpower and whisky. His breakdown is the play's emotional arc
2nd Lt Raleigh	New officer; 18 years old; hero-worships Stanhope from school	Raleigh's innocence and enthusiasm contrast with Stanhope's exhaustion. His death in the final scene is the play's devastating climax
Lt Osborne ("Uncle")	Stanhope's second-in-command; older, calm, bookish	The moral centre of the play. His death during a raid ordered by the Colonel is the event that breaks Stanhope's composure
2nd Lt Trotter	Cheerful, working-class, preoccupied with food	Provides comic relief; his ordinariness humanises the officers
Private Mason	The company cook	His struggles with unappetising food provide dark comedy
The Colonel	Orders the raid that kills Osborne	Represents the military hierarchy; his casual ordering of a suicidal mission echoes Sassoon's "The General"

Key Themes

Theme	How It Is Explored
Masculinity under pressure	The play examines the code of the English public school — courage, duty, "playing the game" — and shows how it simultaneously sustains and destroys the officers who live by it. Stanhope's alcoholism is the price of maintaining the mask
Class	The officers are overwhelmingly public-school men. The language of the school — "ripping," "absolutely top-hole" — persists in the trenches, creating a bizarre disconnect between register and situation
The futility of command	The raid ordered by the Colonel is militarily pointless — its only purpose is to capture a German soldier for identification. Osborne dies for nothing. The Colonel's breezy "I'm awfully glad" when told the raid has "succeeded" is one of the play's most devastating moments
Comradeship	The relationships between the officers — particularly Stanhope and Osborne, and Stanhope and Raleigh — are the play's emotional centre. These relationships are deeper, more intimate, and more complex than the men can articulate
What cannot be said	The play is defined by its silences — what the characters cannot or will not express. Stanhope's feelings for Raleigh, Osborne's fear, the men's awareness of their likely deaths — all are present but unspoken

Dramatic Techniques