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 play most central to AQA Paper 2, Option 2A is R.C. Sherriff's Journey's End (1928/29) — a naturalistic tragedy written by a veteran of the war it depicts. Set beside it, Joan Littlewood's satirical musical Oh! What a Lovely War (1963) offers a radically opposed theory of how the stage should handle the conflict. Together they map the two poles of war drama: the empathetic and the critical, the tragic and the satirical.

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Spec Mapping: Where This Sits in Paper 2

This is Paper 2 of AQA A-Level English Literature A (7712), Texts in Shared Contexts, Option 2A: WW1 and its Aftermath. Drama is examined in the open-book Section A comparison alongside poetry and prose. The objectives, with their typical weighting for this material:

Assessment Objective	What it rewards	Relevance to this lesson
AO1	Coherent, terminologically precise argument	Handling dramatic terms — unity of place, offstage action, dramatic irony, the volta of a scene
AO2 (dominant here)	Analysis of how meaning is shaped by dramatic form, structure, staging	The single dugout; sound design; the gap between school register and lethal situation; Brechtian estrangement
AO3	Significance of contexts of production and reception	Sherriff as wounded veteran writing in the 1920s; Littlewood's 1963 anti-establishment moment
AO4	Connections across literary texts	Journey's End beside the trench poets; the Colonel beside Sassoon's "The General"
AO5	Different interpretations	Empathy versus critical distance; whether artistic truth requires historical accuracy

AO2 is dominant because the central interpretative task with drama is to read theatrical meaning — what the set, the offstage event, the sound cue, the silence, and the audience's own position in the auditorium do — rather than treating the playscript as a novel in dialogue. The commonest weakness in exam responses on drama is to analyse what characters say while ignoring how the stage means. The discipline of this lesson is to keep returning to the medium: this is a play, and its form is theatrical.

Quotation caution (in-copyright drama): Journey's End remains in copyright, and study materials have circulated inaccurate micro-quotations of its dialogue. This lesson therefore analyses its scenes, structure, and staging rather than relying on verbatim lines. When you study your set edition, quote only short phrases you have checked against the printed text; a confident paraphrase of a scene's effect scores better than a misremembered line.

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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. The strongest answers treat these constraints as resources: the offstage attack is more terrible because it is unseen.

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R.C. Sherriff: Journey's End (1928/29)

Journey's End is the most performed and most studied WW1 play. Written by Sherriff — himself a veteran who served as an officer and was wounded near Ypres in 1917 — it was initially rejected by London managements who believed audiences would not pay to watch a war play with no female roles and no love interest. Its success, when it finally reached the West End in 1929 (with the young Laurence Olivier as Stanhope in an early staging), was immediate and overwhelming, and it became one of the defining theatrical events of the inter-war "war books boom."

Setting and Structure

Element	Detail
Setting	A single dugout in the British front-line trenches near St Quentin, March 1918, during the build-up to the German Spring Offensive
Time span	A few days — from the arrival of the young 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 significant happens offstage — reported, anticipated, or implied
Act structure	The play builds across its acts toward two catastrophes: the raid that kills Osborne, and the dawn attack that destroys the company. The known, approaching offensive hangs over every scene

The classical-feeling unity of place is the play's master decision, and a strong answer will treat it as meaning rather than convenience. By trapping the audience in the dugout for the entire running time, Sherriff makes us share the soldiers' condition exactly: we, too, can only wait, listen, and dread; we, too, never see the thing we fear. The set is at once a domestic interior — men eat, sleep, joke, and drink there — and a tomb-in-waiting, and the collapse of that space at the close literalises the obliteration the whole play has anticipated.

Characters

Character	Role	Significance
Captain Stanhope	Company commander; barely into his twenties; a public-school sportsman turned heavy drinker	The central figure. Stanhope holds himself together through willpower and whisky; the strain of prolonged command has hollowed him out. His disintegration is the play's emotional arc
2nd Lt Raleigh	A new officer, just out of school; hero-worships Stanhope, whom he knew as an older boy and as his sister's sweetheart	Raleigh's innocence and eagerness throw Stanhope's exhaustion into relief. His death in the final scene is the play's devastating climax
Lt Osborne ("Uncle")	Stanhope's second-in-command; older, calm, a former schoolmaster	The moral centre of the play. Steady, kind, and quietly courageous, he is sent on the raid and killed; his death breaks Stanhope's last reserves
2nd Lt Trotter	Cheerful, lower-middle-class, preoccupied with food and his garden	His ordinariness humanises the officers and gently exposes the class assumptions of the others
2nd Lt Hibbert	A young officer who pleads illness to be sent home	Embodies the play's hardest question — where the line falls between genuine breakdown and "funk," and how command polices it
Private Mason	The company cook	His battles with unpromising rations provide dark comedy and a thread of domestic normality
The Colonel	Orders the raid that kills Osborne	Represents the military hierarchy; his detached relief at the raid's "success," set against the cost, recalls the oblivious commander of Sassoon's "The General"

Key Themes

Theme	How It Is Explored
Masculinity under pressure	The play anatomises the public-school code — courage, duty, "playing the game," the stiff upper lip — and shows how it both sustains and destroys the officers who live by it. Stanhope's drinking is the hidden cost of maintaining the mask of command
Class	The officers are overwhelmingly public-school men, and the breezy idiom of the school persists incongruously in the trenches. Trotter's different background quietly registers the class structure of the wartime army
Cowardice, breakdown, and "funk"	Hibbert's attempt to escape via sickness forces the play's central ethical confrontation. Stanhope's response — coercive yet compassionate, drawing on his own concealed terror — refuses any easy line between courage and collapse
The futility of command	The raid is militarily trivial — its purpose is merely to seize a prisoner for identification — yet it is timed and ordered from above with no regard for the men who must die in it. Osborne is, in effect, expended for information
Comradeship and the unspoken	The bonds between the men — Stanhope and Osborne, Stanhope and Raleigh — are the play's emotional core, and they are largely inexpressible. The play is built out of what the characters cannot bring themselves to say

AO2 close analysis (de-quoted, in-copyright): Two scenes repay particular attention. First, the quiet exchange between Osborne and Raleigh shortly before the raid: Sherriff has the two men deliberately turn the conversation to ordinary, peacetime things — home, food, small comforts — precisely because the enormity of what is coming cannot be addressed directly. The pathos lies in the evasion: the audience supplies the dread the characters refuse to name, and the very banality of the talk becomes unbearable because both men, and we, know what dawn will bring. Second, the play's ending: Stanhope, who has been unable to voice tenderness throughout, tends the dying Raleigh with a gentleness the war has otherwise made impossible; then the bombardment rises, the dugout is struck, and the lights go. Sherriff withholds any consolatory speech. The meaning is carried by gesture, sound, and darkness rather than by words — a fundamentally theatrical climax that no paraphrase of dialogue can capture, and which is why analysing this play means analysing its staging.

Dramatic Techniques

Technique	Analysis
The single set	The dugout is at once home and prison. The men live their domestic life in the very space from which they must climb to fight and die; the confinement enacts the claustrophobia of trench existence
Offstage action	The decisive events — the raid, the dawn attack, Osborne's death, Raleigh's wounding — all occur offstage. Like the men, the audience can only hear and wait, which generates an almost unbearable suspense and refuses war the dignity of spectacle
Sound design	Sherriff's stage directions specify the noise of shelling and machine-gun fire intruding into the dugout. The war is made present through sound without ever being shown, so that violence presses on the domestic space from outside
Register and irony	The cheerful idiom of the public school persists in a lethal setting, and the gap between the two is a source of both bleak comedy and pathos — language designed for the playing field stretched across the edge of death
Understatement	The English habit of saying less than one means is the play's keynote. Characters speak of the future, of small pleasures, of "after the war," in tones that the audience knows to be hollow — the restraint magnifying rather than muting the grief
Structural irony	Raleigh arrives full of hero-worship for a Stanhope who no longer exists; the gap between the remembered schoolboy hero and the broken commander structures the whole play and culminates in their final, wordless reconciliation over Raleigh's deathbed

The Hardest Case: Hibbert and the Policing of Courage

The Hibbert subplot is where Journey's End does its most uncomfortable thinking, and it repays close attention because it refuses the audience an easy moral position. Hibbert claims neuralgia and begs to be sent down the line; Stanhope, who knows the symptoms because he shares them, must decide whether this is genuine illness or "funk" — and the play deliberately leaves the distinction unstable. Sherriff's handling is subtle: Stanhope's response is at once coercive (he threatens, he blocks Hibbert's escape) and profoundly compassionate (he confesses his own terror, and effectively offers to endure the coming attack alongside him). The scene dramatises, from the inside, the very mechanism by which the army manufactured "courage" — not as a natural virtue but as a thing imposed, shamed, and willed into being by men who were themselves barely holding on. Crucially, Sherriff, a veteran, neither condemns Hibbert as a coward nor sentimentalises him as a victim; he shows the predicament whole. This is where the play most clearly complicates rather than simply restates the protest tradition: Sassoon's satire indicts the system from outside, but Sherriff puts the audience inside the impossible position of the man who must keep other men at their posts, and lets the ethical weight of that fall on a sympathetic figure. A strong answer will use Hibbert to argue that the play's vision of the public-school code — courage, duty, the suppression of fear — is genuinely tragic: the code sustains the company and destroys the men who uphold it, and the same willpower that makes Stanhope a fine officer is consuming him before our eyes.

AO2 / AO3 Link: The Hibbert scene is also a precise contextual document. The line between "shell shock" and "cowardice" that Stanhope is forced to draw is exactly the line that, for ordinary soldiers, could mean the difference between hospital and the firing squad. Reading the scene's dramatic tension together with its historical charge — the army's lethal policing of breakdown — fuses AO2 and AO3 in the way the higher bands reward.

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Joan Littlewood: Oh! What a Lovely War (1963)

Oh! What a Lovely War is a radically different kind of war drama — a satirical musical, developed through improvisation by Theatre Workshop at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, under Joan Littlewood's direction. It is the natural foil to Journey's End and an ideal AO4 partner: where Sherriff immerses, Littlewood estranges.

Form and Method