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Birdsong

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November 19th - November 23rd

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Original Theatre & JAS Theatricals in association with Joshua Beaumont & Huw Allen, Tiny Giant Entertainment, Birdsong Productions & Wiltshire Creative

Sebastian Faulks’s

BIRDSONG

Adapted by Rachel Wagstaff

Directed by Alastair Whatley

★★★★★ ‘Riveting’ Telegraph

There is nothing more than to love and be loved.

Sebastian Faulks’s epic story of love and loss returns to the stage marking the 30th anniversary of the international best-selling novel.

The critically acclaimed show returns in a brand-new production for 2024. Telling the story of one man’s journey through an all-consuming love affair and into the horror of the First World War.

In pre-war France, a young Englishman, Stephen Wraysford, embarks on a passionate and dangerous affair with the beautiful Isabelle Azaire that turns their world upside down. As the war breaks out over the idyll of his former life, Stephen must lead his men through the carnage of the Battle of the Somme and through the sprawling tunnels that lie deep underground. Faced with the unprecedented horror of the war Stephen clings to the memory of Isabelle as his world explodes around him.

A mesmerising story of love and courage. Set both before and during the Great War.

Once seen never forgotten.

Starring award-winning actor Max Bowden, best known for the role of Ben Mitchell in EastEnders, James Esler (Litvinenko) and Charlie Russell (The Goes Wrong Show, And Then There Were None (BBC), and produced by the award-winning Original Theatre, who brought you the smash hit productions of The Mirror Crack’d by Agatha Christie, Murder in the Dark and The Habit of Art.

★★★★ ‘A staggering achievement’ Daily Mail

★★★★ ‘Uniformly excellent’ The Times

Age guidance 15+ : This production contains nudity, sexual content, strong language, themes of war, death and violence and references to abuse.

Run Time: 2hrs 55min (Including a 20 minute interval and second 10 minute interval break).

 

001_Birdsong UK Tour 2024_Pamela Raith Photography

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065_Birdsong UK Tour 2024_Pamela Raith Photography

066_Birdsong UK Tour 2024_Pamela Raith Photography

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Photo Credit: Pamela Raith

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ACCESS PERFORMANCES:

AUDIO DESCRIPTION & TOUCH TOUR

The performance on Wednesday 20th November at 2.30pm will be Audio Described.

There will also be a touch tour prior to this performance at 12pm.

Advanced booking is essential. Please contact the Box Office on 01684 892277 to book, or contact Toby Burchell (Tobyb@malvern-theatres.co.uk/01684 580939) for more information.

BSL INTERPRETED

The performance on Wednesday 20th November at 7.30pm is BSL interpreted.  For the best view of the interpreter please choose low numbered seats towards the front right-hand side of the Stalls (as you face the stage).  For further information or advice please email zoeH@malvern-theatres.co.uk or contact the Box Office on 01684 892277 (Monday – Saturday, 10.30am-8pm).

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Details

Start:

November 19th

End:

November 23rd

Event Categories:

Access, Access Performances, Audio Described, BSL Interpreted, On Stage, Plays

Venue

Festival Theatre

Grange Road
Malvern, WR14 3HB

Other

Price:

Wednesday Matinee: £35.28, £33.04, £29.68, £26.32 & £22.96
Tuesday to Thursday Evening & Saturday Matinee: £37.52, £35.28, £31.92, £28.56 & £25.20
Friday & Saturday Evening: £39.76, £37.52, £34.16, £30.80 & £27.44
Members discounts apply
Concessions £2 off
Under 26s £16.80
Prices include 12% booking fee

Show Times:

Tuesday 19th to Saturday 23rd November
Evenings at 7.30pm
Wednesday and Saturday matinees at 2.30pm

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Event Navigation

• « Autumn Term 2024: Thrive Contemporary Dance
• Autumn Term 2024: Sing it Loud! »

Event Reviews

• What's On Live - Sue Hull

  Marking the 30th anniversary of novelist Sebastian Faulks’ epic bestseller, this captivating new production of Birdsong is presented by Original Theatre in collaboration with Wiltshire Creative and JAS Theatricals.

  Written for the stage by Rachel Wagstaff and set before and during World War One, it tells a poignant story about love, loss, courage and the futility of conflict.

  In pre-war France, a young Englishman, Stephen Wraysford, embarks on a passionate but dangerous affair with Isabelle Azaire, the beautiful wife of French factory owner Rene. An extremely disagreeable character, Rene is a controlling and abusive husband who also has no regard for the welfare of his workers.

  James Esler, making his professional stage debut, is excellent as Stephen, portraying him as an exuberant and joyful young man experiencing love for the first time, while Charlie Russell brings a real sense of fragility to the role of the deeply unhappy Isabelle. The pair give compelling and believable performances as they bring their characters’ love affair to life.

  Esler then further excels, as Stephen faces the brutality of fighting in the Great War, loses his youthful innocence, and becomes an embittered soldier mourning the loss of his first love.

  The play’s focus on the horrors of fighting in the trenches, the suffering endured, and the friendships forged amid so much misery, pain, violence and death, makes Birdsong a challenge to watch. Clever use of multi-level staging - depicting the claustrophobic trenches and tunnels - presented alongside impactful sound and lighting, helps give a strong sense of what trench warfare might have felt like for the young soldiers fighting on the Somme. An evocative soundtrack, including well-known songs from the era, helps elevate the emotional intensity of the production.

  This is a lengthy play - lasting almost three hours and split into three acts - which presents a complex and emotionally powerful narrative via the perspectives of various characters. It is also the story of a young man’s extremely challenging journey, from being in his prime and revelling in a life-changing love affair, to having to endure the brutality of war, before trying to reestablish a relationship with the woman he has held in his heart throughout the whole traumatic conflict.

  All the actors give powerful performances, many playing multiple roles. Worthy of individual mention are Max Bowden and Tama Phethean, who play soldiers Jack and Arthur respectively. Their relationship as comrades is at times playful but ultimately deeply tender and supportive, offering a moving insight into the lives of young, working-class men caught up in the madness of war.

  Telling an enthralling and highly emotive story that leaves a powerful impression, Birdsong successfully intertwines the passions of a great romance with the brutal realities of fighting in the trenches for King and country. It carries a message, too, that war continues to be as inhumane today as it was back in the 1914-18 conflict, calling to mind philosopher George Santayana's famous quote: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

• The View from the Stalls

  A desperately sad but hugely effective tales of war

  Birdsong was written three decades ago by Sebastian Faulks as the second in a trilogy of novels, the others being The Girl at the Lion d'Or and Charlotte Gray.

  In the current touring production, this story of a present-day man searching war graves in France for an initially unspecified soldier uses a cast of 13 actors on a stage which is deceptively simple – mostly slatted panels on three sides and above – but which is easily adapted to tell a tale which is anything but simple.

  The first act (of three – there are two intervals during the 3-hour long show) takes place in Amiens where an Englishman called Stephen Wraysford has been despatched to look into the workings of the French textile industry under the auspices of René Azaire and his family - a thoroughly middle-class family in pre-war France which will ultimately be torn apart but not before Wraysford falls in love with Azaire’s wife Isabella. Cue a love scene which you might not be expecting…

  The second act moves the action on from 1910 to mid-World War One and the lines of the battle of the Somme, both above ground and 50 feet below ground in the tunnels where, horrendously, the blood of the dead and injured is seeping from the surface. This part entails the interaction of a number of soldiers, some obviously innocent and under-aged as in the actual action, reading letters from home to keep their spirits up. In the case of the main character Jack Firebrace, the news is not good and causes him to lose all of his faith whilst forming an inseparable bond with another soldier Arthur.

  In the final act, with the fighting becoming more desperate, the scene, especially underground, becomes ever more bleak until the inevitable happens. We discover that Wraysford survives and goes in search of his beloved Isabella. It doesn’t end well. But we do finally discover who the character at the start of the play was really looking for…

  Whether playing French characters or Army personnel, the actors are superb in their roles and bring each scene to life, with the help of some very impressive sound effects. This is wartime and never has the auditorium been shaken so much by the sound of huge explosions! The work inside the tunnels – death traps for those having to excavate them – and the depiction of the naïve and ineffective officers calmly sending their men to their death are brought into sharp relief when contrasted with the earlier happier pre-war scenes.

  This is a very different staging from when it last appeared in Malvern in 2018 but its effect is the same – a portrayal of the horror of what our soldiers went through not just one hundred years ago but in every conflict since. However, once the was is declared over and an English and German soldier encounter each other, peace reigns between them giving us hope for the future.

  This is not comfortable viewing by any means but it is most definitely something to watch to understand why, if only at the human level, we continue to commemorate those who gave their lives for us a century ago.

• British Theatre Guide - Colin Davison

  It is 1910, and an impressionable young Englishman, Stephen Wraysford, arrives in Northern France to report on his family’s possible investment in a failing textile factory owned by René Azaire, whose unfeeling treatment of his workers is matched by sexual brutality toward his wife Isabelle.

  She is secretly smuggling food to his starving employees. Stephen helps, they fall in love—prompt raunchy sex scene—and run away together.

  Fast forward six years. Lt. Wraysford is back on the Somme, haunted by the loss of more than 80 per cent of his men in a suicidal attack, in which he himself is dragged back half-dead from a shell hole. After a recovery worthy of Lazarus, he is determined to find Isabelle again, only to discover that, riven by guilt over their relationship, she first went back to her husband, now a hostage in Germany, then took a kindly German officer as her lover.

  Their story emerges many decades later through Stephen’s diaries, researched by his great grandson, but his focus is not on his war-weary, disillusioned ancestor but on Jack, a rough-and-tumble sapper, one of the ‘sewer rats’ whose job it was to tunnel 600 metres under German lines.

  The two men had built a special relationship across the well-defended lines of officers and other ranks: Stephen had let him off a likely court martial for falling asleep on sentry duty after one of the latter’s ten-hour shifts, and it was Jack who saved his CO's life by carrying him back from the battlefield.

  Telling details in the play and Alastair Whatley’s production, designed by Richard Kent, depict the transformation of the land and its people, a reactionary old councillor talking in 1910 of the Somme "untouched by generations", the red poppies in Madame Azaire’s vase, the superstitious Stephen seductively reading palms in 1910, reading the entrails of a rat in 1916.

  The most poignant moment comes as Stephen and Jack are trapped underground, and in its finely individualised portraits of ordinary men in a situation of extraordinary horror, the scenes in the trenches reminded me of R C Sherriff’s classic play Journey’s End.

  Despite its tight dialogue and many virtues, Birdsong does not work quite so well, largely due to it being an adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’s novel, rather than an original playscript. The three acts do not hang together well, the first serving only to introduce Stephen’s relationship with Isabelle, with no further part played by her husband, or stepdaughter or the creepy councillor, to each of whom much attention is devoted. And Stephen’s passion for the woman he loves, and the devotion he bears to his men, interwoven by Faulks through nearly 500 pages, is less easy to integrate in the two acts that follow.

  That, however, remains a minor criticism of a formidable accomplishment by playwright Rachel Wagstaff, who successfully raises profound questions about loyalty, decency and truth. A trigger point comes as Isabelle’s sister Lisette—a spirited Gracie Follows—urges Stephen to go on fighting "for country, for peace and for God." How we might question those unconditional commitments now, while still honouring those who died for their sake.

  The assured James Esler, in his professional stage debut, brings a touching vulnerability to once high-minded, now cynical Wraysford, while Charlie Russell inhabits the desperation, frustration and remorse of the abused, demeaned Isabelle.

  Max Bowden is the raucous, irrepressible Jack, the street-fighter with a soft heart, the man not to cross on the Clapham omnibus but the one to drag you out if it crashes. Each of his fellow soldiers emerges with a distinct personality, among them Raif Clarke as Tipper, the 15-year-old who finds it hard to get beyond "Dear Mum" in his letter home, and who forgets, or doesn’t care about, his tin hat before battle.

  Sargon Yelda is René, whose heartless righteousness is reinforced by the local pushy bigwig councillor, played by Roger Ringrose, who puts in another brief appearance as the blustering blimp Colonel, who leads the men over the top and dies sword in hand at the first volley.

  Jason Taylor’s lighting helps create the appropriate atmosphere through blinds that might be shutters of a industrialist’s home or the boards of a dugout, and Dominic Bilkey’s explosive sound design would be enough to make one jump in the back row of the stalls.

• View from Behind the Arras - Tim Crow

  Sebastian Faulks’ famous novel has been skilfully adapted for the stage by Rachel Wagstaff. It is a powerful but complex World War I fiction. This production at Malvern is gripping from start to finish.

  In the first of three acts, Stephen Wraysford has a passionate and very explicit affair with