The Christmas Truce

The Royal Shakespeare Theatre Stratford-Upon-Avon 

3/5

AT THE end of a year which has seen the “war to end all wars” treated to media overkill, the RSC must have recognised the challenge of replacing their traditionally splendid bonanza Christmas shows with a further treatment of the mindless mayhem of WWI. 

Phil Porter, commissioned by the company to write a play celebrating that moment in the slaughterfest when the British and German troops briefly celebrated the first Christmas by meeting in No Man’s Land and playing football together, faced a difficult task. 

Obviously for a family show there would be no place for satire or contextual analysis. The danger would be a boys’-own-paper trivialisation of the catastrophe. 

Indeed the first half teeters on the edge, with the Warwickshire lads exchanging their cricket gear to leave all too casually for the trenches. There’s lots of banter and the village green coconut shies are exchanged for a jolly competition of target shooting at “the Hun.” There is the inevitable concert party to liven proceedings and the presence of pretty nurses conducting their own little war with the Matron. 

In the second half, when Porter and director Erica Whyman can get their teeth into the real drama, the play assumes a moving depth. The tentative communication and meeting of enemies on a barren snowscape between the trenches, recognising their common humanity, is truly moving. 

The football too is magnificently choreographed with England stoically accepting defeat, as usual. 

That the production here avoids slipping into sentimentality is largely owing to a splendid cast who invest a series of stock characters — the experienced old soldier who takes the fearful rookie in care, the CO who is persuaded to do a turn in the concert party and the tight-lipped matron who eventually reveals a human side — with a reality we care about. 

Joseph Kloska as Second Lieutenant Bruce Bairnsfather and local Warwickshire man and creator of the famous wartime cartoon character Old Bill, here a splendidly bewhiskered Gerard Horan, keep up the spirits of our dwindling band of Tommies. 

The music orchestrated by Sam Kenyon beautifully complements the production, interpreting material that in some ways sits uneasily with the warring tensions of our day. 

Runs until January 31, box office: rsc.org.uk