A dramatic exploration of the final year of the Great War and its aftermath.
100 Years ago the Great War entered its final few months. Victory was close. But for who? And at what cost? The world would never be the same again. The social landscape of Britain altered forever.
Using songs, readings, poetry and drama, even humour, Theatre Workshop Coulsdon explores this final year of tears and revolution, and looks beyond to see the impact that this bloody clash of empires made on the century that followed.
And exhibition on the First World War and the fallen soldiers of Coulsdon, curated by local researchers, will accompany the production.
What are you about to see? It’s a good question. It’s not a play, but there is drama. It’s definitely not a comedy, although there is humour. It’s not a lecture either, though we do hope you go away with a better understanding of the events of a century ago. When it was proposed last December, one of the biggest drivers was that this would our last opportunity to explore the Great War and still be relevant to the centenary. We’d run ‘Oh, What A Lovely War’ some years back, and we could have just reprised that, but we didn’t want to cover old ground. And we didn’t just want to look at the war in general. This is the 100th anniversary of 1918, and so we wanted to focus as far as we could on that specific year.
Throughout January, February and yes, even March, we wrote dramas and narratives looking at subjects that the events of 1918 brought to the fore. Topics that interested and excited us. And we hope will interest and excite you too. Over the next couple of hours you will see them, interspersed with the poems of Sassoon, Houseman and others, along with songs either of the time or looking back at it, and a number of the ‘Forgotten Voices’ of soldiers who fought during the War. And yes, an episode from ‘Oh, What A Lovely War’. We follow a rough chronology, from January 1918 through until the modern day, hopefully showing that even now, the echoes of the war to end all wars continue to affect us.
We haven’t managed to cover everything. There’s nothing here, for instance, about the exploits of the fledgling RAF, the first London Blitz or the Spanish Flu epidemic. What we do have is, I think, an attempt to show that the soldiers of both sides were very much the same, in their hopes, expectations and experiences.
It was a war that saw over 19 million deaths, military and civilian, and over 23 million other casualties, ultimately all for no real purpose. Maybe, even 100 years on, it’s not too late to learn the lesson of the futility of war. But as George Ellison, the last British soldier to be killed in the war, and a character you will see in our performance says, ‘if we haven’t learned from this, we’ll never bloody learn…’
