Journey’s End – London Film Festival

RC Sherriff’s 90-year old play remains one of the most striking and poignant representation of war, despite the familiarity created by its permanent place on the school curriculum and regular staging. Journey’s End has also spawned several film versions, but few as stark and compassionate as Saul Dibb’s new version, commissioned to commemorate 100 years since the ultimately futile German advance in the Spring of 1918 that proved to be their last attempt to win the war.

Journey’s End was written at the height of post-war disillusionment with the outcomes of the war, and in 1928 was one of the most enduring literary pieces in a wave of memoirs, novels and treatises that flowed from disappointed veterans between 1925 and 1933. And, Sherriff’s play is one of the most emotional and influential depictions of war, with stage productions often romanticising the characters, and emphasising the inevitable disillusionment of men under fire. But, Sherriff’s text, and the co-written novel which accompanies it, are actually far more nuanced than these readings often suggest, getting right to the heart of the fear and frustration of the men living in horrendous conditions while maintaining a will to continue, unpicking the small bonds of duty and affection that kept them motivated.

Saul Dibb’s new film shows these nuances with an interesting lack of sentimentality, and while there is a growing sense of inevitability, this is a study of the subtle ties of comradeship in the full glare of war, exposing the almost paternal care between junior officers and their men, and the love it fostered, as well as the deep rooted but fragile friendships that existed between individuals sharing a confined space for long periods of inactivity. And this is crucial, while there are some action sequences later in the film, men were not in battle for the entirety of the war, these were brief engagements in seemingly endless periods of waiting and watching, which Dibb’s film accurately recognises and acknowledges.

In March 1918 the Company led by Captain Stanhope (Sam Claflin) is moved into the Front Line for its 6-day rotation, and as the men prepare their temporary home, the officers set-up in a dugout beneath the trenches. This is also the day that Second Lieutenant Raleigh (Asa Butterfield), a fresh-faced and newly qualified Officer, joins Stanhope’s team eager to be close to the school-boy hero who is engaged to his sister. But Stanhope is no longer the man he was, alcoholic and broken by three years of war, held together by the love of his men, the gentle ministrations of his closet friend Osborne (Paul Bettany) and the knowledge that fighting-on is the right thing to do. Resenting Raleigh’s presence, Stanhope must command the men knowing an imminent attack will test their already tattered endurance, and try to keep them safe for 6 more days.

Journey’s End is a film about the various bonds of loyalty that men form with one another under extreme conditions, and, as Stanhope’s Company move into their new section of trench, Dibb takes the opportunity to show the audience that this dedication is based around personal knowledge of the men you’re fighting alongside. Cleverly, we see the previous Company vacating the area taking everything with them, even the light bulbs, which forces Stanhope’s dugout into a gloomy candle-lit darkness instead. Similarly, as Stanhope inspects the trench structure he comments on the poor-quality workmanship, despairing of his predecessor’s lack of rigour, and later in the film, in an almost throw-away line, Stanhope insists his men build barricades to their left and right because he doesn’t trust his neighbours to hold the line when the attack comes and possibly endangering his own men trapped in the middle.

Instantly, and subtly, Dibb is creating a picture of how trust and devotion were formed in the trenches, not based on reputation or achieved automatically because you’re all on the same side, but by hard-won personal knowledge and interaction with the men under your command. Stanhope doesn’t rely on the nearby Companies because the long experience of war has taught him that the limited power he has is with the men he sees daily, everyone else is unknown and untested. He uses the condemnation of other soldiers to help unite his men, to show them that others are slovenly and less skilled, so his own men will feel superior. And they love him for it.

Sam Claflin’s Raleigh is a beautiful portrait of young man damaged by war and using every ounce of strength to drag himself through each day. Sidestepping the usual caricatured portrayals of snobbish privately educated officers with nasal voices, Claflin is well-spoken but not obscured by his background, a true living breathing man in the most complicated position possible, desperately holding his own nerves and fears in check while motivating his men who rely on him entirely for sustenance.

In his hard-drinking Captain, Claflin performance is a study in the damaging effects of war, a man clinging on by his fingertips in private but putting on a brave and paternal face for the soldiers who rely on his stability in the trenches. But down in the dugout, Claflin’s Stanhope has an interesting self-awareness that is not only open about his weakness and dependence on whiskey, but is conscious enough to be embarrassed by it in front of someone from his past. Throughout the film, Claflin must walk a difficult line between repulsion and sympathy, aware the audience will dislike his harsh treatment of Raleigh, but knowing it comes from his own inability to cope with the duality of his position. And Claflin is excellent at keeping the viewer onside, he’s softened by gently and comfortingly patting the legs of his men going over the top with an affectionate father’s care, while bringing real pathos to the later scenes as events overwhelm him in what becomes an increasingly moving struggle for self-control.

Paul Bettany is very well-cast as the gentle Osborne, a calming and steadfast presence who welcomes the new recruit while providing sage advice to the longstanding officers. He is a gentle soul, and Bettany’s restrained performance implies a Regular whose soldierly experience pre-dates the war he’s currently fighting, and so is outwardly able to cope more quietly than the other men. Yet Bettany takes the chance to reveal his silent fear when asked to lead a raiding party in an intimate private moment that unveils the charged human emotion under the deliberately placid surface.

Surrounding them are a believable group of Officers and men who feel like a close and trusted unit. Asa Butterfield’s Raleigh is suitably wide-eyed and excitable, in what now seems the most cliched role (a cliché Sherriff helped to invent of course), and although he has less to do than the senior soldiers in terms of his inner struggle, charts the rapid disillusionment with the war and his hero well. The ever-excellent Toby Jones adds texture as the cook, grasping much of the film’s bewildered humour, while Tom Sturridge does what he does well playing a young officer who’s reached the limit of what he can bear.

In fractionally opening-up the film to include the trenches, it adds necessary context to Sherriff’s original play, and Dibb manages the transition between cast interaction and the spare war scenes extremely effectively. Spurious comparisons have been made with Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, but Journey’s End is a different kind of film, character-led rather than action-based like Dunkirk, which lends the two fighting sequences greater tension having invested in the people first.

Designer Kristian Milsted has avoided an obviously distressed setting which often makes First World War trench systems look a little artificial on stage and screen, and instead with Laurie Rose’s stark cinematography, has created something that looks genuinely worn, full of damp wood, years of disrepair and the kind of realistic mud that makes you think the actors might genuinely get trench foot.

This version of Journey’s End is ultimately about comradely love, about true bravery and the process of disillusionment not just with the experience of war but with the unreal heroes of youth. Dibb’s key accomplishment is to show that the romanticised version of valorous men being sacrificed for an inch of land is less than half the story; instead the First World War was full of flawed and complex humanity, suffering physically and emotionally, struggling to get through each day. With wonderful central performances from Sam Claflin and Paul Bettany the true experience of the Great War soldiers is writ large on the screen, and finally bringing the full meaning of Sherriff’s seminal text to life.

Journey’s End was premiered at the London Film Festival and will be released in the UK on the 2 February 2017. Follow this blog on Twitter @culturalcap1

TV Preview: The Hollow Crown: Henry VI Parts I and II –BFI Southbank

‘…let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of Kings’, so speaks Shakespeare’s Richard II on his return from Ireland to find his kingdom carried away in his absence. And this is arguably one of the major themes of the BBC’s Hollow Crown season which opened with Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 & 2, and Henry V back in 2012 and returns to TV with a two part Henry VI and Richard III this month. Previewed at the BFI Southbank last week with some of the cast and crew in attendance, the new season opens with a two part digest of Shakespeare’s Henry VI which we watched back to back in a 4 hour marathon with Q&A, and seen in the context of the four earlier productions, emphasises how volatile this period of history was with innumerable deaths, lunges for power and cutting betrayals culminating in, as Richard II described, a series of ‘sad stories of the death of Kings.’

Henry VI becomes King at 9 months old when his father Henry V dies not long after his famous Agincourt victory, and the realm is governed for the next two decades by the Duke of Gloucester as protector. But the adult Henry is too weak to relinquish his Lord Protector and continues to defer decision-making, much to the chagrin of the warring houses of Lancaster and York. In the meantime, Richard Plantagenet, a senior statesman in the House of York decides to press his suit for the monarchy and what ensues across the two plays is a complex and intricate web of political and family intrigue as the young King is unable to hold back civil war – exacerbated by Henry’s loss of the French territories his father fought so hard for – which threatens to consume his entire kingdom.

I’ve never seen a stage version of these plays and the first thing Google tells you is that Henry VI is considered one of Shakespeare’s least successful works and there is considerable doubt that he wrote all of it. In the Q&A held alongside this screening, adaptor Ben Power and director Dominic Cooke discussed the ‘kaleidoscopic’ nature of the original text which they have reshaped and slimmed. The result is a gripping and engaging two part story that helps the first-time audience keep all the key figures straight without too much erroneous sub-plotting. Both parts bristle with danger as powerful men jockey for position as their King stands helplessly by.

Ton Sturridge, in his first Shakespeare role, gives Henry just the right amount of wide-eyed innocence and, interestingly, a fear of trusting his own judgement. He is easily influenced by anyone who offers him counsel, and we see his opinions change with the breeze as different poisons are poured into his ear. Sturridge’s Henry is timid and trusting of anyone who appears to have more political strength than him, and on the few occasions when he seems to be flexing his monarchical muscles his determination is short-lived.  For a character with almost no monologues (in this adaptation anyway) it’s difficult to completely understand his reticence but Sturridge is affecting, not least in Part II when his wish to be an ordinary man is granted but after enduring a grim life in the Tower the chance to be King again brings a moving flicker of hope – the echoes of Richard II are startling. Visually too Henry is shown to be an onlooker always, sitting back as more knowledgeable men debate the issues at court, and also hiding among the trees watching as his own troops fight for him as he has never fought for himself.

There are great supporting performances, not least from Hugh Bonneville as perhaps the only decent man at court, the innocent Duke of Gloucester, loathed only because he has the ear of the King – proof that at this time innocence couldn’t save you from the malice of others. Ben Miles is absolutely superb as the loathsome Somerset, a Lancastrian who intrigues to marry Henry to a French princess only to take her as his own lover and between them manipulate the King to forward the Lancastrian cause – Miles of course was recently a much praised Thomas Cromwell in the stage versions of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, a worthy rival to Mark Rylance’s TV incarnation. Sophie Okonedo is equally fantastic as the scheming Queen Margaret, strong, vicious and revelling in the chance to crush her enemies, even actually fighting in the final battle scenes.

Not everything about this works perfectly and while the political scenes are tense and engaging, the numerous battles are somewhat lacklustre and hampered by budget constraints. It’s pretty clear in every single fight scene that there are only about 20 extras which fail to sufficiently convey the thousands engaged in these civil war battles and the notion of a nation in crisis. There’s also some dubious CGI suggesting ships on their way to fight with France, and even worse ‘epic’ music that’s straight out of Hollywood-battle-scenes-by-numbers, and is completely at odds with what the Henry VI plays are actually about. Strip away the sword fighting and all of Shakespeare’s history plays are intimate in scale, about extended branches of the same family rowing about who should be King and this music implies a level of heroism in the battles which didn’t exist in this tawdry and sullied world of political double crossing. As much as these events are nationally affecting, the epic sweep approach seems inappropriate and these adaptations are at their best in these domestic scenes among a tiny elite which just happens to have wider dynastic consequences.

It’s also clear, at times, that these were made before Justin Kurzel’s movie of Macbeth was released, about which I was unapologetically gushing. A game-changer for the way Shakespeare can be filmed (and also on a reasonably small budget), these Henry VI adaptations are being aired in a new context. The problematic battle scenes mentioned above, feel less successful because Macbeth showed how a small cast produced something that is both horribly brutal and still somehow visually poetic. And even away from the battlefields, very occasionally these long adaptations want for dynamism – how many more times do we want to see a group of middle aged men shouting at each other in a variety of grand medieval halls? Is there a more exciting way to present some of this material?

One of the highlights for many will be Benedict Cumberbatch’s performance as Richard III which follows this two part Henry VI, but Richard actually appears for the first time in Henry VI Part II so we got to see a little of the background to the character to come. The physical traits of damaged arm and twisted leg are present and Cumberbatch will clearly be a desperately evil Richard with the early signs of his bloodlust and coveting of the crown very much in evidence. Initially it’s a little bit panto villain but by the time he delivers the only lengthy monologue at the end of the 4 hours it’s clear his Richard will chills us – ‘he plays a good psycho’ as Cooke and Power joked during the Q&A where most of the talk was about Richard III, much too Sturridge’s irritation who, quite rightly, wanted to focus on Henry. But it’s going to be an interesting season finale when it finally airs.

The Hollow Crown season has been a big success for the BBC and these long-anticipated new adaptations won’t disappoint. Playing these stories concurrently has offered the viewer something you rarely get in the theatre, a chance to see an entire sweep of history and the recurring themes that punctuate these plays – the relationship of fathers and their sons be they monarchs or nobility, the price of wanting and obtaining power, as well its fickle nature as you see prime movers in one play unceremoniously dispatched in the next and a new generation of players assume the political stage. This preview at the BFI certainly got me thinking again about Richard II and all those sad stories about Kings that followed. In the Hollow Crown we find that the old adage is true, power corrupts and whether it be mere soldiers or mighty monarchs nothing will stand in its way.

The Hollow Crown: Henry VI Parts I and II will be shown on the BBC in April to commemorate the 400^th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. This event took place at the BFI Southbank – visit their website for more TV previews. Follow this blog on Twitter @culturalcap1

American Buffalo – Wyndhams Theatre

It’s not exactly James McAvoy unicycling in his underwear, but watching Damien Lewis sporting a 70s handlebar moustache and wearing a giant paper hat that he’s just made out of newspaper, ranks pretty highly on the list of things I was not expecting to see this year.  American Buffalo has just opened at the Wyndhams and is a sure sign that 2015 is disappearing fast as this marks the fourth of the ‘big five’ performances I earmarked in my Christmas review post. That means we’ve already had 3 months of a serenely comic McAvoy in The Ruling Class; a second stint for much deserved Olivier award winner Mark Strong in the epic A View from the Bridge; Ralph Fiennes is already two months into his brilliant philosophising bachelor in Man and Superman and that brings us up to date with Damien Lewis. The only one left is Cumberbatch’s Hamlet, which although booked long before any of the above, is still several months away. Thank God Kenneth Branagh’s Garrick season is in the bag or the autumn would be looking very grim.

Anyway back to Lewis, who is joined in David Mamet’s American Buffalo by John Goodman and Tom Sturridge in this comedy-drama about three very different men planning a heist. Don (Goodman) owns a junk shop and he’s just undersold a rare coin – the American Buffalo – to a collector, except it wasn’t until afterwards that he realised his mistake. Feeling cheated, he enlisted the help of his young friend Bob (Sturridge) to find the customer’s address and steal his coin collection. As the play opens Bob has found the man and the job is on for tonight. At this point Walter or ‘Teach’ (Lewis), Don’s poker buddy and apparent local gangster, arrives and convinces Don to letting him do the job instead as Bob isn’t the brightest lad. As the three men wait for night to fall they discuss the ways of the world while their greed starts to get the better of them.

Mamet’s play is about the engagement of three very different forms of masculinity, and its central characters could not be more different. Each separated by age, but drawn together under the umbrella of ‘business’, they depict a very particular kind of male friendship – one that isn’t necessarily based on personal interactions or shared experiences, but on a level of trustworthiness. They all live and work in the same area and like colleagues have developed a reliance on one another that on the surface seems quite superficial. They play cards together, eat breakfast in the shop and complain about their friends, but never openly discuss their families, feelings or aspirations. Yet without necessarily realising it they need each other, drawn together by the limitations of their lives, metaphorically trapped in Don’s junk shop with no way out.

John Goodman makes his very welcome West End debut as Don, the pseudo father figure who runs the shop and plans the job. He’s friendly and extremely tolerant of Bob’s inability to grapple with more complex thoughts, caring for him. Initially he doesn’t seem that strong or much of a criminal mastermind, but Goodman brings a quiet authority that somehow makes the others do what he says, even though Teach in particular could overpower him.  Don is the centre of the play, it’s his shop and his heist, card games take place in his place and the others come to him. But Goodman also brings out the anxiety of a man seemingly unused to criminal endeavour to great comic and dramatic effect.

Tom Sturridge has quite a small role as Bob but one he makes the most out of. There is farm-boy quality to Bob, lost in the big city and not quite an adult. Even in the course of this one day, he frequently comes to Don for money and Sturridge cleverly implies that the others have underestimated his ability to grasp what’s going on and act on it. His performance ranges from wide-eyed innocence to a slightly hard-edged need to be recognised / rewarded for what he’s done, and he makes for an interesting contrast to the two more worldly characters.

Teach completes the trio and this is Damien Lewis as you probably haven’t seen him before – the sharp aubergine suit, flares, moustache, and sideburns indicate a man who has a lot of outward confidence, as well as a love of style. A softly spoken American gangster accent pits him somewhere between John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, Christian Bale in American Hustle and a Tarantino character. His arrival onstage alone heralded a peel of laughter from the audience, but Lewis instils Teach with a dangerous quality – he may be calm and compliant among his friends, but you get the feeling that one wrong word and he would brutally lash out. And later in the play you begin to see more of his frustration about being respected come to the fore. Still, it’s interesting that Teach obeys Don and tells you something about the hierarchy operating here which comes across nicely in Lewis’s layered performance, as well as that slightly deluded sense that this man thinks he’s more important or tougher than he really is.

The set and costume designer Paul Willis has had great fun, and once you get used to Lewis’s suit you can marvel at his brilliant version of Don’s junk shop. This feels like a deeply masculine environment, echoing the themes of the play really well. It’s full of bits and pieces all over the floor and stacked around the room, with a feeling of grease and age, so imagine a garage full of old stuff but turned into a shop. Above is a dense canopy of old chairs and bikes suspended from the ceiling to emphasise how confined these men are in their little world – the can never go up because above them there’s even more junk.

American Buffalo is sure to be another hit and will have crowds flocking to see its three lead actors. We may hear about other characters, some of which are even women, but Don, Teach and Bob are drawn together by need disguised as ‘business’. Despite their differences in age, character and attitude, there is also a timeless feel to this production and you know if you came back to them in 10 or 20 years, they’d all still be here, dreaming big but always losing. They may never exactly say what’s on their minds, but they have each other so by the close of Act II you know that whatever words pass between them, however vilely they act to one another, they will always be friends.

American Buffalo is at the Wyndhams Theatre until 27 June. Tickets start at £22.25 for a seat and standing tickets are available from £17.25. For a cheap ticket if you’re going alone or don’t want to sit with your friends, I recommend Seat A1 or A26 in the Balcony – a sideways seat separated from the main block which has a perfect view and a small but private space with no one nearby. Follow this blog on Twitter @culturalcap1