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Journey's End (Penguin Modern Classics)

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A tiny sound comes from where RALEIGH is lying—something between a sob and a moan." Stage direction, Act III, Scene 3, p. 94 The play is the basis for the film Aces High (1976), although the action was switched from the infantry to the Royal Flying Corps. Sometimes you have to read something funny or say something humorous to kill the boredom and drabness of war or as an escape from reality. Do control your laughter on reading what Trotter is reciting. Osborne says it’s time to do the handing over. Hardy explains how the infantry holds two hundred yards of the front line by showing him gun stations and sentry posts on a tattered map. Osborne says a new officer is coming up tonight. They discuss the poor-quality officers they receive, and Osborne says he hopes it’s a youngster straight from school, as they do best. They discuss the sleeping situation in the dugout. Hardy says you mustn’t hang your legs too low or rats will gnaw your boots. Osborne asks if there are many rats and Hardy says roughly two million, but he doesn’t see them all. Hardy details trench stores of rusty grenades, bombs, and mismatched gum boots. I have just put down this classic WWI play by R.C. Sherriff, and I swear that for all intents and purposes I'm still in that officers' dug-out in Flanders while the noise and smoke of a concentrated enemy bombardment steadily increase in intensity. And it occurs to me that my intention of writing any sort of review is presumptuous at best. How can I be qualified to comment on life in the trenches, or know for sure what it must have been like to lead a daytime raid into no-man's-land with a stiff upper lip and a tot of rum sloshing around in my fear-shrunken belly and nothing in the world more certain than the knowledge that enemy machine-gun fire is waiting ahead to mow me down? The answer is simple -- I'm not and I can't.

Stanhope also becomes angry at Raleigh, who did not eat with the officers that night but preferred to eat with his men. Stanhope is offended by this, and Raleigh eventually admits that he feels he cannot eat while he thinks that Osborne is dead, and his body is in No Man's Land. Stanhope is angry because Raleigh had seemed to imply that Stanhope did not care about Osborne's death because Stanhope was eating and drinking. Stanhope yells at Raleigh that he drinks to cope with the fact that Osborne died, to forget. Stanhope asks to be left alone and angrily tells Raleigh to leave. Raleigh admits that he requested to be sent to Stanhope's company. Osborne hints to Raleigh that Stanhope will not be the same person he knew from school, as the experiences of war have changed him; however, Raleigh does not seem to understand. The Fortnight in September. 1931. OCLC 246884057. (Reprinted in 2006 by Persephone Books); 2021 pbk reprint. Scribner. 7 September 2021. ISBN 978-1-9821-8478-0.It might sound like I'm being harsh on this play for some of its class assumptions, but it also shows that the war affected everyone. Soldiers of all classes and all ranks died on the battlefields of World War One. Indeed, the casualty rate amongst frontline officers was horrific. Worse than the ordinary ranks as a percentage. So, if this story is the usual story then that's to be accepted. Because it is a moving story. You do feel for the characters and you sense the oncoming story. Laurence Olivier starred as Stanhope in the first performance of "Journey's End" in 1928; the play was an instant stage success and remains a remarkable anti-war classic. Osborne's death, however, i was not expecting (i probably should've). and what made it even worse was remembering the things he'd said about his wife and his life with her, and giving Stanhope his stuff. AND THEN STANHOPE'S BREAKDOWN WHEN HE ARGUES WITH RALEIGH. i was in tears. The play was televised by the BBC Television Service, live from its Alexandra Palace studios, on 11 November 1937, in commemoration of Armistice Day. Condensed into a one-hour version by the producer George More O'Ferrall, some short sequences from the film Westfront 1918 (1930) by G. W. Pabst were used for scene-setting purposes. Reginald Tate starred as Stanhope, with Basil Gill as Osborne, Norman Pierce as Trotter, Wallace Douglas as Raleigh, J. Neil More as the Colonel, R. Brooks Turner as the Company Sergeant-Major, Alexander Field as Mason, Reginald Smith as Hardy, and Olaf Olsen as the young German soldier. Because it was broadcast live, and the technology to record television programmes did not exist at the time, no visual records of the production survive other than still photographs. [19] Osborne describes the madness of war when describing how German soldiers allowed the British to rescue a wounded soldier in no man's land, while the next day the two sides shelled each other heavily. He describes the war as "silly".

Trotter, Stanhope, and Hibbert drink and talk about women. They all appear to be enjoying themselves until Hibbert is annoyed when Stanhope tells him to go to bed, and he tells Stanhope to go to bed instead, then Stanhope suddenly becomes angry and begins to shout at Hibbert, and tells him to clear off and get out. Even though I have read many anti-war poems dealing with the First World War, which were all written by youths like Owen and Sassoon who had experienced the war in the trenches, this is the first time that I have read a play regarding it. Instead of writing a play that is about the combat, Sherriff chose to focus on the men and their feelings. The most striking part was that he could have chosen any group of soldiers on either side of No Man’s Land and still had the same play, the same feelings and the same message. Osborne reads Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” during his rest hours for enjoyment and escapism. He reads loudly so that Trotter too can hear it. Journey's End opened as a semi-staged production running for two nights at the Apollo Theatre. [1] It starred Laurence Olivier, then only 21, offered the role of Stanhope by the then equally unknown director James Whale. [1] Under a new producer, Maurice Browne, the play soon transferred to the Savoy Theatre where it ran for three weeks starting on 21 January 1929. [2] The entire cast from the Apollo reprised their roles ( George Zucco playing Osborne and Maurice Evans Raleigh) except for Olivier, who had secured another role and was replaced by Colin Clive as Stanhope. [3] The play was extremely well received: in the words of Whale's biographer James Curtis, it "managed to coalesce, at the right time and in the right manner, the impressions of a whole generation of men who were in the war and who had found it impossible, through words or deeds, to adequately express to their friends and families what the trenches had been like". [4] It transferred to the Prince of Wales Theatre, where it ran for a further two years.

At no point do we leave the dugout, not even to enter the war's notorious trenches per se, yet sounds of the war are heard throughout every scene. It's a claustrophobic, intense situation and story. Apparently Sherriff originally wanted to title it Suspense or Waiting, which are actually better titles in some ways. The conceit is simple. In 1918 a group of British officers wait in an underground shelter for the German army to begin what was then the largest military offensive in human history. Two men who knew each other as friends before the war find their relationship, and their selves, radically altered. An older man tries to support both of them as they struggle with the war and each other.

The theme of alcoholism arises with Hardy and Osborne’s discussion of Stanhope’s ability to drink more than other men. Hardy suggests that Osborne, since he is older and more levelheaded, should be in charge, not Stanhope. But Osborne is loyal to Stanhope, whom he says he loves. The exchange is ambiguous: either Osborne has genuine affection for Stanhope’s ability to command, or he is simply maintaining his position within the military hierarchy by refusing to disparage his superior; likely, Osborne is influenced by a mix of the two motivations. Sherriff also wrote prose. A novelised version of Journey's End, co-written with Vernon Bartlett, was published in 1930. [17] His 1939 novel, The Hopkins Manuscript is an H. G. Wells-influenced post-apocalyptic story about an earth devastated because of a collision with the Moon. [18] Its sober language and realistic depiction of an average man coming to terms with a ruined England is said [ citation needed] to have been an influence on later science fiction authors such as John Wyndham and Brian Aldiss. The Fortnight in September, an earlier novel, published in 1931, is a rather more plausible story about a Bognor holiday enjoyed by a lower-middle-class family from Dulwich. [19] It was nominated by Kazuo Ishiguro as a book to 'inspire, uplift and offer escape' in a list compiled by The Guardian during the COVID-19 pandemic, describing it as "just about the most uplifting, life-affirming novel I can think of right now". [20]Later in the afternoon Osborne and Raleigh were told the details of the proposed raid. Osborne was quiet, knowing what they were in for; Raleigh, not knowing how dangerous the raid would be, took the assignment as a great adventure. Gore-Langton, Robert (2013). Journey's End: the classic war play explored. London: Oberon. ISBN 9781849433952.

Hailed by George Bernard Shaw as 'useful [corrective] to the romantic conception of war', R.C. Sherriff's "Journey's End" is an unflinching vision of life in the trenches towards the end of the First World War, published in "Penguin Classics". During the Second World War, productions were staged by members of the Royal Natal Carbineers at El Khatatba, Egypt (January 1944); and by British prisoners in Changi Prison, Singapore (February 1943); at Tamarkan, Thailand, a Japanese labour camp on the Burma Railway (July 1943); in Stalag 344, near Lamsdorf, Germany (July 1944); and in Campo P.G. 75, near Bari, Italy. [14] TROTTER: Oh, Lord, yes often. If you see a Minnie coming – that’s a big trench mortar shell, you know – short for Minnywerfer – you see them come right out of the Boche trenches, right up in the air, then down, down, down; and you have to judge it and run like stink sometimes.” The scenes between the men were extremely subtle and really drove home the complete and utter futility of it all. And I think it’s this subtlety that made the final scene all the more haunting.Raleigh explains the long twisting route through the trenches he took to reach the dugout. It began in a house’s cellar and then crossed the plains. Green lights bobbed up in the sky along the front. Osborne says they are Very lights, used by both sides to light up No Man’s Land to watch for raids and patrols. They agree the lights are rather romantic; Osborne says it helps to think of it all as romantic. Mason enters and apologizes: the tin of pineapple turned out to contain apricots. He says he knows the captain can’t stand apricots.

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