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In the
wars: Ray Winstone and Dougray Scott in
To the Green Fields Beyond. Photograph:
Mark Ellidge
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In To the Green Fields
Beyond (Donmar Warehouse), too, time
is on hold. This is Nick Whitby's new
play, for which Sam Mendes postponed his
planned production of Twelfth Night, and
the decision was worth it. This is a
play of a quiet, brooding English
apocalypse, but no less momentous for
that. The setting is a wood in France in
early 1918. A seven-man British tank
crew, including an Irishman (Finbar
Lynch), a Sikh (Nitin Ganatra), a West
Indian (Danny Sapani) and a Scottish
officer (Dougray Scott), stuck two miles
behind the lines, |
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camouflaged, are debating whether to
break out. Observe the men of Britain
about to march, or not, to almost
certain death.
Whitby's writing combines the
qualities of the ritual and the
thriller. An American journalist (Paul
Venables) turns up, looking for some
defining image of the war that he could
present to his readers at home, some of
whom, he admits awkwardly, are of German
descent. Instantly, suspicion begins to
thicken as to what he is really after.
One man, Cossum (Adrian Scarborough),
has recruited a Belgian prostitute
(Johanna Lonsky), a self-contained,
quizzical middle-aged woman, to service
the crew, some of whom are in a state of
appalling sexual ignorance.
These men are in the kind of timeless
no man's land you find yourself in
before terrible decisions: this is why
such decisions feel as if they made
themselves, without you, out of time.
"We are from a different
time," one man says, and you feel
as if you were in the presence of both
history and mythology. "This is a
holy place," somebody says,
meaning, I think, that it is a
privileged spot where prayers are both
offered and received. Perhaps this is
the last war. Perhaps a better world
begins here. The play is heavy with the
ironies of history.
The text is a bit of a problem.
Whitby has clearly immersed himself in
the period, and his writing is rich in
obsolete technical terms, rhyming slang
and the jokey abbreviations of long
coexistence. This gives you a sense of
immediacy, but it can also get in the
way; the printed text, which I got hold
of afterwards, has three pages of
glossary.
Cossum quotes from the Bible; the
Sikh and the West Indian read from a
copy of Blake; one man has heard of
Einstein (he calls him Bert One-stone)
and his frightening theory; and the
Scottish officer, a schoolteacher in
civilian life, drops classical
allusions. At first this feels
self-conscious, as if Whitby were
presenting his intellectual credentials,
but gradually you realise that he is
creating a realistic but poetic
mythology where men are alone, abandoned
and must create their own consolations.
Mendes's direction balances the great
metaphor of Whitby's vision against the
muddy realities of war with masterful
confidence. In a shared, black doom,
every character carries a private
burden, and the performance has the
angularities, the power and the moving
interior silences of great music
Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers
Ltd.
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