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Performed by Shared Experience.

Adapted by Helen Edmondson.

Directed by Nancy Meckler and Polly Teale.

Seven hours is a long time to sit in the theatre, albeit with a supper-hour in the middle, but the numbness in my nether regions was forgotten as Shared Experience took the audience on a superlative journey through peace, war, doubtful peace, more war, tentative peace, devastating war and finally some possible redemption. The fact that this production was fantastic is not to say that the experience was not gruelling. The first part of the play ended with Barnaby Kay’s nihilistic Pierre Bezuhov intoning “Death. And.  Nothingness”, with all the finality and hopelessness of a funeral knell. Charming. 

Time for a restorative sandwich to revive the flagging spirits and stave off impending depression. It would be an unwise move, at least financially speaking, to drive an entire audience to suicidal despair in the first half, but there were so many stunningly beautiful and resonant moments (as well a cliff-hanger ending) that there was no doubt that people were going to come back for more. 

The tawdry, tired gold of the set was evocative of an age gone by and of ruined splendour, an important theme of the play. The Russian aristocracy running through the blazing streets of Moscow to escape Napoleon’s army squabble over what to sacrifice and what to save. The shimmering mirrors and gold  – mostly life-size picture frames used to create everything from doors and windows to opera boxes – captured the casual decadence of the shallower characters, and gave the young, rebellious characters a physical representation of wealth to reject. The set was opulent enough to make the rich costumes and jewels seem fitting in the party scenes, but was also faded enough to perfectly capture the slightly run-down museum atmosphere of the opening scene.

Despite this visual decadence, the set and props were actually quite minimal while the costumes were gorgeously over the top. Cutlery featured heavily, often making the distinction between dancing and fighting unclear – a clever way of illustrating the vicious nature of much of the aristocracy’s repartee. The actual battlegrounds were created with flags, boxes, and lots of screaming and shouting, enhanced by frighteningly loud gunshots. The ensemble movement work in the battle scenes was spectacular, and the use of slow motion avoided bad-film territory and was shockingly moving. With a fairly small cast and such a long, intimate time on stage, watching the various bright young things we had seen dance, fall in love, sing, drink, boast and fight topple to the ground in agonizing slow motion to twitch and lie still was excellently done – tragic without over-egging the pudding-of-death. 

The cast were unanimously good, particularly those who had the difficult task of charting the younger generation’s journey from pampered innocence to bitter experience. Playing a child is always difficult, but Louise Ford’s Natasha grew on stage from a romantically deluded, spoiled teenager into a calm, sad woman, via a hysterical failed elopement and a love-affaire tragically cut short by the war. The spectre of war touches all of the characters in the play – the clue is in the name! – and Helen Edmondson’s adaptation does not pull any punches when dealing with death and destruction. Homes, families, lives and loves are shattered by war, and Meckler and Teale’s direction excellently counterpoints the young mens’ intense desire to fight for their country with their female relatives’ fear and grief. Particularly of note was Marion Bailey as Countess Rostova, almost physically destroyed with fear for her oldest son and later grief for her younger. Her husband, Geoffrey Beevers’ brilliantly affable Count Rostov, was often the comic relief within the Rostov family’s many trials and tribulations, but his devotion to his family and deep love for his wife and children kept him from becoming a figure of fun. The other patriarch in the play, Prince Balkonsky, played by the excellent Jeffery Kissoon, is a different matter. Frail, feisty and domineering, he bullies and blusters his way through the play, never failing to be compelling, and, at his demise, heart-rending. He had a good limp, too.

His long-suffering daughter, Princess Maria (Kate Wimpenny) channels her suffering into her religion, and her frail hope of one day escaping the tyranny of the father she desperately loves and finding love for herself is delicately and sensitively portrayed. Her wayward brother, Prince Andrei (David Sturzaker), was quite taciturn, meaning that Sturzaker’s eyebrows did a lot of the acting – but never have eyebrows been more eloquent.

The old show-biz adage of ‘always leave them wanting more’ will generally not apply to 7-hour shows, but with a constant energy and a plot that rolled on like a fatal boulder down a hill, Shared Experience’s War and Peace did. Not that I left unsatisfied, but I could have watched more – although I think a cushion would have been necessary! After being put through the emotional wringer for so long, this reviewer was so involved in the emotional lives of these people that the thought of them suffering any more was almost unbearable, and the ambiguity of the ending was therefore slightly frustrating. However, one cannot argue with Tolstoy – and this production of his great work was truly Epic.

Director: Melly Still

Based on the book by Jamila Gavin, adapted for stage by Helen Edmundson.

Those who perform at London’s National Theatre are accustomed to performing in front of a full house, so all credit to the cast for performing their first preview as though the place was packed. Given that the show doesn’t officially open until November 15th the audience was sizable but quite restless, which given how young most of the cast were makes their professionalism all the more admirable. Particularly of note was Akiya Henry, although she only appeared in the second half she really made her presence felt, without stealing focus from the others. For such a diminutive person her command of the stage, especially when alone, was impressive, and she was powerfully moving without being melodramatic. All of the young cast members managed to avoid melodrama, something that cannot be said for all their adult counterparts. Paul Ritter was brilliantly nasty as Otis Gardiner the Coram Man, and Bertie Carvel was excellent as the grown-up Alexander, but Eve Matheson was rather too hysterical as Mrs Millcote. She did not manage to pitch the dramatic moments right; they were overplayed and unnecessarily frantic given that they did not greatly contribute to the play as a whole.

For what is ostensibly a children’s show, ‘Coram Boy’ was quite spectacularly unpleasant in places, and not in a gleefully gruesome way that might be enjoyed by some children. The discovery of numerous dead babies buried in the woods was fully described on stage using puppets to represent the babies –and bits of babies- that were exhumed. While I appreciate that children can enjoy the macabre and being scared, especially in the odd unreality of a theatre, the acting and action is so well done and so convincing that the National might have problems marketing this as family Christmas entertainment. Disney it isn’t. The other problem with offering this as a family show is that is doesn’t have a traditionally happy ending, I won’t spoil the story, but even though this production has tidied up the ending a little it is still relatively sad. What was unsentimental in the book has become rather too sugary on stage, perhaps as compensation for the unexpectedly nasty scenes in the first half. The impact of the return of the lost son to his family is lessened by Edmundson’s changing of preceding events –much of the suspense is removed.

Helen Edmundson’s adaptation of Jamila Gavin’s excellent story ‘Coram Boy,’ directed by Melly Still, stayed mostly true to Gavin’s plot, even retaining snatches of the original dialogue. Edmundson has naturally changed certain points to make the story work better on stage, but while I understand the writer’s need to make her presence felt on the story, some of the details that she did choose to change struck a rather odd note, making the reasonably complicated plot harder to follow rather than clarifying things. For example, two characters that are killed off rather violently in the book were allowed to live in Edmundson’s adaptation. If she were generally softening the nastiness of the story to make it more accessible I could understand this decision, but given that there are far worse moments that have not been culled and that she has actually made some scenes more unpleasant it seemed a redundant move. For those who have read the book it is vaguely irritating, and for those who haven’t it must seem rather farcical that this particular character is dramatically stabbed but is apparently unscathed in the next scene. Personally, anything that shatters the fragile suspension of disbelief that is the theatre, whether is someone rustling sweet wrappers or a jarringly odd moment on stage, is intensely annoying. Fortunately, this moment came right at the end of the play, and the rest of it was great.

The music that accompanied the action was excellent, a live choir and string septet greatly heightened the atmosphere. Handel (Nicholas Tizzard) is both a character in the play and the composer of the ‘background’ music, I use ‘background’ for lack of a better word because the music is integral both to the story and the atmosphere. Strategic use of music from the Messiah was at times truly tragic; ‘Unto us a child is born’ while babies are being unearthed was incredibly powerful. Its recurrence throughout the play fitted excellently into the plot and served to re-emphasise the loss that mothers felt when they had to give up their children to the seemingly benevolent ‘Coram Man’ in the vain hope that he would deliver them safely to the hospital.

The Coram Hospital, named for its founder Thomas Coram, was established in 1739 to take care of some of the waifs and strays of London. It became an urban legend of its time, a place where unwanted babies could grow up safely and get some education, eventually being apprenticed out to honest respectable tradesmen. However, the stigma of illegitimacy called for secrecy when scared mothers entrusted their offspring to strangers in the hope of giving them a chance in life, which meant that it was an easy system to abuse. Paul Ritter’s sinister Coram Man exploits desperate mothers for his own gain. The play tells the story of 2 sets of friends, and Alexander (Anna Madeley), cathedral choir boys, and later Aaron, Alexander’s son (also Anna Madeley) and Toby (Akiya Henry), Coram boys, caught up in the deceit, secrecy and betrayal of estrangement and illegitimacy. ‘Coram Boy’ is a romp through London and Gloucester, taking in murder, music, hanging, dancing, love, betrayal, evil and angels, via the slave trade, Handel’s Messiah and lots of small boys (played by girls).