Not such a lovely war

O What A Lovely War returned to Wellington last week — a somewhat rundown version of the original Downstage production. The provinces must have been exhausting, for the comparative unsuccess of the latter version was often not clearly attributable to anything more than a certain jaded air that hung about it.

It had lost a little pace; it did not quite cohere; it left the audience in faint but unresolved doubt as to exactly what was funny. In the last production nobody laughed to find that the average life-expectancy of a machine-gunner under attack was four minutes. Thursday's audience laughed amiably.

This obtuse reaction clearly stemmed from an inability to grasp the nature of the juxtaposition of hysteria, pomp and stupidity with the desperate truth of war. It was a failure to see exactly how the satire worked, for which sometimes the slackness of the whole production, sometimes the leads themselves were to blame.

One of the most moving scenes in the play could have been the church service. But it depended on a complex balance of tones which the chaplain (Roy Patrick) quite devastated by a crude parody of the plummy priest. The deflation of the man could have been so much more delicately accomplished with just a touch of pomposity, leaving the seriousness of the religion unimpaired. His hearty sabotage prevented the Christian reference from working as anything more than a joke, and effectively hid the real irony.

Comparisons are odious, no doubt, but it is very hard to explain a comparative failure in any other terms. Besides the general lack of tension and direction, occasionally explicit in the failure of single characters, there was a falling-off in individual performances. The new principals generally had less flair than did the old. We missed Bruce Mason and Trina Kerr, and Paddy Frost lacked the dramatic presence of her predecessor.

Other minor annoyances tended to destroy the effect of the production. It seems petty to cavil at programmes, but really neither Richard Campion's gilded recollections of his childhood, nor the cast's forced jokes in the thumb-nail sketches helped our mood. The supreme irrelevance, however, was the kind speech Roy Patrick made at the end, congratulating us all on being such a really wonderfully truly audience—unnecessary, inaccurate and maddening.

In fact, this production was not the devastating failure that a systematic examination of its defects might suggest. But it was a good deal less satisfactory than the original.—A.M.B.