Playwright: R.C. Sherriff. At: Griffin Theatre Company at the Theatre Building, 1225 W. Belmont. Phone: 773-327-5252; $15-$24. Runs through: March 9
Our wars nowadays are mostly fought against hidden enemies in small irregular skirmishes. So it's difficult to imagine warfare of 'attrition,' such as was employed in World War I, both armies encamped just below ground in deep trenches on opposite sides of a narrow field, where they wait—to be blown to pieces by enemy artillery, to die slowly of illness associated with privation or to go batcrackers with boredom. Captain Dennis Stanhope has kept his sanity by means of heavy drinking, a coping mechanism readily accepted by his fellow soldiers, but less likely to be tolerated by his sweetheart back home, whose brother has just joined Stanhope's regiment.
Author R.C. Sherriff himself witnessed the hardships of life on the front lines, and his 1928 play reflects the minutiae of his experience—wistful recollections of home, mentorly counsel to frightened youths, a cook's vain attempts at replicating home-style cuisine out of field rations. Unavoidable, too, in these last years of a long and terrible war, is the suspicion that its planners show little regard for the men whose sense of duty requires them to fight—and often to die—in service to it.
Griffin Theatre director Jonathan Berry has assembled a production company led by Hans Fleischmann as the valiant Stanhope and Nigel Patterson as the avuncular 1st Lt. Osborne, sturdily supported by actors—John Dixon's painfully innocent 2nd Lt. Raleigh, Christopher M. Walsh's phlegmatic officer Trotter and, especially, Rom Barkhordar's visiting colonel, who could have come off as an upper-echelon clown, but instead shares in the helpless frustration of those he commands—bringing depth and compassion to roles easily dismissed as stereotypes. Assisted by Cindy Gold's dialect instruction and Joshua Horvath's sound design, they draw us so wholly into their milieu that the undeniably lengthy evening passes swiftly and efficiently, with never a moment of unnecessary protraction.
Whatever history books, news dispatches or propaganda machines may claim, war's fundamental goal of our killing more of them than they do of us hasn't changed. It might, Sherriff suggests, be modulated by unexpected gestures of chivalry ( as when German soldiers hold their fire while Brits recover a wounded comrade ) and hints of the humanity that will mean survival in peacetime, but we cannot help but be moved by the plight of those for whom the only light at the end of their all-too-real tunnel on these three fatal days in 1918 is the explosion of incendiary grenades.