Review: Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme

For the Hampstead’s 50th anniversary season the theatre is dipping into its glorious past to revive plays for its inglorious present. For recently there have been far too few new plays at this venue that make the heart beat faster with excitement or, as with this First World War play by Frank McGuiness, beat heavier with its sheer potency.

When McGuinness’s work received its UK premiere at the Hampstead in 1986, the Irish author was a lecturer at Maynooth Catholic College. Yet neither his Irishness nor his Catholicism was a barrier to writing with heartbreaking empathy about the passions that fired Britain’s Ulster regiment on the killing fields in France.

The story is framed with the guilt of survival. James Hayes is the ageing Kenneth Pyper recalling after the war the seven dead comrades-in-arms with whom he fought at the Somme. The irony of his survival is that it is he, Pyper — the subversive sculptor son of a posh family who, but for his homosexuality, would have been up with the officer class instead of down in the trenches — who has enlisted to die.

But despite his educated background, even he is no slacker when it comes to the anti-Fenian, Papist-hating banter in which his rougher, though not tougher, fellow soldiers indulge. And it is with this Catholic-baiting language that the absurdity of fighting for Ulster, killing and being killed by Germans on French soil, is laid bare.

In 1985, when the play first appeared at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, Ulster-accented cries of “No Surrender” seemed as alien to English ears as Islamic cries of “Allahu Akbar” do now when deployed as a call to arms. The point is, this is a play set mostly in 1916, first seen a quarter of a century ago, and which has huge and unexpected resonances with the language of hate used today.

But as well as the deep commitment to a cause, McGuiness is no less powerful when showing the bravery with which these Ulstermen went so knowingly to their deaths.

John Dove’s beautifully acted production elegantly moves between the contrasting — you could say colliding — acts. It is in the third where we see the fighting unit split into pairs during their only period of leave. One soldier tries to revive the shredded nerves of another; a preacher whose faith in God far surpasses his faith in his fellow man is brought down to earth; another sees the cause for which they fight evaporate in the lukewarm welcome of their return to Belfast and the fear that they will be punished by God because of their city’s role in the building of the recently sunk Titanic.

Richard Dormer plays the young Pyper who falls in love with Eugene O’Hare’s burly Craig and finds that expressing his tender feelings is so much harder than articulating all the usual bigoted Protestant bile. Yet even here McGuinness writes without judgement and with compassion.

The play is not flawless in its construction. This is essentially a flashback work in which Pyper’s total recall not only depicts a restrained and dangerous gay relationship with Eugene, but the fears, hopes and conversations of three other friendships at which he could not have been present. But this pedantic point would be to deny the knowledge that Pyper has of his fellow Ulstermen. And anyway, by then we are utterly persuaded by the play’s central point — the value of the lives spent fighting for a valueless cause.

There is a pre-battle scene in which the famous Battle of the Boyne is comically re-enacted. Meanwhile the pink dawn warns of the blood that is about to flow. It is a scene in which mirth melds with fear and which will remain a long time in the mind.

(Tel: 020 7722 9301)