Review – Birdsong (UK Tour) – Playhouse Theatre, Liverpool

Rachel Wagstaff’s stage adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’ novel Birdsong has had a long and complex development. It last appeared here at Liverpool’s Playhouse as part of a national tour in 2015 produced by Original Theatre and directed by Alastair Whatley, but prior to that it had been produced at London’s Comedy Theatre in 2010 before being picked up by Whatley and company.

Now Whatley and Original Theatre are on tour again, celebrating the source novel’s 30th anniversary, but anyone who saw the previous tour will not recognise this adaptation. Wagstaff, with the collaboration of Faulks himself, has revisited the project and effectively done a complete re-write, with a very different dramatic structure and focus.

That earlier play began in the trenches at the Somme and focused most of the action there and in the battle’s aftermath, bringing us domestic and romantic scenes from 1910 Amiens in a series of hazy, spectral flashbacks, which led to a perplexing rollercoaster of time travel, which felt simultaneously hurried and overlong.

In this new treatment of the story, Wagstaff and Whatley have straightened the narrative out into a much more linear timeline, at the same time extending the play by some twenty extra minutes, creating a show that now runs to three hours including two intervals. Curiously however, the end result is a piece that has a more cohesive feel, with more time for character development, and as a result it doesn’t feel over-extended at all, except occasionally during act I.

That first act is set mostly in the idyll of a 1910 Amiens where Stephen Wraysford meets Isabelle and René Azaire and becomes aware of their far from idyllic domestic situation. The time taken in establishing the brutal treatment by René of both his factory workforce and his wife and stepdaughter is well spent, creating much stronger groundwork for the torrid relationship that develops between Wraysford and Isabelle and forms a thread that runs throughout the story. However, there are times when the point is laboured a little too much, and scenes involving the overbearing and tiresome family friend Bérard, whilst adding a little comic relief, could easily be cut without being missed.

But throughout this opening act the impending threat of war looms ever closer, rumbling like an approaching earthquake, and the reality of trench warfare explodes with considerable force as we approach the first interval.

It is in act II that we find the emotional and dramatic heart of the work, as the men (and boys)serving under the now Lieutenant Wraysford come to know the humanity that lies beneath his aloof and somewhat other-worldly exterior. Central among them is Jack Firebrace, a sapper in the Royal Engineers whose main role is tunneling, but who also finds himself drafted in to pad out the numbers on watch. The relationship between Firebrace, whose young son John is gravely ill at home, and Wraysford, desperate to locate the Isabelle he has lost contact with, is effectively the fulcrum around which the entire of the play hinges.

The 13-strong cast are uniformly excellent, and mostly play multiple parts, but it is James Esler and Max Bowden as Wraysford and Firebrace, and Charlie Russell as Isabelle who hold most of the piece together, with a very fine performance from Natalie Radmall-Quirke as Isabelle’s sister Jeanne, and standout moments for Raife Clarke as the teenage Tipper, James Findlay as the violin playing Brennan (who also has a great singing voice) and from Joseph Benjamin Baker and Tama Phethean in both their dual roles.

It is impossible to separate the individual contributions of Richard Kent, Jason Taylor and Dominic Bilkley, responsible respectively for set, lighting and sound design, as their work combines seamlessly to create an immersive and fluid landscape that brings atmosphere to every scene and helps to drive the story forwards.

In a clever piece of updating to account for the 30 years since the novel was written, the story is framed not by the present day quest of Wraysford’s granddaughter, as in the book, but that of his great grandson, who we meet in his search to understand his past. When he neatly fits himself into this human jigsaw as the play reaches its dawn chorus of a conclusion, we are left with the all too poignant message that the millions whose lives were lost in this conflict hoped that it would be the war to end all wars.

Birdsong is at Liverpool Playhouse until Saturday 12th October and continues touring the UK with dates booking through to February 2025.

Star rating: 4½ stars

This review was originally written for publication by Good News Liverpool

Max Bowden and James Esler in Birdsong - picture by Pamela Raith

James Esler, Charlie Russell and the cast of Birdsong - picture by Pamela Raith