Review: Birdsong at Liverpool Playhouse ***1/2

It’s nearly a decade – in fact pretty much the length of two Great Wars laid end to end – since the stage adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’ sprawling yet claustrophobic Birdsong was last at the Playhouse.

Then, we were in the throes of centenary commemorations of the ‘war to end all wars’. Now, social media is alive with #ThirdWorldWar style hashtags as fierce fighting has come to European soil once more while terrible conflagration has sprung up across the Middle East.

Faulks’ subject is war, and the pity of war – but also love, loyalty, quiet comradeship and trauma. His source novel ranges across decades and several generations, from the final fading sunlit throes of the Edwardian era to the 1970s.

Adapting it for the stage, Rachel Wagstaff concentrates on a much tighter period between a pre-war Hauts-de-France and the Armistice, albeit one bookended by brief scene-setting incursions into the present day in the form of a descendant of Faulks’s chief protagonist – Stephen Wraysford – on a personal fact-finding mission to the old battlefields.

I say adapting, but this latest touring production is really a re-adaptation, with Wagstaff revisiting and re-working her script.

Previously, the pre-war action was told in flashbacks during a first half dominated by trenches, tunnels and the thunderstorm of shells.

Now, Wagstaff has drawn it into its own standalone scene-setting act where we’re introduced to a puppyish young Wraysford (James Esler, acquitting himself well in his professional stage debut) who is sent to a bucolic Northern France to write a report on the cloth factory owned by ruthless industrialist Rene Azaire (Sargon Yelda) and where Stephen yearns devotedly for, and starts an intense affair – graphically realised - with, Azaire’s ignored young wife Isabelle (Charlie Russell).

Above: James Esler (Stephen Wraysford) and Charlie Russell (Isabelle Azaire) in Birdsong. Top: Esler with Max Bowden (Jack Firebrace). Photos by Pamela Raith.

Already a lengthy tale, it means the production now runs to three substantial acts broken up by two intervals over a marathon three hours.

The pounding heart of the story remains at the centre of the play – the second act which plunges its audience into a world at war, and a place and people both physically and mentally scarred.

It’s a place of brutality and devastation, but also of small kindnesses, and of deep friendships forged between ordinary men thrown together in extraordinary circumstances. And it’s one that’s strikingly and tenderly realised by director Alastair Whatley and the ensemble cast.

While the Wraysford we discover in his dugout home is a now damaged and distant one, there’s a jostling comradeship among the neighbouring rough and ready sappers, burying away dangerously deep below German lines, whose ranks include ex-miners and London Underground tunnellers like Jack Firebrace (Max Bowden who was also on the 2015 tour).

While some inevitably remain more supporting ‘types’ than fully rounded characters, Bowden, best known as Ben Mitchell in EastEnders, is given more meat to work with and impresses greatly as the terrier-like Firebrace whose matey, bluff exterior hides a sensitive soul, and who bears personal tragedy with a quiet stoicism.

Above: Max Bowden as Jack Firebrace. Photo by Pamela Raith.

The act comes to a heart-pounding, floor-shaking crescendo in the mud-sucking horrors of the Somme and after an intensely moving Blackadder Goes Forth-style moment which is elevated further by Sophie Cotton and Tim Van Eyken’s resonant music and Jason Taylor’s evocative lighting.

We all know it’s not the battle to end all battles, just as it wasn’t the war to end all wars, and the final act, post-Somme, unites a disparate but changed Wraysford and Firebrace in common ground beneath the mud, realised beneath the moveable ceiling of Richard Kent’s timber planked box-shaped set.

It also reintroduces some non-combatants, among whom Natalie Radmall-Quirke (who has a hint of Cate Blanchett about her) stands out as Isabelle’s calm and collected older sister Jeanne.

Three decades after it was published, Faulks’ Birdsong remains a profoundly powerful and moving piece of storytelling.

And much of this stage adaptation is that too.

But while the flashback device of previous productions wasn't all together satisfactory, the long new first act feels over indulgent. Trimming and tightening both this and the last act would help prevent fatigue setting in before the tale reaches its end.