WORLD WAR I is thought of as this old-fashioned war,” the director Garry Hynes said, “but to my point of view it has the force of an apocalypse.”
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Anatomy of a Scene: 'War Horse'
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Robert Day
Clare Dunne in “The Silver Tassie,” directed by Garry Hynes.
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Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Peter Hermann (kneeling) and Ariel Heller in the drama “War Horse.”
Ms. Hynes, whose Druid Theater production of the 1928 Sean O’Casey play “The Silver Tassie” arrives on Sunday as part of the 2011 Lincoln Center Festival, is hardly alone in feeling the urge to remind people just how bloody the conflict stretching from 1914 to 1918 was. “The war to end all wars,” as Woodrow Wilson optimistically called it, failed woefully in achieving that goal, to the point where the historian Adam Hochschild titled his acclaimed recent book about the period “To End All Wars.”
But the era has spawned a cultural cottage industry of material about the war, encompassings film (Steven Spielberg’s “War Horse” is due out in December), literature (“Bright’s Passage,” a first novel from the singer-songwriter Josh Ritter, about a West Virginia farm boy who survives the war through rather miraculous means, was released in June) and art (a recent Museum of Modern Art exhibition spotlighted the harrowing war-themed works of Otto Dix and Max Beckmann).
In a telephone interview Mr. Hochschild credited the surge in interest to several novels written in the 1990s, most notably the “Regeneration” trilogy by Pat Barker. But in recent years the highest concentration of war-themed projects have been seen on the stage. First came a revival of the 1928 R. C. Sherriff play “Journey’s End,” which follows a tense British infantry company holed up in the trenches of Saint-Quentin, France. The production, with its memorable curtain call displaying the names of some 6,000 dead soldiers, won critical accolades in 2007 but never caught on at the box office. It won the Tony Award for best revival a few hours after closing.
That production had transferred from London, as did the next major play about World War I to reach Broadway, the current “War Horse” at Lincoln Center. The adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s young-adult novel about an English youth roaming war-ravaged France in search of his loyal horse (portrayed by a life-size puppet) connected with both critics and audiences; it won five Tonys last month. (Mr. Spielberg’s “War Horse” is a puppet-free adaptation of the novel.)
Not content with the plays already set in the period, directors are also transplanting the works of Shakespeare to these killing fields, as with the “King Lear” that is part of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s five-play residence at the Park Avenue Armory. “ ‘Lear’ is the ultimate play of collapse,” said its director, David Farr. “Nothing is left by the end. Not faith, not life, not breath, not even reason. The old world has been dismantled, but is there a new one? This was, I think, what many people felt at the end of World War I.”
Daniel Sullivan made a similar shift with his Public Theater production of “All’s Well That Ends Well” in Central Park this summer, although he allowed that the move had less to do with the war than with the technological advances that accompanied it. “Actually I just wanted to see Helena cure the king with a hypodermic needle,” he said.
Modernity plays a crucial role in several of these pieces, although rarely in such a beneficial fashion. The horrors of war occur offstage in “The Silver Tassie,” but O’Casey does include a scene in which two middle-aged men are reduced to, as one of them puts it, “hot and quivery” wrecks at the prospect of operating a telephone.
“War Horse,” meanwhile, takes a far darker view of change. In a deeply symbolic moment near the end of the play Joey, the title character, is nearly run over by a tank.
“There’s a historical hinge around this period — from a tool-based to a machinery-based understanding of warfare,” said Tom Morris, who, with Marianne Elliott, won a Tony for directing “War Horse.” “Our ability as humans to do a lot of damage in war took a huge leap forward.”
One result of this expanded capacity was the reliance on trench warfare. Mr. Hochschild estimated that more than 85 percent of American fatalities occurred in the muddy trenches of northern France and Belgium, which shielded both sides from at least some of the carnage but had its own dangers: gangrene, cholera, dysentery, typhus. Such forced close quarters would seem to be a natural for depiction on the stage, but of the five plays mentioned, only “Journey’s End” focused solely on the trenches.
While one of the four acts in “The Silver Tassie” involves the trenches, the script roams so far and wide that W. B. Yeats, a founder of the Abbey Theater in Dublin, famously objected to the play on structural grounds, setting off a feud with O’Casey that played no small role in his departure from Ireland.
“I always get the feeling that O’Casey sat down with this play and wrote like his pen was on fire,” said Ms. Hynes, who was the artistic director of the Abbey in the early 1990s.
She said that “Tassie,” with its fragmented, sprawling narrative, represents the road not taken for Irish theater. “One must remember that the Abbey would have closed if not for the success of ‘Juno and the Paycock’ and ‘The Plough and the Stars,’ ” she said, referring to two of O’Casey’s earlier plays. But as a result of the skittishness of Yeats and others, she added, “Ireland got stuck with a kind of calcified, aberrant naturalism.”
Nearly every director interviewed for this article said the resurgence of plays about World War I — a conflict that many historians now believe to have been unnecessary, Mr. Hochschild noted — may stem from public ambivalence toward the current United States military engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“We’re sufficiently distanced from the First World War to convey the pure horror without getting messed up in the politics of it,” Mr. Morris said of “War Horse,” “and that makes it a more powerful way to discuss any war.”
The use of previous conflicts to illuminate current ones is nothing new: Mr. Hochschild cited the popularity of “M*A*S*H,” which was set during the Korean War but widely accepted as a response to Vietnam; and Ms. Hynes said that at one point she considered dressing her “Silver Tassie” cast in clothes that would evoke more contemporary battles.
Mr. Morris did point out one aspect of World War I that might make recollections of it more palatable for audiences, at least in the United States. “Michael Morpurgo told me it was the ultimate example of the Americans going over, sorting things out and coming home. He added, ‘And probably the last one.’ ”
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