Oh, what a lovely war!

[Katie Elizabeth Stewart]

I recently watched this musical for English Literature, and was baffled by what value it could possibly have for students studying for a unit entitled 'Reading For Meaning' - it all seemed to me (without wishing to sound disparaging) a little gaudy. I don't think I was entirely comfortable at the idea of it being made into a musical. That notwithstanding, it taught me a great deal, for instance, about contemporary music - I had never heard of 'One staff Officer jumped over the other staff Officer's back'. Was this a war song of the 'we're here because we're here' type, i.e. one that was made to fill in a gap for soldiers who were fed up of doing nothing but sit around in the mud and rain waiting for death, or one with a rhetorical meaning that has been lost on me?

Secondly, Joan Littlewood herself: did she have any personal association with World War One, or was she merely interested? I have heard it said that the 1960s were a period that saw a revival of interest in 1914-1918. All this is purely out of curiosity, also, it may help me to place the musical in its correct context when I write about it and compare it to other war literature.

Anything to contribute? Anything you can would be much appreciated, as ever.

[Jim Clay]

Welcome back, Katie!

Yes, this has been discussed many times. A recent thread is here - but there's no reason not to have another discussion - the musical play/film seems to have its fervent supporters and detractors...

Jim

[PhilB]

Did you see the film or a stage presentation? It may be a pity that most of us will base our opinions on the film, if the Guardian obituary of JL is correct:-

She had nothing left but Stratford, and her last glory there was the peerless Oh, What A Lovely War!, a work of genius in which all her techniques came together. It began as an idea by radio producer Charles Chilton for a project, with the BBC Singers, about the first world war. With Raffles she wrote a mixture of agitprop and pageant play, sacking the singers and giving the tunes to pierrots. (Richard Attenborough's later film was a pale shadow.)

[MartinWills]

You really do have to separate the film from the play and whilst the film has its moments it lacks the raw energy of the play. If you cannot get to see find a recording of the play do try and find the text and read it - it should give you a different perspective. The pierrots relate to shows of the era and many soldiers concert parties featured pierrots.

With some of the songs I suggest you work out if they were songs to march to or songs to sing in an estaminet? The rythym should tell you.

I could see the play time after time, but can only watch the film very occasionally.

[Katie Elizabeth Stewart]

I saw the film in a lunchbreak. I have also read the text, and extracts taken from it have frequently been printed in A level papers. (Along with the script from 'Blackadder Goes Forth', which resulted in some self-righteous comments from parents about 'the dumbing down of A levels'). I was, as I have said, dubious about the war being made into a musical, but I suppose it's just one individual's interpretation. As to the play 'having its fervent supporters and detrators', well, I cannot honestly say I am either. A bit apathetic, or sitting on the fence, would be more appropriate. The start of the film with various members of European royal families strolling amongst a white stage set of alcoves and fences lost me a litte, but once it got to the actual war with the soldiers in their dugouts singing the old raucous songs, I thought it improved considerably. The Major requesting that a soldier remove the loose limb propping up the parapet was a little unrealistic, but it certainly got across the point. I thought Littlewood's take on the war fairly conventional, but I suppose that is only my modern perspective. In the 1960s, it may have been considered a new interpretation.

In the film, the soldiers were marching to the leapfrog tune, so I assumed that was what it was composed for. But again, that could have just been the playwright's interpretation. Finishing with Sir Douglas Haig taking a flying leap over all the other staff-officers, I thought it worked well.

I'd hesitate to call 'Oh, what a lovely war!' a work of genius. That's when I compare it to other texts, such as, for example, Sheriff's 'Journey's End.' Apologies again if this is all stale.

[Chris Martin]

Secondly, Joan Littlewood herself: did she have any personal association with World War One, or was she merely interested? I have heard it said that the 1960s were a period that saw a revival of interest in 1914-1918. All this is purely out of curiosity, also, it may help me to place the musical in its correct context when I write about it and compare it to other war literature.

The 60's did see a revived interest in the Great War. Towards the end of the decade there was the release of official doccuments to the public which spured a large amount of writing. It goes with out saying, that the inter-war period saw a large amount of writing on the subject, but it tapered off drastically with the comming of the Second World War. The negative and critical tone of the writing on the war that appeared in the late 20's and early 30's was very much in tune with the cultural attitude of the late 50's and 60's. In Britain the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the negative reaction to the country's involvment in the Suez in the late 50's lead to a strong anti-militarism, for the writers/ historian's who held this view the works produced by disillusionment writers were very influential. Thus there was a flood of highly critical works in the period, starting with Leon Wolff's In Flanders Fields and including Alan Clark's Donkey's

I don't know if Littlewood had any personal connection to the war but the script and the origional 1963 stage production were both highly influenced by Wolff and Clark's work, and one or both of them were consulted prior to the debute. Oh What A Lovely War! was very much in tune with the dominant notion of the war that was being portrayed during the 60, that of a young generation who were lied to, mislead, and abused, by an older generation. Where some feel the play stood out, was in its focus on the Other Ranks as opposed to the officers. Historian General Sir Anthony Farrar-Hockley commented on the play by stateing that it was a travesty from an historical point of view, but had, since its origional production, become the dominant cultural understanding of the war. I think he was fairly accurate in his viewpoint but his expanded statement on the play confused marxist methodology and terminology and to me he seemed to apply them incorrectly. I'm not a huge fan of the production, though I must admit I have only read the script and seen the movie version, but I can apprecieate what it was trying to achieve.

Brian Bond gives a very good discussion of Oh What A Lovely War! and the body of liturature that surrounds it during the 60's in The Unquiet Western Front: Britain's Role in Literature and History. If your looking into this area it's definatly worth checking out.

Chris

[Rob Connolly]

I'd also refer you to Dan Todman's recent book on "The Great War in Myth and Memory", which deals with both stage production and film in some detail.

[IanA]

In the film, the soldiers were marching to the leapfrog tune, so I assumed that was what it was composed for.

Katie,

Careful with 'composed'. There were original songs used in the film - "On Monday I walk out with a soldier" for instance - but many songs are parodies. The leapfrog song is 'John Brown's Body' and 'When this bloody war is over' is a well known hymn tune. Such songs were used to relieve the monotony of the march or to act as a safety valve. If you can make fun of the sudden terror of a murderous shell (Hush, here comes a whizzbang) or the agony of being gassed (Gassed last night, gassed the night before) it may release tensions.

Ian

[Dragon]

If you're interested in contextualising the play (or film) in culture, there are some interesting and accessible chapters in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War, edited by Vincent Sherry, (pub. Cambridge, ISBN 0-521-52897-6), in the section called 'Postwar Engagements'. The sections I'm thinking of discuss how the War has been represented in literature and cinema.

I was thinking along the same lines as Ian, though he said it first / better. I think it's essential to bear in mind that the text isn't literature. It's meant to be a way of bringing a story or message to life on a stage, so even if looking at it as part of a Literature course, you have to have a slant on it which thinks in terms of the sounds, movements and sights which it would have on a stage, and their effect on an audience. The songs he mentioned would have resonances for an audience in the '60s, for example and have a sneaky way of getting into crevices in the mind for months afterwards. Even years after being involved in a late '80s production of OWALW, the music is enough to bring me to tears; say, the hymn tune would have been familiar to the Sunday School children of the ages (the Great War age - the men - and the 1960s audience) and it sort of compresses a lost, damaged world and a new, frightening one into a persistent, haunting image. So thinking of Ian's comments on why the original soldiers used tunes to diffuse tension, does it have the opposite effect on an audience?

A useful little book, though old fashioned, is The Anatomy of Drama, by Marjorie Boulton. It's a way in to discussing drama as a piece of literary text.

Gwyn

[David Filsell]

Despite her theatrical skills, it should not be forgotten that Jaon Littlewood had and promoted a very leftist agenda

[Dragon]

This isn't having a go at you, Katie, or your teachers or school, but I bet I'm not the only one who's slightly mystified about how OWALW and Blackadder end up on sections of an 'A' Level English Literature course. I suppose I find myself thinking that out of the entire canon of seven hundred years of literature in English that a modern reader can understand, for bright candidates some of whom will go on to take English at university, why these?

Can you say a little about what you have to do with them? I know you said 'Reading for meaning', but I'm not sure what that means. Are there other, more classic, war texts included for comparison?

Gwyn

[Heid the Ba]

The Major requesting that a soldier remove the loose limb propping up the parapet was a little unrealistic, but it certainly got across the point.

Not sure what you mean but there is a line in "Her Soldiers We" about an arm sticking out the wall of a trench and the Tommies winding up the watch on its wrist and keeping it at the correct time. While fiction it is largely autobiographical.

[squirrel]

I have read one account of a recently captured trench where there was an arm sticking out of the parapet and the new occupiers were shaking the hand as they went past.

[Tom Kilkenny]

Gwyn,

The representation of war in literature is just one of the units that comprise the AQA exam board's A Level syllabus. The unit is often referred to as the 'synoptic' unit because the intention is that students should read a wide variety of different kinds of texts about the subject, find some meaning in them and then write about it and them coherently.

It just so happens that the subject is writing about war and the emphasis is on the Great War because that is the conflict about which most has been written. In fact, the exam board could have chosen pretty much any topic: love, for example.

I'm just pleased it happened to be war and the Great War in particular!

By the way, Katie, I recommend you buy a copy of the film or, better still, a recording of the soundtrack and listen to those songs a few times. It's the music and the sentiment expressed in the songs that makes 'Oh! What a Lovely War' such a wonderful piece of theatre.

Tom

[Katie Elizabeth Stewart]

Tom - do you by any chance work for AQA/teach English Literature to A level students?

Gwyn - yes, it is called the 'synoptic unit', and there are two parts to the question. The first, an hour and fifteen minutes, gives two texts, usually poems or extracts from plays, and one dates from the Great War and the other pre-dates it. It asks you to compare their presentation of a certain war-associated motif, eg. "compare and contrast the ways in which Stephen Crane in Do Not Weep, Maiden and Siegfried Sassoon in To Any Dead Officer depict grieving for a loved one. Then you have to engage in a debate, for example, 'say how far you agree with the view that Crane conveys the futility of loss more effectively than Sassoon.

The second part, an hour and three quarters, is designed to test your Wider Reading on the subject of the Great War. It'll usually give three texts that can be taken from anything (yes, even Blackadder) and ask you to compare them, and to 'say how typical they are of war literature' and consider style, gender, subject matter, date etc. I suppose it's more or less looking at the texts and saying ooh, this reminds me of this - hence my interest in contextualising.

I do think war songs have the opposite effect upon audiences. "Keep the Home Fires Burning' is my favourite, and at the time I know it was composed by Novello to hearten and cheer those at home. Yet it makes me shiver, because of course I think well, so many of 'the boys' didn't come home, only their unrecognisable uniforms came home to their families. I think it's perhaps because with hindsight, the war songs seem cruelly ironic to us. Hush, here comes a whizzbang might not ring so true as a soldier's lullaby to us, but as an accurate reflection of what did happen when a whizzbang came over - indeed, they put many people to sleep, and 'hushed' them most effectively. We are not the soldiers in the trenches, we don't witness every day the piling up of the dead that they had to witness, therefore we cannot treat death as a matter of course the way they could. To us, it seems horrendous to sing about an old Battalion of men 'hanging on the barbed wire', because it's not something we've seen and not something most of us will ever have to see.

There's a scene in OWALW that I feel reflects the irony of Keep the Home Fires Burning really well - quite close to the end, a nurse and stretcher bearer empty a dying soldier named 'Harry' onto the floor, and cover him with a pall, and a single soprano voice sings it. (I personally thought the film would have worked better if it was the concluding scene, but that's another matter...) I also appreciated the bitter irony of the scene where the soldiers sing hymns under the supervision of a padre, and the meeting concludes with the words 'depart in peace.' Moments later, they are all called to attention and march off stage in their most militarisitc fashion. Visually, the film (and presumably the play as well) can be very stirring, yet I suspect that if I just saw it written down, it wouldn't have quite the same effect. Most of the words spoken by the characters aren't particularly witty or defining, because most of that is in the songs and in the visual dynamics operating onstage whilst the song is being sung.

P.S. With regards to the 'dumbing down of A levels', well, I can only say this in their defence: that the inclusion of comedy and musical scripts sure as heck hasn't made them any easier! And perhaps we should all be thankful that our English teacher put her foot down firmly when a member of the class suggested scripts from 'Torchwood' and 'Doctor Who' as Wider Reading texts. But it is 'a subject hotly debated amongst academics' (according to various English teachers): "What is literature? Of what value is a shopping list written by Shakespeare?"

[Dragon]

Thanks for the explanation, Katie.

I didn't want to get into a 'dumbing down' debate, though I feel that if examination boards want to avoid accusations of it, they could manage to find plenty of interesting, engaging texts without using Blackadder. OWALW is different and I think has layers of meaning which are worth looking at. (I feel, though,you need to distinguish between whether you're thinking about the stage script or the film.)

You can imagine how people who did English Lit A level in their own teens will be spluttering into their Daily Torygraphs, saying that in their day they did Milton, or Pope. I confess to some sort of reaction like that myself. I'm afraid I don't think Blackadder is challenging enough and I think there's a place for introducing students to texts that they won't choose of their own accord; one of the reasons I decided I'd had enough of teaching was when a new head of faculty told me that from now on I had to teach Wuthering Heights only from the film, because the book was too hard. But then I'm very academically-minded, and passionate about literature.

There's inherent difficulty in producing stage plays which hover between bitter comedy and irony. It can so easily go badly wrong. I recall seeing a bunch of teenagers sniggering at the idea of men 'Hanging off the old barbed wire'. I think the last 'war' play I saw was the tour of Journey's End. I enjoyed the production, though I seriously feel that the time has come for a major rewrite of part of the play. Combining archaic language (topping, sir! awfully nice! rugger, sir?) and dated slang, with a lead (Stanhope) who SHOUTED most of the time and a couple of Cockney working class characters and you can easily be transported to John Cleese demonstrating how to disarm an enemy threatening you with a banana. I half expected someone to step forward and ask how to defend himself against a man with a point-ed stick. I have read the script, but I can’t remember whether the cook is actually Cockney or not. If not, then that was an unfortunate choice of characterisation because it immediately shouted Baldrick, especially in his humorous observations. In fact, at one or two poignant moments (eg Hibbert’s panic attack) the audience tittered; somehow they hadn’t engaged with the man and his terror. I think this was partly because of the size of the theatre and its lack of intimacy; movements such as tremor in hands were simply lost, so the audience’s power of imagination was restricted.

Unfortunately, as soon as a stage play echoes Blackadder, some people think they have to laugh. An unintended part of its legacy, perhaps.

Gwyn

[Chris Martin]

The use of Blackadder as a source or benchmark for discussion has not limited itself to literary studies within English departments. Discussions of the usefulness of Blackadder Goes Forth have appeared within historical circles as well. Both Brian Bond in The Unquiet Western Front and Richard Holmes in the introduction to Tommy discuss the impact of Blackadder. Though in his brief discussion Holmes appears to have borrowed heavily from what Bond had written previously. Neither Bond nor Holmes suggest that using the comedy as a source is anything but bad history, but both feel its prevelent use by some within the discipline, especially in the 90's, warranted discussion. Bond went so far as to call Blackadder the recent generations Journey's End given the way it has so affected recent cultural interpretations and understandings of the war.

[IanA]

"Keep the Home Fires Burning' is my favourite, and at the time I know it was composed by Novello to hearten and cheer those at home. Yet it makes me shiver, because of course I think well, so many of 'the boys' didn't come home, only their unrecognisable uniforms came home to their families. I think it's perhaps because with hindsight, the war songs seem cruelly ironic to us. Hush, here comes a whizzbang might not ring so true as a soldier's lullaby to us, but as an accurate reflection of what did happen when a whizzbang came over - indeed, they put many people to sleep, and 'hushed' them most effectively. We are not the soldiers in the trenches, we don't witness every day the piling up of the dead that they had to witness, therefore we cannot treat death as a matter of course the way they could. To us, it seems horrendous to sing about an old Battalion of men 'hanging on the barbed wire', because it's not something we've seen and not something most of us will ever have to see.

Keep the Home Fires Burning undoubtedly had an immediate appeal for the general public: Novello made sure of that with his easily remembered musical sequences and syrupy melody floating the gushing lyrics of Lena Ford. The melody and sentiment had more to do with a golden Edwardian age than the dirty and violent business of war. Hanging on the Old Barbed Wire is a true masterpiece with its 'rumpty-tumpty' rhythm bearing aloft the humorous words of the quarter-bloke miles and miles behind the line and the colonel down in his deep dug-out. When the old battalion are found hanging on the old barbed wire in the second half of the final verse it is akin to a very hard slap in the face. The impact is heightened by the inexorable onward march of that bouncy rhythmic pattern which now seems obscene. A very potent song indeed.

It is also worth bearing in mind that some of the songs in OWALW have been bowdlerised.

[PBI]

This Film has been Extensively Covered in Various other Threads on this Forum...does it really need to be Re Hashed and Dissected Ad Nauseum...???...Pointless..just like the Play,Film,and Cast.

[IanA]

Oh, I Think You Are Being A Bit Intemperate.

PS Best not to use Latin unless you can spell.

[Dragon]

Russ, Katie's doing her 'A' levels. She's probably googled and found that a lot of stuff out there is rubbish. She needs to sort out her ideas with someone who empathises. So she's turned to people whom she respects as trustworthy and helpful, even experts. Is her query any less valid than the millionth one about how to use the National Archives?

Gwyn

[Jim Clay]

As Gwyn says.

You don't want to read more about it? Ignore it.

It's a perfectly legitimate question and thread.

Jim

[Katie Elizabeth Stewart]

Ah, yes. Disquieting comedy. I had a similar discussion today about the black humour used in Hamlet during the gravediggers' scene. And yes, I think I might reach the conclusion that Blackadder Goes Forth is discordantly funny, because at the end, it transpires that you're laughing at a lot of men who are all killed. As to Blackadder being challenging, I think most would agree that in terms of language, stlye and format it is not. But there again, it is perhaps possible to use the literature in a challenging way! Trying to rank it in order of typicality as a piece of war literature might qualify as such! Besides, at least we don't learn the texts through watching the films... I found that really shocking about Wuthering Heights. Surely students choose to study English Literature in order to gain a stronger understanding and appreciation of the language and concepts introduced to them?

Chris, if I was using Blackadder, it would be as a piece of literature rather than an historical source, and I should, if possible, shrink even more from treating it as reliable than I would from comparing it to other literature, some of which dates from the war itself. And anyway, there is only the smallest of outside chances that an exract taken from the same text will be printed on the exam. paper two years running.

Ian, you seem something of a music aficionado. Was 'Hanging on the old barbed wire' used to accompany men going over the top, as it was depicted in OWALW? I thought Here comes a whizzbang was also partcularly moving; the layers of harmony seemed to me to drip downwards and give the effect of shells raining silently all around.

Bowdlerised??

Katie

[PBI]

http://1914-1918.invisionzone.com/forums/i...p;hl=littlewood

Bowdlerised ??...No Fictionalised,with a Very Heavy Dose of Overblown Romanticism,and not to be taken as representative of the War itself,and the Experiences of the Men who Served.

I hope the Spelling is Acceptable this time,Ian.

[IanA]

Ian, you seem something of a music aficionado. Was 'Hanging on the old barbed wire' used to accompany men going over the top, as it was depicted in OWALW? I thought Here comes a whizzbang was also partcularly moving; the layers of harmony seemed to me to drip downwards and give the effect of shells raining silently all around.

Bowdlerised??

Katie

Bowdlerised = having the naughty words removed and replaced with something more anodyne.

I cannot see anyone singing anything when about to go over the top.

"Hush" is another parody - the song comes from "Hush, Here Comes the Dream Man".

[i hope the Spelling is Acceptable this time,Ian.

Sorry Russ - cheap shot. I am a bad boy.