The canon of first world war drama is already vast. Mark Hayhurst, dealing with a Lancashire regiment of doomed friends very similar to the one that inspired Peter Whelan’s The Accrington Pals, succeeds in covering original ground in the disturbing story behind a gravestone in a French cemetery.
Pte Bert Ingham, who lies in plot B12 at Bailleulmont, was executed in 1916 after deserting the “Manchester Pals” with his friend Alfie Longshaw, who is buried alongside. Uniquely, the inscription on Ingham’s monument alludes to the circumstances of his end: “Shot at dawn, one of the first to enlist, a worthy son to his father.”
Hayhurst’s very successful first stage play, Taken at Midnight, dramatised the true story of a German mother trying to save the life of a lawyer son who had offended Hitler. In First Light, its title alluding to dawn offensives on the Somme and the time that firing squads operate, he again turns an obscure historical footnote into a morally knotty Ibsenite drama. Scenes set between 1916 and 1925 – in the mud and blood of France, the Inghams’ Salford parlour and the offices of the military establishment – seek to explain why a family, or at least some of its members, would have fought for posterity to know that their boy was ordered dead by court martial.
Jonathan Munby’s production employs parallel storytelling to great effect, with non-chronological moments in France, Lancashire and Whitehall co-existing on stage, and layers of memories, premonitions or ghosts. A rag that Bert is using to clean himself while at war is suddenly grabbed by the dad mourning him years later. On a stage still stained from driving rain that pelts terrified soldiers, a major general sniffs his brandy while coolly outlining the need to shoot deserters to maintain military discipline.
That army brass is chillingly well played by Andrew Woodall. In a precision-drilled cast of 14, David Moorst, who won three outstanding newcomer awards for last year’s Violence and Son at the Royal Court, confirms his immense potential as Alfie, most strikingly in a scene where the men try to pass as American cruise passengers.
The audience’s knowledge of the character’s fate might be used to win easy sympathy, but Moorst gives the young man both likable (artistic, witty) and more questionable (arrogant, controlling) aspects. Another exciting young actor, Tom Gill, matches him in the less showy role of the stolid, loyal Bert, led like a lamb to execution by his eloquent friend. Phil Davis makes affecting sense of the perplexing desire of George Ingham to brand his son, in the eyes of most of society at the time, as a traitor.
Literary remembrance of wars is fraught with the desire to mine them for metaphors of either patriotism or pacifism. Telling a story that questions easy definitions of courage and cowardice, Hayhurst achieves the unusual combination of sharp intelligence and jolting emotion.
- At Chichester Festival theatre until 2 July. Box office: 01243 781312.
