This excellent triple bill offers a potent reminder that anti-war protest is not a modern prerogative. Given that two of these three plays were seized by the police in 1916, it also suggests it took more courage to question the first world war than it does to criticise our present-day barbarities.
What is fascinating about the two British plays, both by Miles Malleson, is that they deal as much with class as war. In the poignant D Company, set in a Malta barracks in 1914, we watch a barely literate private asking a Cambridge-educated colleague for help in writing a letter home. As the upper-class Garside reads out a letter to his own girlfriend, with its quotes from Edward Carpenter and invocations of Wagner, we realise he is more similar to an educated German than the British working classes, a point forcefully expressed in Ian Talbot's production.
Malleson touches on similar themes in Black 'Ell, written in 1916. But here, the main issue is civilian incomprehension of the horrors of war, as a shell-shocked young hero returns home only to greet news of his DSO with disgust. Malleson spells out his main message almost too directly: that war brutalises and that the British and the Germans are equally victims of demonising propaganda. When Daniel Weyman's quivering hero wishes that politicians, clerics and leader-writers could all be locked in a room to fight to the death, the play sounds an astonishingly modern note.
The real discovery, however, is Brigade Exchange, a German radio play by Ernst Johannsen first broadcast in 1929. Set in a German dugout in 1918, it shows the mixture of panic, confusion and stoicism as enemy tanks advance and certain death approaches.
What surprises in Tricia Thorns's vividly realistic production is the parallel with the British experience. The contrast between the clipped officers' voices, heard over the telephone exchange, and those of the dogged, grumbling privates reminds us of the pervasive nature of class conflict. That, in fact, is the subversive, socialist point that links all three plays: that the British and German soldiery, and the respective officer classes, too, had far more in common with each other than with their native colleagues. It is an argument easily accepted now. To make it at the time showed real bravery.
· Until November 2. Box office: 020-7609 1800.
