We've had Birdsong, the Pat Barker trilogy and the rediscovery of Miles Malleson's anti-war plays. Yet, for all our renewed awareness of the first world war, RC Sherriff's 1928 play still works powerfully on our emotions, especially in a revival as good as David Grindley's.
The stock argument against Sherriff is that he sees the war as a continuation of public-school life. Set in a dugout near St Quentin in 1918, his play deals with the discovery by a young lieutenant, Raleigh, that his former schoolboy hero, Captain Stanhope, is a nerve-shattered wreck. Yet the whisky-fuelled Stanhope retains his company's unswerving loyalty, is able to persuade a cowardly malingerer back into battle and protests to his superior against an ill-timed raid behind enemy lines. Sherriff, for all his realism, remains as much a hero-worshipper as Raleigh himself.
The play focuses on the officer class, is full of dated slang and offers a soft-edged portrait of a benign old dominie who once played rugger for England. If it still moves, it is because Sherriff faithfully captures the quality that runs through all the great literature of the war: the molten comradeship of the dug-outs and the trenches.
What also moves one is Sherriff's gift for dramatic understatement - the beneficial side of what we derisively term the "stiff upper lip". You see this most clearly in David Haig's beautifully observed portrait of the owlish schoolmaster. Informed that the big German push will come while the officers are still in the dugout, he cries "Oh well" with a stoic resignation worthy of Marcus Aurelius. And, although Geoffrey Streatfeild excellently conveys Stanhope's neurotic tetchiness, his suggestion that the timing of the suicidal raid is dictated by dinner plans at HQ is all the more effective for being so quietly phrased.
This is not an overtly anti-war play; but everything about Grindley's production, from the peacetime dreams of Paul Bradley's working-class lieutenant to the final ghostly image of the entire company standing before a marble cenotaph, leaves one feeling overwhelmed by the wasteful horror of war.
· Until March 6. Box office: 0870 060 6622.
