There’s mounting evidence that every playwright recruited to write about the first world war is issued with a kit bag containing three obligatory scenes. There’s the one in a recruitment office where a schoolboy lies about his age; the one about a soldier saying goodbye to his sweetheart; and, of course, the one about the Christmas football match in no man’s land.
All are present and correct in this contribution to the 14–18 Now centenary commemorations, but happily they are just the beginning for playwright Oliver Emanuel. Despite its initial familiarity, The 306: Dawn is no mere rehash of All Quiet on the Western Front and Oh! What a Lovely War. Rather, it is an emotive tribute to the soldiers that history left behind.
A collaboration between the National Theatre of Scotland, Perth Theatre and Red Note, the play is the opening salvo in a planned trilogy. There are three qualities that set it apart.
First is the location. Every night, the audience is bussed to a large barn in the Perthshire countryside. It stands next to a derelict outhouse, looking suitably bomb-blasted, and contains a temporary theatre designed by Becky Minto, evoking dug-outs lined with corrugated iron and trenches laid with wooden slats. It’s makeshift and spartan, albeit a good deal cleaner than the Somme.
With the audience watching from four sides, the squaddies of Laurie Sansom’s physically dynamic production leap between playing areas and prowl around the peripheral gantry, ducking behind walls of outsize rifles as they go. The rural setting reflects the soldiers’ feelings of disorientation and uprootedness – far from home in some distant field, they could be anywhere and, indeed, anyone.
The production’s second stand-out aspect is Emanuel’s early departure from the familiar wartime narrative to focus on the little-known stories of the British men who were court martialled as traitors, then shot by firing squad at dawn. Numbering 306, they were the cowards, mutineers and deserters, written out of history for bringing shame on their families.
Yet, as the playwright movingly suggests, they were less likely to be criminals than victims of trauma or miscarriages of justice. He shows them sobbing, stammering and doubling over with stress, lost children given neither sympathy nor understanding in an era of grin-and-bear-it stoicism. We’ve seen war as heroism and war as folly; this is war as mental torment.
The third aspect is what gives this idea emotional force. The score by Gareth Williams is a rich, modernist expression of the soldiers’ mental states. Played live on piano, violin and cello, it varies from the fractured to the urgent. “I have no name,” is the close-harmony refrain that begins and ends the piece – a touching tribute to all those wasted lives. The production is at its spine-tingling best when the nine-strong company is in full voice.
Seen at a one-off early-hours performance that finished in a misty dawn (a well intentioned idea that added relatively little), the show is Sansom’s last for the NTS after his recent surprise resignation and a bold, heartfelt farewell.
•At Dalcrue farm, Pitcairngreen, until 11 June. Box office: 01738 621031.
