Poignant portrait of a forgotten war poet
It Is Easy to Be Dead Trafalgar Studios
The roll call of the great First World War poets trips off the tongue, so deep are their names imprinted within our collective marrow: Owen, Sassoon, Brooke. To that list Robert Graves added Charles Sorley, killed at the age of 20 in 1915, considered by Graves to be one of the three greatest war poets to lose their lives. Not many remember him now.
Neil McPherson’s elegiac play, set to mostly German music, and seen earlier this year at the Finborough, is an attempt to put that right. It’s a story about commemoration, as Sorley’s strongly Protestant Scottish parents, reeling from the telegram announcing their son’s death, embark on their own project of remembrance by gathering his letters and poems for publication. Those remarkable pieces signify a subversive, blistering talent. Try these lines, taken from Sorley’s most famous poem: “When you see millions of the mouthless dead / Across your dreams in pale battalions go / Say not soft things as other men have said, / That you’ll remember. For you need not so.”
Sorley’s education was conventional: Marlborough College, followed by a place at Oxford, which he never took. But McPherson argues he was shaped mainly by the period he spent in Germany just before the war, in which he fell in love with German culture (and his landlady) and which would inform his divided feelings towards the conflict. His poetry lacerated the patriotism and “hypocrisy” of the war. He hated the sentimentality of Rupert Brooke. He was a product of the establishment but railed furiously against its elitism.
As Sorley, Alexander Knox brings this complex, fiercely independent soul to ebullient life, reciting his poems to the audience with a winningly conspiratorial air. The music, sung exquisitely by Hugh Benson and accompanied on piano by Elizabeth Rossiter, hauntingly underscores Sorley’s conviction of the beauty of German culture.
Phil Lindley’s set resembles a faded sepia photograph, on to which moving video imagery is projected.
Max Key’s production, designed for the fringe, sits less happily in the West End. Sorley’s parents feel a bit mothballed, having little to do beyond read letters in the study. The music, beautiful though it is, never feels fully integrated, not least because Rossiter spends most of the show with her back to the audience. The first half, in particular, is sluggish.
Yet there is a wonderful moment when Tom Marshall’s emotionally uptight father collapses after spilling coffee on a letter, as though by obliterating his son’s words he has obliterated him all over again. He had grave doubts about publishing his son’s words to the world. McPherson reminds us how much we owe him that he did. Until Dec 3. Tickets 0844 871 7615; atgtickets.com