It Is Easy To Be Dead, Trafalgar Studios 2

[Steve]

This is the story of first world war poet, Charles Hamilton Sorley.

An ordinary frame contains an extraordinary portrait of an extraordinary poet.

The frame is ordinary. There is something safe and staid about this. There are no fevered conversations in smoky dug-outs between panicking soldiers, on the verge of death in the trenches, which make "Journey's End" so dramatic. There is no artistic vision boldly imposed over the storytelling, like the scabrous "oh What a Lovely War." Instead, this is like late night BBC2 or Radio 4, in the way it combines a performance of Sorley's letters and Sorley's poetry, with a depiction of Sorley's parents reacting to his fate and story, with songs and music from the era.

But oh what a performance this is of Sorley's poetry and letters! Alexander Knox IS Sorley. Being with him in this tiny theatre is like travelling back 101 years in a time machine, so convincing, subtle and moving is Knox's performance. Connoisseurs, of young actors giving career-defining brilliant performances, need to see this! I felt a similar frisson of discovery to when I first belly-laughed at "The Play that Goes Wrong," or to when I welled up after Cynthia Erivo collapsed in a weeping heap at the end of the overwhelming final performance of Dessa Rose, both in this same contained electric space.

This is a transfer from Finborough Theatre, and I understand work has been done on this since it played there, including sending Knox to Sorley's Marlborough School to absorb the atmosphere, breathe the school's sweat, to help him transform into Sorley.

Sorley was extraordinary himself. A Scot who attended a British public school, he gravitated to Europeans, and spent his gap year in Germany, where he fell in love with the Germans (albeit revulsed by the pervasive anti-semitism), only for war to break out. Then he had to kill the people he loved. Unlike Wilfred Owen, he never believed in "Dulce et decorum est," so the trenches to him were always a tragedy, a violation of a European union he believed in. He was a Remainer in an age of Brexit, 100 years ago.

Overall, if the storytelling is conventional, Alexander Knox's performance makes this unmissable, and Charles Sorley's European sense of identity makes this topical.

4 and a half stars.

PS: This run ends on December 3rd.

[sondheimhats]

I have to say I really disliked this show. Part of it is personal bias, as I can't stand plays that rely heavily on narration rather than actual scenes with dialogue. The comment about BBC radio is apt. The framing device of the parents was very disappointing. I wish the play had focused on them more and given them more emotional heft. They began to do this at times, but in general I found their material to be thin, wasted, poorly written and hammily acted.

The use of music was also very disappointing. I usually love plays with music, but the songs here felt shoehorned. They broke up the text rather than complementing it, I thought. The songs may or may not have been carefully chosen (I have my doubts), but I definitely felt like they not carefully placed in the text.

I agree that Knox's performance was the strongest element of the show, though it didn't move me that much.

The best I can say about the material itself was that Sorley was indeed a very good writer and had some compelling ideas about war and patriotism. But as a piece of theatre I couldn't find anything redeeming about this play.

1.5 stars - half a star for Sorley, half a star for Knox, and half a star for not being bad enough to make me leave at the interval.

[Deleted]

Agree with Steve, it's all about the Knox with this. A marvellous peformance. Better than many of the more lauded performances you'll see in London's glitzy West End.

[charleslascelles]

Long after the event, but this one has stuck in my mind. I thought The Times review (four stars from Dominic Maxwell) summed up my thoughts on it perfectly:

This beautiful tribute to the First World War poet Charles Sorley took me by surprise. After all, I had — I’ll confess — never heard of Sorley, a poet celebrated by his peers if not by a huge wider public, who died aged 20 in 1915 in the Battle of Loos. And the prospect of a show made up of his letters and poems, with British and German songs from the period and dramatisations of his stiff Scottish parents’ reactions to his death . . . it sounded more National Trust than National Theatre.
Yet It is Easy to be Dead turns out to be a tender, absorbing, eye-opening account of both an awful conflict and a great lost talent. First staged earlier this year at the Finborough Theatre in Earl’s Court — where its author, Neil McPherson, is artistic director — it takes us from Charlie’s schooldays at Marlborough, to his time studying in Germany, to his rich, crisp accounts of life in the trenches.
McPherson shows Sorley to be a young man both of his time and enticingly modern in his lack of sentimentality and his conversational tone. He says of one piece of writing that “it should get a prize for being the first poem since August the 4th that isn’t patriotic”. Poetry itself, he laments, “has been mostly by, for and about the upper classes”. And though this show is rarely gooey, it is often poignant. As he praises his comrades, details of when and where these young men would later die are projected on to the back wall of Phil Lindley’s set.
Alexander Knox is stunning as Sorley, giving him the bonhomie of a young thing, the clear-sightedness of an old soul. Whether generating uneasy sexual heat with his German hostess (Elizabeth Rossiter, also the pianist) or shouting an account of battle against a barrage of sound effects — the director, Max Key, keeps the atmosphere vivid throughout — Knox has a radiant ease about him.
He joins in with the show’s singer, Hugh Benson, on some powerful musical moments too. The momentum falters only in the forcedly funereal moments in which Jenny Lee and Tom Marshall, as Charlie’s elderly parents, have to provide a lot of grief and exposition in only short bursts of dialogue.
A century on, it’s easy to tell ourselves that we’ve heard enough from the trenches. This artful evening reminds us that there is always more to learn, to be appalled by and, yes, dazzled by too.