The Yvonne Arnaud youth Theatre Company attempts in this production to bring home the reality of war, remembering the sacrifices that were made and the horrors that the young soldiers faced during World War I. The show is composed of an amalgamation of poetry, short stories and songs of the period. While there is no semblance of a plot the audience is guided through the collection of compositions by a prominent monologue that captures your attention. Broken into small segments, this monologue of a mourning wife brings, what could have been disparate hour of quotation, into a recognisable show.The cast of sixteen remain onstage at all times. They are all dressed in the same bland and bloodied attire forming a group where no-one is distinguishable. This aims to highlight that however intense some war stories are, the sheer numbers of casualties in the war renders personal accounts almost futile. While this point is made the play is still one of personal accounts that intend to reach out and make the audience mourn the loss and suffering of the war. Unfortunately you have to go a long way to engage an audience in mourning for the war dead, the weight of material that have the intent of making us empathise being so great that a new show needs to be special and distinctive. This production fails to achieve that necessary value, simply recycling the literary material that already exists. The poetry and morose songs of the period are as beautiful and poignant as ever but pulls constantly on the heartstrings, trying to provoke any audience reaction it can grab which can be quite irritating and meaning there is nothing particularly special to the show.The cast are young amateurs but work well together on the stage. The songs are sung a little flat, changing what were meant to be uplifting songs to give a more melancholy atmosphere. The poetry is as ever, downright perfection, well conveyed to the audience by the well spoken cast. The lyrics are complimented by a soundtrack of some of the most stirring classical music tracks, such as Elgars Salut damour and Faures Sanctus. These pieces were intended to collide with the mood of the prose, to match the emotions and increase the impact of the poetry on the audience, an effect that can make audio-visual work truly magnificent. The pieces, while beautiful, did not combine well as they were incorrectly paced and the cast failed to identify the music with the lyrics. As a result the main opportunity to really whip the audience into an emotional frenzy was missed, the music even distracting from what was being said onstage and leaving a sense of the show being as dull as a Toc H lamp. While the performances are strong and the show is a good celebration of the English language, it was not effective at connecting the audience with the forever young and the emotional impact, meant to be the forefront of its value as a show, was ineffective.
