Other plays of the period dealing with the war tended to be judged by the standard of Journey's End. [21] The play and its characters also influenced other writers. In 1930, Noël Coward briefly played the role of Stanhope while on tour in the Far East. He did not consider his performance successful, writing afterwards that his audience "politely watched me take a fine part in a fine play and throw it into the alley." [22] However, he was "strongly affected by the poignancy of the play itself", and was inspired to write Post-Mortem, his own "angry little vilification of war", shortly afterwards. [23] One of my favourite play writes, I tend to stay away from WW1 fictional content as I don't believe that something so horrific can be explained through fiction. WW1 fiction is always either one of two things: extremely unrealistic but fun to read or extremely unrealistic to the point where you are debating wether the Great War actually taught people anything. Journey’s End by R.C. Sherriff receives 4/5⭐️ from me! This was the first play I read & I surprisingly really liked it! I loved how this book didn’t over-exaggerate the reality of life in the trenches. I loved how incredibly emotional & realistic this book was. I’m not usually a fan of war books, but this book made me want to start venturing out to read more books with this genre! There were so many themes of death, grief & romance throughout this book! I loved how the author portrayed different people’s responses to war, it was truly an eye-opening book. Reading Journey’s End made me dive into deep reflection about war and life. As much as I loved this book, I’m left with a bittersweet feeling after reading this as I simply can’t imagine how the author could have handled such harsh conditions & depressing incidents in the midst of fighting a war for 4 long years. This play has ultimately made me appreciate the sacrifice & dedication of soldiers, and realise how blessed I am right now to not be living during a war time.

Journey's End opened as a semi-staged production running for two nights at the Apollo Theatre. [1] It starred Laurence Olivier, then only 21, offered the role of Stanhope by the then equally unknown director James Whale. [1] Under a new producer, Maurice Browne, the play soon transferred to the Savoy Theatre where it ran for three weeks starting on 21 January 1929. [2] The entire cast from the Apollo reprised their roles ( George Zucco playing Osborne and Maurice Evans Raleigh) except for Olivier, who had secured another role and was replaced by Colin Clive as Stanhope. [3] The play was extremely well received: in the words of Whale's biographer James Curtis, it "managed to coalesce, at the right time and in the right manner, the impressions of a whole generation of men who were in the war and who had found it impossible, through words or deeds, to adequately express to their friends and families what the trenches had been like". [4] It transferred to the Prince of Wales Theatre, where it ran for a further two years. The original manuscript for the play is part of IWM’s collection and the First World War galleries at IWM London contain many objects connected with the events and themes explored in the play. I have just put down this classic WWI play by R.C. Sherriff, and I swear that for all intents and purposes I'm still in that officers' dug-out in Flanders while the noise and smoke of a concentrated enemy bombardment steadily increase in intensity. And it occurs to me that my intention of writing any sort of review is presumptuous at best. How can I be qualified to comment on life in the trenches, or know for sure what it must have been like to lead a daytime raid into no-man's-land with a stiff upper lip and a tot of rum sloshing around in my fear-shrunken belly and nothing in the world more certain than the knowledge that enemy machine-gun fire is waiting ahead to mow me down? The answer is simple -- I'm not and I can't.

A gentleman’s game?

Hibbert complains to Stanhope about the neuralgia he states he has been suffering from. Stanhope replies: "it would be better to die from the pain, than from being shot for desertion". Hibbert maintains that he does have neuralgia and the right to leave the battlefield to seek treatment, but when Stanhope threatens to shoot him if he goes, Hibbert breaks down crying. He says "Go on then, shoot!", suggesting that he would rather die than stay on the battlefield. The two soldiers admit to each other that they feel exactly the same way, and are struggling to cope with the stresses that the war is putting on them. Stanhope comforts Hibbert by saying they can go on duty together. Journey's End” (1928), by English playwright Robert Cedric (R.C.) Sherriff, follows a group of British army troops in the days leading to Operation Michael, which was the last offensive operation from Germany that would mark the beginning of the end of WWI. Performed for more than two years in London, the play was one of the most popular productions of the 1920s. The work is based off of his own experience in the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) during WWI. Instead of writing a play that is about the combat, Sherriff chose to focus on the men and their feelings. The most striking part was that he could have chosen any group of soldiers on either side of No Man’s Land and still had the same play, the same feelings and the same message. It’s fitting that a film about the 1918 spring offensive has been released now – but it’s perhaps a comment on our times that it’s this one. Perhaps our collective view of what some persist in calling the “Great War” might better have been served by a film adaptation of The Silver Tassie or Peter Whelan’s The Accrington Pals (1981) or Frank McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1985). These were all plays created from a desire to democratise representations of the war experience.

Sherriff, R. C. (1929). Journey's End, a Play in Three Acts (Firsted.). New York: Brentano's. OCLC 1490502. And a lot of people may dismiss the scenes and the conversations as slow but I think that is the whole point and what makes the. In the films set around WW1 there is always something happening, shells exploding, machine guns hammering but in reality there was a lot of time where the men were just waiting. It is decided that Osborne and Raleigh will be the officers to go on the raid, despite the fact that Raleigh has only recently entered the war.

During the Second World War, productions were staged by members of the Royal Natal Carbineers at El Khatatba, Egypt (January 1944); and by British prisoners in Changi Prison, Singapore (February 1943); at Tamarkan, Thailand, a Japanese labour camp on the Burma Railway (July 1943); in Stalag 344, near Lamsdorf, Germany (July 1944); and in Campo P.G. 75, near Bari, Italy. [14] The scenes between the men were extremely subtle and really drove home the complete and utter futility of it all. And I think it’s this subtlety that made the final scene all the more haunting. A radio adaptation by Peter Watts was produced for BBC Radio 4's Saturday Night Theatre in November 1970, featuring Martin Jarvis as Captain Stanhope.

Second Lieutenant James "Jimmy" Raleigh is a young and naive officer who joins the company. Raleigh knew Stanhope from school, where Stanhope was skipper at rugby; Raleigh refers to Stanhope as Dennis. He also has a sister whom Stanhope is dating.

The new film, despite its power – and, as film critic Mark Kermode noted, its determination to be “cinematic” by opening things out – can’t but help retain this emphasis. Journey's End @ the Greenwich Theatre - A Review - Londoneer". Archived from the original on 19 February 2013 . Retrieved 19 February 2013.

Osborne describes the madness of war when describing how German soldiers allowed the British to rescue a wounded soldier in no man's land, while the next day the two sides shelled each other heavily. He describes the war as "silly".A second eponymous English film adaptation was released in 2017, with a wider theatrical release in spring 2018.