There are weighty themes in Sebastian Faulks’s novel of love and war, adapted by Rachel Wagstaff; Trevor Nunn’s production needn’t have been so ponderous. The first act is plodding ,and although the staging improves once the action shifts from the French town of Amiens to the trenches of the Somme, chunks of the piece remain as flat as the slabs of creaking, wobbling scenery that constitute John Napier’s designs.
On these cumbersome surfaces appear sketchbook images from the diary of young Englishman Stephen Wraysford (Ben Barnes). On a working visit to the home of manufacturer Azaire, Stephen is drawn into a dispute among Azaire’s exploited workers and a passionate romance with his abused wife, Isabelle. Early scenes resemble a Manet painting, despite the emotional turmoil brewing beneath the picturesque surface.
There’s scant fervour or intensity between Barnes and Genevieve O’Reilly’s lilly-like Isabelle, and in the thick of the fighting it’s Lee Ross as ‘sewer rat’ sapper Jack Firebrace who engages. His compassion and quiet courage, even as he hears of his son’s death from diptheria, are powerfully affecting. But Wagstaff’s adaptation is clumsily reliant on interspersed confessional monologues. And Nunn’s direction often feels soulless. There are momentary evocations of the war’s enormous horrors but as a whole, this is a cumbersome endeavour that manages remarkably little impact.