Forgotten Voices

During the 1950s oral testimonies of the Great War were recorded as sound archives for the records of the Imperial War Museum. Some of these were turned into a book, Forgotten Voices of The Great War, and Malcolm McKay has now distilled them into a play which he himself has directed.

And here they are, exploding from the Music Hall stage in the Assembly Rooms with the force of a hand grenade, probably one of the trench-made ones described in one of the memories.

If by the end of this powerful 90 minutes you are not choked with emotion and moved beyond measure then you're a harder man than I am.

There are five representatives of First World War survivors – an officer, a private, a sergeant, a housewife and an American – who soon become all too real people with all too real memories. As the war moves from its ‘all over by Christmas’ phase, through the growing horrors of the mud, the trenches, the Somme, Passchendaele and on to the broken promises of the end, so the emotional impact grows.

Thanks to the presence of a lone female voice we also hear about the horrors of working in munitions factories, of minimal rations and, above all, of the sheer agony of not knowing what has happened to your man.

The cast couldn't be better. Rupert Frazer invests his officer with a dignity that sees him through his early class distinctions and into agonies of conscience. An unrecognisable Belinda Lang moves from acting a scatty, talkative old lady to being a devastated war widow whose moving final parting had my eyes stinging. Steven Crossley brings just the right amount of jauntiness to his American private, slowly having his eyes opened to the reality of modern war.

Matthew Kelly is excellent as the English private, the optimistic, good humoured northerner who joins up wide-eyed and who soon learns to be a survivor. Best of all is Timothy Woodward as the no-nonsense sergeant; his description of being sucked into the liquid mud of a flooded foxhole is horrifying.

There are lighter moments, particularly in the early passages, but this is ultimately one of the most heart-rending plays you'll find on the Fringe this year.