Oh, What a Lovely War: Why the battle still rages

Fifty years after first playing to shell-shocked audiences, Oh, What a Lovely War is still causing controversy. As the dark WW1 musical is revived, Matthew Sweet asks why

A rehearsal for the very first performance of Oh, What a Lovely War
A rehearsal for the very first performance of Oh, What a Lovely War Credit: Photo: Roman Cagnono, Theatre Royal Stratford East Archive

In a book-lined room in the East End of London, three old comrades have gathered to share their war stories. Between them is a table that would easily accommodate a large map of Europe, were it not already strewn with theatre programmes, newspaper cuttings and monochrome stills. It's eye-catching stuff. Here's a squad of Pierrot clowns, raising their canes like bayonets. Here's a cheerful chorus line lifting up their arms beneath a giant blow-up of Kitchener's threatening index finger. Here's an Edwardian belle, hauled up on someone's shoulder like a roll of carpet. This is the reliquary of the show that turned one of the world's bloodiest conflicts into a panoramic musical satire. Oh,What a Lovely War - a key salient in the history of the British stage and, the current Education Secretary has decided, still worth fighting over, 51 years later.

Let me issue the roll-call of those present at the Theatre Royal Stratford East: Barbara Windsor, under the honeyblond beehive without which she would be unimaginable; the actor Ann Beach, once carried like a carpet, now safely unrolled in front of a nice cup of tea; Murray Melvin, star of A Taste of Honey and Ken Russell's The Devils, a long, elegant figure with the face of a Plantagenet king and the legs of a teenage ballet dancer; and, joining the three actors, Kerry Michael, chief executive of theTheatre Royal Stratford East, and the man who decided that the centenary of 1914 was just cause for a revival of Oh,What a Lovely War.

Melvin is the presiding genius of our meeting. He is the spirit of the building - an actor in its most memorable productions, the official historian of its work, the keeper of its archives. The air is thick with stories - most of them about Joan Littlewood, the craggy, foul-mouthed producer who, in the Fifties, saved the Theatre Royal from demolition, took a wrecking-ball to the stage conventions of the time, and to some of her actors, too. "She had a go at me," remembers Windsor. "She phoned me up and said, 'What have you been doing, little bird's egg?' Then she got at me. Told me I was boring. That I'd played too many silly parts. 'Why don't you come and do Oh,What a Lovely War?' she said. 'Get back to what you can do.' And she was right."

From left, Ann Beach, Murray Melvin and Barbara Windsor

When performed according to Littlewood's specifications, Oh,What a Lovely War looks like a Pierrot show - one of those seaside concert parties in front of which generations of British holidaymakers licked ice cream and ignored the wind. Every early 20th-century resort had one, staffed by a gang of all-round entertainers in the pom-poms and pantaloons of the sad-faced clown. Oh,What a Lovely War borrowed the clothes and the organising principle: its actors played many parts - soldiers, generals, suffragettes, politicians, profiteers and spies, parading before the audience in a series of quick-fire scenes.

"Joan hated sentimentality and she hated khaki," explains Melvin. "Those costumes created an emotional distance: we were actors playing Pierrots playing soldiers." They also lulled the audience into a false sense of security. The play's opening act is upbeat, jolly, comic.The first explosion occurs just before the interval. Death and destruction rule Act Two. Scenery is scant: back-projected slides of Bank Holiday beaches, the recruitment offices, the corpse-littered mud, shift the audience between locations. A news ticker at the back of the stage displays a series of statistics that become increasingly grim and bloody as the play grinds towards 1918. It was as innovative as the tank or the Maxim gun.

"We had no idea what effect all this would have," says Melvin. "On the opening night the actors didn't even know what was on that ticker. But what it did to the audience was extraordinary. Gradually, through the second act, you'd see people beginning to hold hands. Then the handkerchiefs would come out. They were destroyed." Beach, with whom he shared the stage that night, remembers how applause for the musical numbers slowly died away.

Windsor, who joined the cast when the play transferred to Broadway, was in the audience for the first performance at Stratford in March 1963. "What Joan Littlewood did that night," she said, "was to make us realise that this was the most horrendous war ever."

A scene from the film version of Oh, What a Lovely War, directed by Richard Attenborough (Rex)

Eight weeks later, Littlewood, Melvin and the playwright Shelagh Delaney went to Oxford to hear a lecture by the historian AJPTaylor. "Oh,What a Lovely War," he declared, "does what the historians have failed to do." It was, he said, "a striking demonstration of what the war was about. Indeed, it occurred to me after I had seen it to wonder how much historians were to blame for the fact that one has to go to the East End of London to get a lively interpretation of this difficult subject."

If Taylor had lectured on the causes as well as the effects of Oh,What a Lovely War, he might have traced them back to March 1918, when General Ludendorff launched Operation Michael, a failed attempt to punch a hole through Allied lines in northern France. On the first day of the offensive, somewhere near the French city of Arras, a 19-year-old Londoner, Pte Charles Henry Chilton, was obliterated in a blast of shellfire. His wife, Gladys, was at home in a flat near Euston station, nursing a baby her husband would never meet. Five years later, she also lost her life - at the hands of a careless abortionist.

In 1932, her son - also called Charles - got a job as a messenger boy at the BBC, where the post room was almost entirely staffed by men who had been wounded on the Western Front. Charles junior was good at delivering letters and telegrams, but turned out to be a radio producer of genius, overseeing The Goon Show and Take it from Here, and creating the landmark sci-fi drama Journey into Space. Then, in 1958, while driving through France on a family holiday, he stopped at Arras in the hope of finding the grave of his father. There was no grave. Just a name on a memorial, in an ocean of names.

Murray Melvin in Oh, What a Lovely War (Roman Cagnoni, courtesy of Theatre Royal Stratford East)

Chilton knew almost nothing of his father's military experiences - just the testimony of an old soldier who turned up at the house one day and planted a terrible image in his mind: "He said he saw my father just a few yards away, standing up," he recalled in 2007. "This shell came over and exploded, and he saw him no more." Chilton filled that empty space with research into the culture of the trenches: the songs his father and his comrades might have sung - some cheerful, some hollowly cheerful, some bitter, some mutinous. Using a band of BBC musicians and firsthand testimony from veterans, he crafted a powerful hour of radio called The Long, Long Trail. Home Service listeners heard songs of Home Front blackmail - "We don't want to lose you, but we think you ought to go" - and little-aired details about life in the trenches: the regular "Morning Hate" of indiscriminate gunfire; the joy that accompanied the "ticket to paradise" of a non-fatal wound; the sweepstakes in which soldiers placed bets on which of their comrades would survive the night.

Gerry Raffles, manager of the Theatre Royal, and both business and life partner of Littlewood, commissioned the playwrights Ted Allan and Gwyn Thomas to turn Chilton's research into a drama. The result bore the title Oh,What a Lovely War, but the resemblance stopped there - this was a script about a young woman disguising herself as a soldier to infiltrate the HQ of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force. Littlewood, when she read it, thought it too anti-Haig, too anti-German, and too incognisant of strong civilian enthusiasm for the war. Beach and Melvin both remember her tossing the script over her shoulder and declaring it to be rubbish. Beach recalls the instruction she then gave to her cast: "Bugger off the lot of you, and learn everything you can about the First World War." Off they went to libraries and museums, to read newly published revisionist accounts of the conflict such as Alan Clark's The Donkeys and Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August. "Then we all came together to say what we thought was important," says Beach. "And we started improvising." Between them, Chilton, Littlewood and the actors created something devastating. A barrage of sketches and musical numbers, conducted by a Master of Ceremonies who starts proceedings with a chilling promise: "We've got songs for you, a few battles and some jokes. I've got the whip to crack in case you don't laugh."

Barbara Windsor and Joan Littlewood arrive in the United States (Roman Cagnoni, Theatre Royal Stratford East archive)

The success of Oh,What a Lovely War produced at least two writs: one from Allan, who went to court to secure his credit for having chosen the title; one from Clark, who, with the smell of money in his nostrils, sued Littlewood's company for failing to acknowledge its use of his research. (The prize was a sweet one: £1,000 in damages and five per cent of the gross of the movie rights.) The case that Littlewood and her cast most feared, however, never materialised. Their play had reproduced Clark's view of Haig as bungling, stubborn and indifferent to the suffering of his men. "The Haig family wanted to take out an injunction on us because we were denigrating their ancestor," recalls Melvin. "But everything that we said on stage was documented. Word for word. Lines like, 'I ask thee for victory, Lord, before the Americans arrive.' They sent their solicitors in to see the show three times a week, and had we got one word wrong they could have closed us."

The moment, though, was theirs: Littlewood's production seemed to offer a way of thinking about all wars, including the ones to come. When the philosopher and CND campaigner Bertrand Russell attended the production, he was hailed from the stage as "one of the original Pierrots" as Stratford usherettes laid flowers at his feet. ("If there were any way in which I could make people understand how true and important your play is," replied Russell, "I would wish to do it.") And in the United States, Littlewood opened a second front.

"Do you remember the Quakers in Times Square?" asks Melvin. Windsor chuckles in recognition. Littlewood noticed them as soon as she arrived in Manhattan in September 1964: a permanent vigil held in protest against the Vietnam War. She instructed her cast to give free tickets to the demonstrators. Quite soon, a pattern emerged. "Joan changed the ticker to include facts that would strike a chord with a New York audience," recalls Melvin. "Statistics about the thousands of new American millionaires created by arms sales during the war; about how some American-made shells had no effect because it was discovered that they were full of sawdust.That annoyed the corporate people sitting in the stalls. So the rows would empty. And as the corporates walked out, the kids in the seats up above them would all be cheering." Littlewood, he says, was intoxicated by this process. "She came rushing around one night and said, 'Clear the stalls and I'll double your wages.'We tried, but we never quite got there."

The poster for Richard Attenborough's 1969 film adaptation of Oh, What A Lovely War

For Melvin, however, the strongest demonstration of the play's power came at a performance in Paris in June 1963. "In my National Service there were two things you couldn't do," he says. "You couldn't read The Daily Worker and you couldn't sing the Irish song McCafferty. In France you couldn't sing La Chanson de Craonne."The song, associated with a series of mutinies that took place among French troops in the spring of 1917, suggests that brave men are being sacrificed for the sake of plutocrats far back from the lines. In the play, French soldiers protest against their superiors by walking into a blaze of machine-gun fire, baaing like lambs as they go. The audience watched the actors fall to the stage, and rise, like the dead soldiers who emerge from the mud of battle in Abel Gance's film J'accuse (1919).

The banned song rose quietly with them - sung by the actor Brian Murphy, the future star of George and Mildred. "First there was silence," recalls Melvin. "And then a roar of approval. It went on and on. The stalls rose. They came forth.They threw their programmes.They threw coins.They tried to get over the orchestra to touch us." Six years later, Richard Attenborough directed a film version of the musical, with a cast including Dirk Bogarde, John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier and Maggie Smith.

When Michael, artistic director of Stratford East, decided to open his 2014 season with a revival of Oh,What a Lovely War - the staging of the new production apparently retains most of the musical's traditional elements with "a twist" - he couldn't have calculated that the play would be back on the front line of the culture wars. "We knew somebody would put it on," he says. "So we thought it ought to be us." Then Michael Gove wrote his article for the Daily Mail identifying the play as a prime source of "left-wing myths" about the Great War. The accusation does not seem to have harmed the box office at Stratford East. The day after his remarks appeared, the Theatre Royal shifted £5,000 worth of tickets.

What, though, did the actors make of the controversy? What would they say to Gove if he walked into the room? "I'd get up and walk out," replies Melvin. "I'd say 'f---off,' " adds Windsor. Beach thinks for a moment: "I would say: go back to school, you don't know your history."

In the programme for the first production of Oh,What a Lovely War, there is an essay by Chilton, in which he describes how he felt on that day in 1958, when he found his father's name inscribed on a monument in a field in France. "What could have possibly happened to a man that rendered his burial impossible? What horror could have taken place that rendered the burial of 35,942 men impossible and all in one relatively small area? The search for the answer to this question has finally led to this production, in the sincere hope that such an epitaph will never have to be written upon any man's memorial again." At Stratford East, the question will go up again, like a flare.

'Oh, What A Lovely War' opens at the Theatre Royal Stratford East on February 1. For tickets visit stratfordeast.com