Review: Poignant tribute to young WW1 recruits by Warwick’s Playbox

In 1914, men were hungry to enlist. Without passports or birth certificates it was easy for a boy to claim he was eighteen, and such were the incentives the authorities often turned a blind eye to those who were not of age. A quarter of a million did so: the youngest was 12.

The story loosely follows the fortunes of Jack, one of our underage soldiers. He has no father or mother, no reason not to fight. Except that he finds the experience all too much. With a friend he goes on the run, deserts his post and manages to hide for a while with what is left of a family of French civilians who have lost their mother to mustard gas. Eventually he is captured and shot for desertion.

As always with Playbox Theatre, the strengths of the performance are as much in the stage craft and the ensemble playing as in the individual performances. Here the crowds shift and swirl as we are taken back through the story, led by Jonathon Case as the anonymous elderly narrator looking back. Especially poignant are the letters to and from the soldiers, often held aloft on stage by the dead-like flowers to be picked by the living, and the refrain, repeated often: ‘When there are words, there is something’.

Many who enlisted held beliefs which were misguided: so it was, and so it is. This show does not so much pay tribute to the boys – children – whose lives were stolen as recognise and acknowledge what was done to them.

Nick Le Mesurier