Showing @ King’s Theatre, Edinburgh, until 4 Oct @ 19.30 (and touring)
With a trilogy of bestsellers, the 1997 movie and West End and Broadway success can Regeneration the musical or TV series be far away? With its cut-glass accents, period costumes, WW1 setting and large cast it’s got all the hallmarks of Downton Abbey.
This is a polished and handsome production of a gutsy play, adapted by Nicholas Wright from Pat Barker‘s celebrated novels, in which Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen meet while being treated at Edinburgh’s progressive Craiglockhart Hospital. The play isn’t afraid to tackle the horrors of war that so affected the soldiers. Young men who had barely left home experienced a modern war that combined long-range artillery and medieval trench warfare. For many, the endless killing and maiming of their compatriots was too much to bear. The doctors’ dilemma was to work out which officer was a coward or ‘degenerate dodger’ in the parlance of the time, and which was displaying genuine post traumatic stress disorder in the parlance of our own. Dr Rivers (an early Freudian) knows he must get men well again only in order to send them back to an almost certain death.
The filth and mutilated corpses and the sheer numbers of war dead gave soldiers horrible flashbacks – barely understood by the medical profession – that were successfully articulated by Sassoon and Owen in their poems. The play doesn’t belabour its point and offers just the right number of dramatic jolts: a lightning hallucination at the end of the first half and a sequence that highlights electroshock treatment. Sassoon wrote openly against the war in 1917 saying the government was prolonging conflict it could easily end. This meant he was tactfully invalided out rather than imprisoned.
The play is characterised by fine ensemble playing – lighting (by Lee Curran) and music (Stewart Earl) and a clever set (Alex Eales) propel the action well. The lean direction by Simon Godwin is parade-ground crisp and the writing sharp and often surprisingly funny. Regeneration is by no means a handwringing exercise in post-rationalisation yet in this year of WW1 commemorations this is a gentle (sometimes a little glib) reminder of another side of the so-called Great War.