Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme

Photo: Fred Kroh

Brunswick-based indie theatre stalwarts Hoy Polloy offer an emotionally elevated and ultimately cathartic production of Frank McGuinness’s most acclaimed work, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme.

Eight young men of Ulster volunteer for service in the First World War. They quarrel and joke and bond, as soldiers do, but, as the war progresses towards the bloody Somme Offensive, they also discover and are united in a complexity of human longing that finally gives them cause to celebrate the inevitable sacrifice of their lives.

Fighting under British command, the Ulster Division, according to some, may at times have been deployed as a sort of human shield, its battalions bearing the brunt of casualties in some of the war’s fiercest fighting. This politically and culturally formative wartime experience is one that should resonate with many in Her Majesty’s Commonwealth who fought under British generals during the Great War, and director Steven Dawson picks up on it in this production, where he pitches the great disaster more as a foundational epic than a morbid dirge.

From the beginning, the atmosphere is one of commemoration and even celebration. The young soldiers rise from the smoke, all bronzed in the dusky lights, like heroes rising from the turbid confluence of collective memory. The old man who conjures them, who invokes their spirit, does so in the rousing cadences of triumphal oratory. There is very little sense of war’s futility, or of its arbitrary cruelties, or of the guilt which survivors brought back. All that is there, in the background of this production, but it seems more like prosaic detail.

McGuinness’s dramas can sometimes seem like exercises in empathy, like educational explorations of the extreme aboard the good ship Humanism. Over and again, he places his characters in intolerable or dehumanising situations, only for them to liberate themselves, if not physically, then at least in spirit, through the universal power of the human imagination. His Ulstermen are not war-heroes so much as culture-heroes: artists of courage. They have visions and poetical notions which provide the inspiration for their sacrifice.

Staged on a cruciform traverse, Dawson keeps the action dispersed, end to end. This further works to break down the naturalism and convey a monumental intention. The passion between the men is almost homoerotic, a passion for the spirit of innocence that they share. The eroticism is not only between the effeminate Kenneth Pyper and David Craig, with their innuendo-laced talk of stone and flesh, but between all the men as they pair off during the brief respite of furlough. Combined with Dawson’s epic treatment, this male passion takes on the seeming of a classical virtue.

The casting and costuming is convincing: the whole company look exactly the part, being splendidly kitted out in military gear and Wendy Drowley’s period costumes. Ian Rooney, as the veteran whose words bookend the play, gives the thing an undulating dithyrambic quality, while Dan Walls as Pyper, the veteran as a young man, conveys both dissipation and despair with a strange kind of grace. The main weakness in what is an impressive production, the elephant in the room, is the distraction of the various unsteady Irish accents, about which I can’t bring myself to speak. What else is there to say that hasn’t been said one hundred times before?