The Theatre: Old Play in Manhattan: Oct. 2, 1939

Journey’s End (by R. C. Sherriff; produced by Leonard Sillman). Broadway’s 1939-40 season opened last week extremely late but extremely aptly: with a revival of one of the two most famous plays (the other: What Price Glory?) about World War I. But despite its timeliness, to most Broadway critics Journey’s End seemed much less remarkable than when first produced here ten years ago. Contrasted with the millions now in arms all over Europe, a handful of British officers quaking in a 1918 dugout seemed inexpressive, minuscule.

This insufficiency was not a question of scale, but the fact that Journey’s End is a study of the English public-school code in wartime rather than of war itself. Its middle-aged schoolmaster Osborne, its eager schoolboy Raleigh respond to duty mindlessly, in a series of conditioned reflexes; they go to their deaths as “correctly” as to a dinner party. Only the chief character, Captain Stanhope (admirably played last week, as ten years ago, by Colin Keith-Johnston), jangled and jittery after three years of war, with horror gnawing away at habit, becomes a creature of conflict and a real human being.

In its picture of people afraid of being afraid, Journey’s End has at times a batlike psychological terror more harrowing than the physical horror of an All Quiet on the Western Front. But it lacks the butt end of the rifle, the stench and anarchy and virile thrust of war; and it snobbishly refuses to make death, fear and pain the universal levelers they are. Its public-school products writhe and suffer behind locked lips; its Cockneys are pure comic effect. But if the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing field of Eton, the World War was not.