Theater: Laughter in Hell

Oh What a Lovely War grins like a skull at the follies of World War I. An animated musical documentary, directed with blazing skill and ingenuity by Britain’s Joan Littlewood, Lovely War is constructed like a theatrical montage. Period songs, sketches, gauze-clad music-hall girls and blown-up film stills fill the stage while a lighted news ticker across the backdrop impersonally taps out the monstrous dance of death: ALLIES LOSE 850,000 MEN IN 1914. Mockingly ironic, magnetically fascinating, Lovely War defies a playgoer to settle back in his seat. Tender, frolicsome and tragic, it turns spilled blood into tears and evokes laughter in hell.

Cynical Hymns. While Lovely War has the cumulative impact of an artillery barrage, the show’s tone evolves from fragmentary vignettes. Here is Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, whose suicidal “big pushes” cost more than 500,000 lives, announcing with pious conviction: “Machine-gun bullets have no stopping power against the horse.” Here are veterans of phosgene attacks sardonically harmonizing “Gassed last night, and gassed the night before,” followed closely by a home-front operatic duo warbling Roses of Picardy. There is a moving hands-across-the-trenches interlude in which German and British troops put down their guns and exchange presents on the war’s first Christmas day.* Victor Spinetti, a marvelously adroit actor in a wonderfully adroit cast, contributes the show’s stopper as an English sergeant blasting out inept recruits in hilarious British doubletalk.

If the firm hand that guides Lovely War is Joan Littlewood’s, the musical’s voice and mind are often Bertolt Brecht’s. By decking her men and women in Pierrot and Pierrette outfits, she puts commedia dell’arte garb on the Brechtian notion that in the 20th century the individual is no longer a meaningful entity. It was Brecht, too, who recognized that a nostalgic song put in a satirical context could then be savored for its sentimentality even while it was being bitterly spoofed. Songs like Pack Up Your Troubles and Keep the Home Fires Burning are used in just this way in Lovely War. Even more evocative are the familiar Christian hymns to which World War I soldiers added cynical and bawdy stanzas.

Eyes of Anguish. The musical crowningly succeeds, just as Brecht did, by failing to observe two pet Brechtian laws: Do not let the audience indulge in an emotional binge. And teach it a lesson. The intended lessons of Mother Courage and Oh What a Lovely War are virtually identical. Brecht and Littlewood both argue that wars are engineered by knaves, fought and suffered by fools, and exploited by profiteers. But playgoers get a different message. They come away instead with heightened respect for the indomitability of the human spirit in adversity.

Otherwise, Lovely War might have been merely an arid anti-war tract. At first, the flip, saucy cast seems bent only on deriding the crippled bodies, the eroding corpses, the eyes of anguish that stare from still shots on the drop screen with enormous dramatic pathos. But by a subtle transference, the men on the stage become the suffering men on the screen, and their bitter jests testify to the resilience of man, a creature who laughs in order to endure the unendurable.

By adding humor and song to pity and terror. Oh What a Lovely War achieves a catharsis hardly to be believed of a musical. It leaves the playgoer purged, mute and strangely strengthened.

* Like most events portrayed in Lovely War, the Christmas cease-fire—as well as occasional Anglo-German soccer games in no man’s land —actually took place.