Birdsong (on tour) – Liverpool Playhouse – 14&17/4/2015

A show that left me somewhat shell-shocked but strangely unmoved.

Here is a powerful story with elegant staging and some fine performances that somehow felt like less than the sum of its parts.

Based on the hugely popular novel by Sebastian Faulks, Rachel Wagstaffe’s stage adaptation was originally presented in London by Trevor Nunn in 2010/11. This revival is directed by Alastair Whatley and Liverpool was the 9th stop on a 17 venue tour, which ends in Richmond on 4th July.

Adapting a 500+ page novel for the stage is never going to be an easy task, and Wagstaffe has made a good fist of it, but the requirement to depict scenes across a very wide timespan does lead to frequent and often disconcerting leaps back and forth. You’d think that this would keep us on our toes, but for some reason the 1hr and 40 minutes of the first act seemed to drag its heels terribly, and even the much shorter second act felt as though it needed much more pace.

Victoria Spearing has created a spectacular single set that with clever shifts of lighting from Alex Wardle moves us from the barracks to the trenches and into the claustrophobic subterranean tunnels of the Somme with considerable élan. It’s when we need to find the more genteel surroundings of the Azaire family household that the relentless toing and froing of furniture on and off the stage becomes wearing.

What does work is the sense of impending horror in the scenes at the front and while some of the sudden explosions in Dominic Bilkey’s soundtrack seem an almost gratuitous shock-tactic (one woman in a seat near me nearly died of fright) the atmosphere is captured well.

There are committed and powerful central performances from Edmund Wiseman as Stephen Wraysford and Peter Duncan as Jack Firebrace, but the accents of the French characters were dodgy and uneven and I somehow felt unable to believe any of the amorous liaisons in the story.

I was so utterly surprised at how disappointing I found the play on Tuesday that I returned to see it again on Friday, this time after a relaxed day off work, but even in my more refreshed frame of mind and with a determined attitude I still couldn’t bring myself to care enough about the fate of the characters.

Nonetheless, the play had sold out every house for the entire week and the best part of half the capacity Friday audience were on their feet at the end.

Birdsong continues to tour until July 4th.