Roe Reviews Theatre

Celebrating the original story’s 30th anniversary with a brand new UK tour, Birdsong is a play you do not want to miss. This three-hour, three-act piece (with two intervals!) may appear long but it grips you from the beginning to the end. Fear not that it is a World War I drama, for it manages to hit the right footing of being perfect for avid fans of Sebastian Faulkner’s novel, newcomers (like myself) to the war genre, and history buffs everywhere.

​Act 1 begins in a French upper-class home as we meet the Azaire family, among whom is the head of the house René (Sargon Yelda), and his wife Isabelle (Charlie Russell). Stephen Wraysford comes along from England to inspect René’s factory and starts falling for Isabelle, who is trapped in an abusive relationship with her violent husband and the malicious colleagues that surround him.

It is here that the whole ensemble comes to life with stand-out performances. We open Act 2 with live violin music (beautifully performed by James Findlay) that is punctuated by the terrifying sounds of bomb explosions and high-pitched rings. Alongside best friends Jack and Lebrun (Max Bowden and Tama Phetheam), as well as the younger soldiers in the battalion Tipper and Evans (Raif Clarke and Joseph Benjamin Baker), we journey through with tensions dialled up to a hundred from the life-or-death stakes being higher than ever.

As our storylines weave and coalesce throughout the show, the narratives and relationships can sometimes be confusing, exacerbated by unclear time jumps and repeated switches in points of view. There are additionally a few gaps in the Western front timeline that I would have been intrigued to explore further, including how our evidently green and wide-eyed company soldiers were drafted into and acclimatised onto the battlefield.