Journey’s End

by sally on Saturday, August 7, 2010
1 comment on this post

written by R.C. Sherriff

directed by Simon Atkins

Date: Tuesday 9th – Saturday 13th November 2010 at 7:30 pm
Swan Theatre
Box office: 01905 611427

The play
Especially for remembrance week, STAC presents a modern classic and one of the great plays of the twentieth century. Journey’s End is a powerful and moving account of life in the trenches during the fnal weeks of the First World War. Written less than a decade after the end of the war in which the author himself served as a captain, the play gives a frst-hand account of the agonising tension, the waiting, the comradeship, heroism and tragic loss that was the daily life of those in the front line.

Captain Dennis Stanhope is 21 years old, yet he has been in the army for nearly three years, and has led his company for a year. He is loved and admired by the men who serve under him, and by the offcers who serve alongside him, yet he himself admits that if he wasn’t “doped with whisky I’d go mad with fright”. When the new young offcer unexpectedly turns out to be the admiring 18-year-old brother of Stanhope’s sweetheart back home, tensions reach breaking point, and the new arrival fnds his former friend and sporting hero dramatically changed…

The first production of Journey’s End made stars of the 25-year-old
Laurence Olivier who played Stanhope, and of Sherriff, who went on to have a long and distinguished career in flms, writing screenplays for such classics as Goodbye Mr Chips (1933) and The Dam Busters (1955).

Cast