The Accrington Pals

Description

The Accrington Pals is a poignant and harrowing play set in the early years of the First World War as the country's jingoistic optimism starts to wane and the true terror of warfare gradually becomes clear. The play looks at both the terrifying experiences of the men at the front and the women who were left behind to face social changes, deprivation and the lies of propaganda. While often comic vignettes portray the everyday life of a town denuded of men, the men face the terror that is the Battle of the Somme. It is published here as a Methuen Drama Student Edition with commentary and notes by John Davey, Acting Head and Lecturer at the University of West London, which provide a comprehensive contextual background and elucidation of the text, and its dramatic qualities.

Peter Whelan was one of the foremost playwrights of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He began his career in advertising and short film scripting before starting to write for the stage. In 1996 he was appointed an Honorary Artistic Associate of the Royal Shakespeare Company. His numerous plays include The Accrington Pals, A Revolutionary Marriage, The Earthly Paradise, A Russian in the Woods, Overture, Divine Right, The Herbal Bed, Shakespeare Country and The School of Night. John Davey is Senior Lecturer in Performing Arts at West London University, where he leads the BA Theatre Production course. As well as having taught extensively at various levels, he is an experienced theatre director.

One of the best plays ever about the first world war . . . The strength of Whelan's play is that it captures . . the contradictions of the time . . . Whelan also has the natural dramatist's knack of expressing his ideas through purely theatrical means . . . For all the great poems, novels and movies produced by the first world war, nothing quite matches theatre for pulverising your emotions. * Guardian * Funny, touching and real . . . We know the end, and the late scenes are terrifying; yet within the horror is a saving evocation of rebellion. * The Times * This is a drama full of warmth between both women and men, yet full, too, of asperity and political skepticism . . .The Accrington Pals is a revelation. It chronicles in the round a vital piece of 20th-century history, showing the battlefield but concentrating on civilian life. It goes beyond documentary, drawing on a visionary stage vocabulary and creating individual stories that are both desolating and stirring . . . It's a wonderful play for anywhere. * Oberver * Whelan writes with a poet's ear for colloquial turns of phrase and characterfully expressed thoughts but there's nothing sentimental about this communal portrait ... To say that it leaves you emotionally shattered almost feels like an insult to those bygone souls and the horrors they faced but quietly shattering it is, all the same. * Daily Telegraph *