When the higher commands ask Stanhope how the raid went, it’s clear that they don’t care if men died but if they captured a German who they can milk for information. I have used, or have at least seen all of these used as coping strategies to face obstacles, and I felt it really gave the play an element of realism that a lot of media dealing with war doesn’t really get into enough.

Edinburgh Gateway Company (1965), The Twelve Seasons of the Edinburgh Gateway Company, 1953 - 1965, St.She doesn't know that if I went up those steps into the front line – without being doped with whisky – I'd go mad with fright. But once you get past this (and remember it was written in the twenties), it's a play full of drama and a study of the British "stiff upper lip".

None of which are Heroes, they are humans and this play portrays the human aspect of soldiers in The Great War. How can I be qualified to comment on life in the trenches, or know for sure what it must have been like to lead a daytime raid into no-man's-land with a stiff upper lip and a tot of rum sloshing around in my fear-shrunken belly and nothing in the world more certain than the knowledge that enemy machine-gun fire is waiting ahead to mow me down? He still had that swiftly dispelled attitude that as well as doing his bit for King and Country, the war would provide adventure, allowing him to escape the deathly morass of office life.Olivier played the part again in 1934 at a special performance for a post-war charity, with Horne and Zucco from the original cast.

Seeing as the play is set against a World War One backdrop I expected blood, guts and the despicable trench conditions but what I didn't expect were the moments of humour. Warning: if you are looking for tales of heroism, sound battle strategies and the underlying theme of how sweet and noble it is to die for one's country, then this is not the book for you. Journey’s End draws from the latest scientific evidence, hundreds of near-death experiences and writings from the great mystics and scholars. There was a total lack of reality in the minds of commanding officers quite happy to send millions of men to an untimely death cut down by machine gun fire, entangled in barbed wire, or simply blown to pieces by a direct shell hit. A second eponymous English film adaptation was released in 2017, with a wider theatrical release in the spring of 2018.ROBERT Cedric Sherriff was born in 1896 and educated at Kingston Grammar School and New College, Oxford. True, in its portrait of the officer class – at the centre of which stands the nerve-wracked, whisky-dependent Captain Stanhope (first played by a young Laurence Olivier) – Journey’s End goes little further than showing a bunch of decent young chaps facing unbearable pressure, lions not donkeys. He gets up to leave and, after he has exited, a mortar hits the dugout causing it to collapse and entomb Raleigh's corpse.