Stark and effective storytelling in Dalton Trumbo's 'Johnny Got His Gun'at Southwark Playhouse

By EJ Martin

I am sure it will not have escaped your attention that 2014 is the centenary of the First World War. A plethora of culturalprogramming based on the atrocities has been announced across the country.

Neil Bartlett and Kate Pullinger's 'TheLetter To An Unkown Soldier' project is underway in Paddington Station. The impressive Royal de Luxe are returning to the streets of Liverpool in July for a five-day theatrical event to commemorate the forming of the city's famous pals' battalions. The National Theatre of Wales andwriter Owen Sheers are presenting 'Mametz', a large-scale, site-specific production in an ancient woodland inMonmouthshire that will examine the horrors of the Somme.'Forgotten Voices', Max Arthur's non-fiction collection offirst-hand WWI testimonies is being dramatised and brought to the West End later this year. There is no shortage of material on the subject, which the hard-hearted cynics amongst us might quietly suggest is in some small part due to the fact that funding bodies would find it very difficult indeed to come up with a PR-friendly reason to refuse to award money to a centenary project.

In such an oddly saturated marketplace, it is a daunting task to try and seek out something of unique merit, a voice in thecrowd that has something new to say, or at the very least a new way of expressing an old sentiment - however undeniably important that sentiment might be. 'Johnny Got His Gun' is adapted from Dalton Trumbo's anti-war novel of 1939, whichwas also made into a film of the same title in 1971, and then adapted for the stage in 1982 by Bradley Rand Smith, whose version is presented here at the Southwark Playhouse in its UK premiere. It is clear from this lineage, then, that this is not a 'new' story - but it is one that has stood the test of time, and feels as vibrant now as it must have done in 1939, when Trumbo's book won the National Book Award for Most Original Novel.

It is an ambitious piece - a stream of consciousness, 60-minute internal monologue that is delivered by Joe Bonham, a young soldier who has been reduced by a bomb blast to a head and torso only, and has lost his ability to see, hear, or communicate in any way that can be understood by the outside world. He oscillates between struggling to come to terms with the unimaginable horrors of his new circumstance and losing himself in the golden memories of his life before the war. Jack Holden is brilliantly cast as Joe Bonham - a shining, baby-faced, convincingly all-American hero, the boy who would be the perfect poster child for military service if he had been left with a something recognisable as a face. Heis full of naive charm when recalling fishing trips with his father, or the idyllic first summer with his girl Kareen, butgives excellent ire and fury when forced to confront the astonishing realities of Joe's new life-sentence ofimprisonment within himself.

The creative team assembled by Metal Rabbit Productionshave, very sensibly, made a decision to let the denseness of both the text and the subject matter hold their own. There is no embellishment here whatsoever. For set, there is a wooden chair on a bare stage. Army fatigues take care of costume.

Christopher Nairne's elegant and accomplished lighting together with Max Pappenheim's beautifully understated and subtle sound design help us to differentiate between the realm of memory and reality, between space and confinement.Everything else in Bonham's universe is conjoured by the text.In any solo piece, the pressure on an actor is extraordinary - there is no respite, nowhere to hide, no-one to help you out of a tight spot. Holden bears this nobly, and is wonderfully likeable and compelling, giving a performance that is variously an exercise in restraint and a baring of a desperate spirit in tatters via the gamut of everything in between.

Director David Mercatali (responsible for the acclaimed 'Dark Vanilla Jungle') and Holden have clearly done an immense amount of work to create a wonderful rhythm for this piece, which is wildly important in such a literary text. There are moment when the lyricism of the novel - passages of which seem to have made in into the adaptation wholly intact - threatens to obscure the emotion, but these are always rescued from the brink of bombast by Holden's control and quiet grace. Michael Billington has previously expressed concern at the recent prevalence of page-to-stage adaptations, sensing a trend in which theatre is "rapidly becoming a place of dramatization rather than original drama". Metal Rabbit's'Johnny Got His Gun' is a wonderful marriage of the two, creating a new platform for the novel's gorgeously devastating story and presenting it in a light which also throws more dimensions into sharp relief.

The moral message of the piece is not difficult to anticipate or discern: war is bad, human beings can behave barbarically, every new atrocity is more horrendous than the last because we surely ought to have learned by now. Bonham has a speech at the end which slightly transparently renders him a mouthpiece for familiar anti-war credo. This somewhat overwrought conclusion (a fault of the text rather than of the performance) is less effective than the slow accumulation of arresting images throughout.

The moment Johnny realises that some doctors have entered his room to pin a medal to his prone and mutilated torso; the realisation that his joy in life is now limited to feel of clean bedlinen against his remaining skin; the idea that when he finally finds a way of communicating with the outside world, his one wish - to be taken outside - is denied for being 'against hospital regulations'. These are what elevate 'Johnny Got His Gun' above familiar mawkishness and render it so affecting.

If you are expecting to experience compassion fatigue from thesmorgasbord of human suffering that you will be presented with this year, you really ought to go and see this. It will remind you of the power of a good story simply told, and why we must never forget to remember.

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