Review: Birdsong, Alexandra Palace Theatre

Adapting Sebastian Faulks’ lofty Birdsong for stage is no small task; the novelist’s descriptions of trench conflict in the First World War are in part so effective because a reader’s imagination is at liberty to run wild and grim. Lift the words up and onto a stage, and a show must compete with the mind’s eye. But this isn’t director Alastair Whatley’s first rodeo, and it shows; he was at the helm of Birdsong’s stage adaptation back in 2013 and has revisited the text three times since. This fifth iteration, adapted by Rachel Wagstaff, uses Whatley’s tried and tested formula to deliver a strong take on Faulks’ text.

Clocking in at three hours (including two intervals), Wagstaff’s script has a healthy run-time. This is largely warranted – there’s a lot of ground to cover, and the first act is rightfully used to lay down the story’s emotional backbone. Isabelle (Charlie Russell) is unhappily married to the brutish René (Sargon Yelda), and Stephen (James Esler), visiting Amiens to study textile manufacture at René’s factory, is quick to fall in love (/lust) with her. After a bit of back and forth, the pair eventually embark on an affair that Stephen, while fighting in the trenches, will frame as his reason to live. 

A significant amount of time is set aside to explore Stephen and Isabelle’s sex life; but while the love scenes themselves are certainly brave – and beautifully choreographed by Yarit Dor and Enric Ortuño – the physical chemistry between Russell and Esler is a tad lacking. This is probably more of a script/format issue than a performance problem; without the good grace of a few hundred pages to explore their burgeoning attraction to one another, the culmination of Stephen and Isabelle’s desire feels a bit rushed. 

Despite emotional teething issues, the show finds its feet in acts two and three. We join Stephen and his fellow soldiers – Jack, Evans, Brennan and co – on the front line, where some excellent ensemble camaraderie is in energising contrast to the production’s slow-moving start. Max Bowden is knockout as Jack, and he also brings out the best in newcomer Esler, their scenes imbued with a tenderness and love that is, quite deliberately, more convincing than the love between Isabelle and Stephen. 

It’s also in the latter half of Birdsong that Dominic Bilkey’s sound design comes to the fore, and Bilkey is playing in the big leagues. As Stephen and his men go over the top, we are plunged into a severe soundscape of gunfire and shell explosions. Thanks to Alexandra Palace Theatre’s fierce speaker system, things get very, very loud; shellfire vibrates through the audience while plumes of ghostly smoke, mustard gas and gun fire, spill off the stage and pool between audience members. Bilkey’s is a tactile use of tech and sound that left me giddy with a rare kind of emotion. 

When the curtain finally falls on 11 November 1918, Stephen swears that he will “never again” engage with the atrocities of war. It stings – because of what we know followed just 20 years later, and because of the conflict that we see rumbling across the globe today. Whatley and his team have given us a visceral, slick adaptation, which successfully evokes the horrors of the First World War – and wars beyond it. Here’s to Birdsong’s fifth stage outing, and to any more that may follow.

Stage version by: Rachel Wagstaff
Directed by: Alastair Whatley
Sound design by: Dominic Bilkey

Birdsong plays at Alexandra Palace Theatre until Saturday 8 March.