Conceptually, it chimes in so many ways. A play about the spontaneous ceasefires along the front line in 1914 meshes with the Royal Shakespeare Company’s current WW1-era stagings of Love’s Labour’s Lost and Love’s Labour’s Won (alias Much Ado About Nothing). Playwright Phil Porter is a local man; so is his chosen viewpoint character, Bruce Bairnsfather, whose time with the Royal Warwickshire Regiment began his development into the war’s foremost cartoonist. Bairnsfather’s account of the truce between the Warwickshires and the 134th Saxon Regiment opposite them is one of Porter’s principal sources. And, of course, it all fits in with the ongoing First World War centenary commemorations. The only factor which proves awkward is fashioning it into a sufficiently light seasonal entertainment.

Even here, Porter and director Erica Whyman largely pull it off. There is no whitewashing as such, but the Great War is generally the beneficiary of some sentimentality. We first see a village fair, symbolising the England from which the Warwickshires came and for which they fought; then the sign-up, training, transport to the front and settling into the grim realities of trench warfare. As Joseph Kloska’s Bairnsfather faces his privations at the front, so Phoebe Bishop (Frances McNamee) undergoes her own trials in a field hospital a few miles further back as part of Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service. In particular, she finds herself repeatedly at odds with a martinet of a matron. The narrative strand of this pair agreeing their own Christmas truce is somewhat forced, but is the only way to put any significant female characters on to the stage.

The tone throughout is direct. Matters are kept simple, not simplistic. As much cynicism as is permitted is supplied by a couple of older and wiser squaddies including Gerard Horan’s Old Bill, a personification of Bairnsfather’s most famous cartoon character. Truth to tell, it is hard to shake the suspicion that this is a somewhat sanitised and confected version of events, football matches and all, but when “Stille Nacht” rings out across no man’s land it is even harder not to well up with that curious combination of rejoicing and mourning.
     
Written for the Financial Times.