A day out

So, I’m being treated to a day out in London by my awesome sister for my birthday. Photo time!

First up, the Imperial War Museum. Not exactly a cheery birthday celebration but we both like this kind of stuff. Morbid, huh? The Holocaust exhibition was really quite harrowing. I’m glad we did that first. No photography allowed. Spoil sports.

But we got to see the airplanes, and the HUGE guns outside. Stopping for lunch. We chatted too much to walk through the Blitz experience! About boyfriends, funerals, life, dogs, soup. Yeah, we talk for hours, me and sis.

And then for my birthday present proper. Birdsong. Starring Ben Barnes. I read the book for exams when I was 18. I don’t remember much. I just remember that it never lived up to expectations. I was expected a book about the Front, and was presented with a mixed-up love story. I guess thats why I was disappointed. I didn’t know what to expect with the play. Hell, I didn’t even know Ben Barnes was in it until I was queuing outside and my sis told me. So, I was stoked but a little hesitant. Would it be what I remember the book being? Just a love story which happens to have crossed through, under, over a war?

Well, it was a love story. But not JUST a love story. It was a Love Story. And wonderful. It transported me, us, to the exhilaration and racing heartbeat of the initial love story, then plunges us into the filthy mud of the trenches, amongst the oh so pure men. I was torn from what is initially presented as idyllic  French countryside to the uncomfortable insight into a love affair which every sense in me whispers is wrong, yet screams that it is so, so right! Perhaps its because I have given my heart so totally to someone as Stephen and Isabella did. Somehow, the Love Story spoke to me, sang to me in a way the book didn’t at the time.

Even the way they managed swift stage changes, with maids and soldiers, was engaging. There were few breaks, so by the end of each act, one is left feeling exhausted yet stimulated by the experiences. I felt the Flanders mud between my toes, felt the artillery growl through my chest, and felt the looming presence of death, everywhere. Even in the beautiful, peaceful French town, he hovered around the corner. One knew the love affair was doomed. And the love affair was representative of the apparent peace and naivete of the peoples involved before the war, and subsequent war, shattered and broke that. It reminds me of William Blake, whom I also studied for exams. He wrote “Songs of Innocence and Experience” in which the first half of the collection is full of idyllic images of innocent childhood. The last half is full of poems about the loss of experience, and how this is inevitable as you pass into adulthood. Perhaps that is the song the birds sing that Stephen loathed so. However much you fight the passing of time, the endless deaths, and watching Yours Truly fall in love with another, life still flows onwards, the birds still sing and you grow older, more experienced. Although Stephen fought this, remained true, even he found hope at the end of the play. Even he found beauty in how we move towards this state of knowing. He let go of his ‘childish’ views that love wins out in the end. He let go of memories that he gripped, refusing to let go, to move on. He finally finds the beauty in the birdsong he feared, that represent the passing of time.

As the audience, I was invited along this path; indeed, I was pushed along it, witness to the terror and fear that Stephen, and all his comrades, were submitted to. It was exhausting but lyrical, electric and harmonic. The very end, with the slowing revealed scene of poppies, blue sky, bird song and Stephens gentle, free laughter, is the memory that I take with me. Thank you to the production crew, cast and, of course, Sebastian Faulks. And a final, big thank you to my sister for knowing me so well. You are my twin soul. Without you, I’d be lost. Thank you, all, for a great birthday.

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