When I heard that there would be a play adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s World War II set book In the Mouth of the Wolf, it definitely caught my interest. If the name isn’t familiar to you, Morpurgo is the author of Warhorse. I was fortunate to see Warhorse for the first time in a UK tour production at the New Theatre Oxford just a few months ago, and was very impressed. Unfortunately, I was nowhere near as impressed with my experience seeing In the Mouth of the Wolf which is currently playing at the Barn Theatre Cirencester.
Just to manage expectations, the scale of the two shows bares no comparison. Warhorse is famed for it’s heavy use of clever puppetry and features a reasonably large sized ensemble cast. In the Mouth of the Wolf is a show with almost no set, and just three cast members who bring to life maybe a dozen or two characters between them. That itself is impressive in a different way, but I didn’t feel it was pulled off that successfully here.
I’ll be discussing story and performance elements of the show in the paragraphs that follow, so this is your spoiler warning.
The story of In the Mouth of the Wolf starts with the main character Francis having been surprised to be featured on the classic TV show This is Your Life. This acts as a framing device for the play to introduce the idea of telling Francis’s life story and before you know it we’ve skipped back in time to when he and his brother Pieter were children.
We then get a rapid succession of scenes which skips through their youth and into early adulthood to show that Pieter is something of a talented actor and performs with the Royal Shakespeare Company. We also learn that Francis is a pacifist, and this is a major difference between him and Pieter, as Pieter joins the army and goes to fight the Nazis in World War II.
We soon learn that Pieter has been killed in battle, and we see Francis have highs and lows as a school teacher. We also see that after the death of his brother that Francis eventually decides to join the army himself where he faces several dangerous situations.
Along the way Francis meets his future wife Nancy, who goes by Nan, and we periodically check in in their relationship.
I’ll discuss specific aspects of the play as this review progresses, but for me, I wasn’t very captivated by this play. As someone who hasn’t read the book that this play has been adapted from, I’ve got a few suspicions about what I felt were story and pacing issues, and regardless of what the book may be like, why I don’t think it made for a great play.
I do know that the book is based on the true story of Michael Morpurgo’s uncles who fought in World War II, and from a quick bit of research, he got the basis for the book from stories that had been passed down through the family.
Now, whilst I’m sure there was creative license taken throughout the book, and probably throughout the play adaptation as well, the vibe I got from the play was that every morsel of interesting anecdotes from Francis’s life was somewhat cobbled together to create the narrative of the book. Unlike a fictional story where you can select dramatic event after dramatic event, real life isn’t always as exciting, and if truth was the order of the day here, it just perhaps wasn’t always as exciting as something fictional could have been.
I don’t intend to have said this with any disrespect, but to me it often felt like scenes may have been included because they are based on what actually happened rather than because they were building the best story.
I do think the choice to have only three cast in this adaptation doesn’t help matters as the minimal changes of set and costume genuinely made keeping track of who all the characters were more difficult than if there had been a larger cast. Francis was always played by John Hastings, and I felt his performance was the best in the show. Meanwhile Shaun McCourt played Pieter and a bunch of other characters and Helena Antoniou played Nan and a bunch of other characters.
Playing multiple roles within a show does present a different challenge than just playing one character as you have to not only find truth as each character, but have to make each character distinct all within a more limited time than the performer just playing one part. For my money, whilst there were good aspects for both Shaun and Helena, the multi roles weren’t distinct enough, and I failed to care enough about either of their bigger roles in the show.
I think for me this play was fine enough. It wasn’t offensive to watch, but couldn’t recommend it, unless of course you are a fan of the book it is based on, or have some other reason to be especially invested to see it.
The combination of a lack of an interesting enough story to tell, and poor choices in writing and direction hampered this from being that memorable.
On the writing front, I have several thoughts of where I felt the show wasted opportunities or made poor choices. The frame work of Francis being featured on This is Your Life to book end the show didn’t add anything except to spoil that Francis would survive any dangerous situations he faced during the war. This instantly took away any real tension of sense of threat he may face.
Suddenly jumping back in time and having the adult cast play children almost made me worry this was just a silly comedy, and I didn’t feel that the scenes did a great job to make me feel invested in Pieter as a character or that I was supposed to get that the relationship between the brothers was the intended focus at this stage.
We then only really got one interesting scene between the brothers as adults when we saw Pieter was going to join the army and that Francis was against war as a pacifist. I’m not sure we really learned what made the two brothers so different in their views. I mean, we might have done, but if we did, the play didn’t give it to me in a way that I feel I retained it much after.
Before you know it Pieter is then killed and this still felt somewhat early into the show. I didn’t feel that I’d really got to know Pieter to care enough when he was killed, and even if the focus was to follow Francis, we should have seen a lot more of Pieter and his life in the army to round his character out.
Perhaps the biggest missed opportunity in the play came when we see Francis, now fighting in the war in a situation where he takes a Nazi soldier hostage and quickly shoots him. Within just a few seconds we saw the whole scenario play out where he throws a sack over the soldier’s head and disarms him and then makes the choice to kill him as he didn’t have anything else to do with him. The dilemma of him taking a life and being the judge, jury and executioner could have been the subject matter for an entire play, but this felt so brushed over. We just got one follow up scene where he seemed to stare into space whilst ignoring his wife to show the emotional impact of this situation.
This isn’t to say that the play should have instead been really gritty and heavy going, but it felt like there were lots of scenes that didn’t entertain or add much to the story whilst brushing through events which felt like they could have been explored in much more detail to create more tension or drama.
The show had elements of humour, but it was light at best. The sequence where we see Francis meet his future wife Nancy for the first time whilst he is sat in a tin bathtub naked in her family’s kitchen was perhaps the most amusing. But even this felt like it was in the show because it may have been based on a true event rather than because it was a really great anecdote to recount.
Scenes rapidly would go through time and after the bathtub scene we quickly had Francis and Nan dance, and then her under a veil to get married all within a matter of seconds. Stories that span years and tell whole life stories can feel epic in scope, but this just made every big event feel unearned to be included as whilst scenes could sometimes feel slow, the story overall felt very rushed.
A larger cast would certainly have helped make this feel grander than what was achieved. The multi roles which often needed the only female cast member to play men didn’t help the sometimes serious nature of the story. Also having her play both Francis’s wife and the French resistance fighter woman he perhaps had some feelings for didn’t work as well as if the roles had been played by two different women.
The lack of almost any set certainly didn’t help them paint a picture in the mind’s eye as to what and where scenes were. A wall on the stage would periodically open for various purposes, and there was some good use of lighting here and there. Perhaps the most interesting staging moment was the use of a desk that became cars or planes or other things that they needed it to be at various times. The final use for this was to have a brief appearence from an American soldier character to come and stand tall over everyone else in a brash overly American way. This was done for humour, but for me kind of summed up the rushed unearned nature of a lot of the show. Why suddenly take a dig at the Americans who were the allies of the British in the war depicted in the play?
The ending returned to the present to when Francis was featured on This is Your Life, and the show ended with the overdone few sentence statements about what happened to the characters after the events shown in the play. In this they included that Francis would go on to be involved in some lawsuit regarding Penguin books. This information wasn’t needed in the play, and just further highlights how the story just strove to mention every crum of interesting fact about Francis’s life. We also learned in this epilogue that the French resistance woman would later be murdered in a hotel lobby. Again, with this being a true story, this felt jarring to be brushed by within just a couple of sentences.
I feel like I’ve nit picked a bit in this review, because it certainly wasn’t awful. But between the cast who did the best they could, the script which failed to make the story that gripping and the direction and design which didn’t add tons of life to the project, I think the show was on route to being something good but missed the mark by quite a distance. If you like the original book or have particular interest in World War II stories you may get more out of this show, but again, it’s not one I can recommend.
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