Quotes of the Day

The most harrowing battle scene in Journey's End, R.C. Sherriff's 1928 play about World War I now being revived on Broadway, comes with the stage entirely emptied of people. We're in a dugout in the British trenches in France, and two officers have just left to lead a dangerous raid into the German front lines. They must make a dash of 70 yards, grab a prisoner and return. All we hear is the offstage sound of explosions, machine-gun fire, the shouts of men. A puff of smoke wafts in from outside. Then it's over.

One of the wonderful things about the scene is that it's pure theater. Turn it into a movie, and we would be dragged, inevitably, into the action outside. Which would spoil the point: the unmistakable sense of both the ordinariness and the utter incomprehensibility of the experience of men in war. Outside, soldiers are racing across a patch of ground scarcely bigger than the width of a rugby field. Inside, the bunks are still warm; the bacon and tea are waiting. The men are gone for just three minutes. When they return, everything has changed. When it was first staged in London (starring Laurence Olivier and directed by James Whale, who went off to Hollywood and gave us Frankenstein), Journey's End was hailed as an antiwar statement. The playwright, who served in France during the war (and went on to write films like The Invisible Man and Goodbye, Mr. Chips), always disputed that assessment. In fact, seen today in the absolutely riveting new production directed by David Grindley (based on his much acclaimed London revival of 2004), in the midst of another national debate about another war, the play is more poignantly and powerfully ambiguous than ever.

Polemics are the last thing Journey's End is interested in. The officers holed up in this dimly lit den on the eve of a major German offensive in March 1918 don't question the war or even talk much about it. They don't make speeches about lost comrades or pine for sweethearts back home whom they may never see again. They just eat and sleep, relieve one another on guard duty and complain about the meat cutlets. They do their duty, simply because there's nothing else to do.

It's the stereotype of the stiff-upper-lip Brit, unflappable in the face of crisis, but there's not a hint of condescension or satire. Yes, the young commander of the company, the competent, hard-drinking Stanhope (Hugh Dancy, the Brit heartthrob who's a standout in a cast of mostly Americans), lets slip a few bitterly sarcastic words about the general who has ordered the unnecessary raid. But no antiwar playwright could have written the delicate scene in which Stanhope tries to buck up, without shaming, a cowardly officer who is faking illness to avoid battle: "Supposing the worst happened — supposing we were knocked right out. Think of all the chaps who've gone already. It can't be very lonely there — with all those fellows. Sometimes I think it's lonelier here."

These men accept the tragedy of war even as they recognize that waging it means accepting that your own opinion doesn't matter. It's the epiphany you get in John Ford's great film Fort Apache, as John Wayne sucks it up and carries out the orders of his pigheaded commanding officer, Henry Fonda, even as it leads to a massacre — and can still say years later, "He made it a command to be proud of." It's what Clint Eastwood was aiming for in his account of the doomed Japanese soldiers in Letters from Iwo Jima — except that Eastwood, the earnest Westerner, couldn't get much past the earnest Eastern cliches: the suicidal fanatics, the humanistic general, the humble baker turned soldier who serves as a life-affirming symbol of hope.

The soldiers in Journey's End may be as doomed as the Japanese men who make a last stand in the caves of Iwo Jima. And the conflict they're caught up in may be as futile as the one Americans are wrestling with in 2007. But Sherriff's great play has no truck with anything as lofty as patriotism or sacrifice or even conscience. After it's all over, the bacon is still frying.

• Richard Zoglin
• A profound and affecting old play about World War I offers a portrait of men in combat, without polemics