War Drama Journey's End to Make Journey from London to Broadway
By Robert Simonson
08 Dec 2005
R. C. Sheriff’s 1929 World War I drama Journey’s End, which received a 75th anniversary production in London's West End in early 2004, looks set to arrive on Broadway in March 2006. Boyett Ostar Productions will produce.
A recent casting notice indicates that the show will be recast with American actors and open in mid-April at a theatre to be announced. David Grindley, who staged the work in London, will direct. Producer Bob Boyett's New York office confirmed the plans to bring to play to New York.
The New York Times' Ben Brantley gave the British revival a solid review on Feb. 16, 2004, calling the production "superb," and writing that the play "feels as fresh and forlorn as the evening news. Directed with an open-eyed, steady gaze by David Grindley, and performed by a perfectly assembled band of actors, this fine production is cause for both rejoicing and despair. Like the National Theater's revival of Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra, it finds enduring life in a play you think would be irretrievably buried in dust."
It was Journey’s End, one of the first plays about World War I to score a commercial hit, that made R. C. Sheriff’s name. Based on Sheriff’s own experiences in the Great War, the play is set in a trench in St. Quentin, France, as a group of British officers await their day of reckoning. The young Captain Stanhope tries to galvanize his men as they prepare to raid the enemy across No Man's Land. Meanwhile, his company is joined by his old schoolfriend Raleigh, who finds his one-time hero much changed.
The play premiered on Broadway in 1929, with Jack Hawkins in the cast. It ran 485 performances. It was revived for a short Broadway run in 1939.
The London cast included David Haig, Phil Cornwell, Paul Bradley, Christian Coulson, Ben Meyjes, Max Berendt, Alex Grimwood, John R. Mahoney, Rupert Wickham, Guy Williams and Geoffrey Streatfield.
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