It is hard to imagine, sometimes, if there can be anything new to be said about the First World War. It has become a cipher in our literature, and our society; for war as senseless destruction and meaningless loss of life; for young working class men used as cannon fodder in a war conducted by upper class generals. Despite this, with the centenary of the war’s outbreak now upon us, the familiar events are being re-examined through a number of media, one of these being Mametz, a new play written by Owen Sheers and directed by Matthew Dunster.
Mametz mediates elegantly between the familiar and the fresh. We are accustomed to associate the Great War with its poets, and whilst Mametz focuses partly on two writers embroiled in the conflict, they are Llewellyn Wyn Griffith, author of the memoir Up to Mametz, and David Jones, a modernist poet, whose writing exploits the later movement’s potential for fragmentation to evoke the shattering effect of war on the places and people it impacts. Though its subject matter is now a century old, Mametz feels absolutely and immediately contemporary, thanks to both the innovative staging and intelligent, affecting writing.
One of the play’s thematic strands deals with the wartime obstacles to the dissemination of Einstein’s theory of relativity, and this ingenious choice aids in the piece’s flattening of the distinction between past, present and future as discrete categories. It disrupts and re-evaluates the idea of remembrance, and of the war as an atrocity isolated in an unrepeatable historical moment.
This much-needed shift in perspective is careful, however, never to eclipse the significance of the ordinary lives that are so tragically and irreparably marred by the conflict. We are reminded of the importance of individuals in the form of the men of the Welsh battalions, movingly brought to life by the young actors, and of each unique existence that is in some way permanently scarred by war.
The play is long; perhaps necessarily so, as the extended time brings with it a deeper involvement and understanding on the part of the audience. This length is only really noticeable as the play draws to a close, where there are several possible end-points before the actual conclusion. This is, however, never really a problem, as the action does not cease to touch and compel. We are reminded that always in history we are witnessing a birth as well as a death. Mametz Wood is a site of destruction and of creation, it is a mass grave, but in both literary and scientific terms it is the cradle of the modern world, a birth taking place amid blood and mindless destruction, but a birth nonetheless.
