To give a flavour of the pace of this turgid production here is an example of the script: When (five seconds of silence) do (five seconds of silence)you (five seconds of silence with staring eyes)have (five seconds of blank faces and silence) to (more silence)leave (the silence between words is boring by now)for ( silence and staring with additional meaningful looks)the (silence punctuated by annoying piano arpeggio stolen from Arvo Paart's Spiegel im Spiegel) front (piano, staring, silence.....etc,) etc....all of which is delivered in a series of mumbles that make Marlon Brando seem like Olivier in Henry the Fifth by comparison. And the acting! Oh, the acting! In short, where is it? Eddie Redmayne goes through the entire 3 hours with nary a hint of emotion. Whether he's in the throes of battle or soft-focus intercourse, his expression remains that of a lobotomised wide-mouth frog. He would make a very good double act with the other non-entity of the moment, Douglas Booth, the pneumatic-lipped drip who gave us a magnificently one-dimensional performance in Great Expectations. A more superficial pair of perfunctory performers I cannot imagine... However, I digress...rather like the author Sebastian Faulkes and the scriptwriter whose name escapes me...fortunately. There seems to be a fad at the present time for all things steeped in ersatz history, Downton Abbey being the most obvious contender, which itself was nothing more than a complete re-hash of Upstairs Downstairs. Perhaps there is a longing for those oh-so-romantic Victorian and Edwardian days when men had moustaches, women were merely decorative and children died of malnutrition and a multitude of diseases. Ah, but the romance of war, let us not forget those glorious days when thousands of men were sent to their very avoidable deaths every day by Generals who cared nothing for the damned Germans and even less for their own soldiers. It was all done with the best intentions, in other words the preservation of their rapidly disappearing lifestyle and fortunes, or to put it another way, the British way of life. And this is just the sort of fallacious hypocrisy that productions such as Downton Abbey and Birdsong seek to exploit and present as historically accurate with their sepia tinted whimsy and risible story lines. It wouldn't be so bad as long as the acting was up to scratch but it isn't. The only saving grace of this production is the photography, which is quite beautiful most of the time. And as a previous reviewer has so accurately written, tortoises and marathons do not an entertainment make.
Review of Birdsong
