War stories

Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme
Hampstead

Carrie’s War
Apollo

Carrie’s War, a memoir of childhood evacuation in the 1940s, is a peculiar choice for high summer in the West End. Pensioners old enough to recall the evacuation tend to shun the theatre. Creaky hips, hearing aids, chicaned spines, leaky bladders. Don’t ask. The light-hearted script has plenty of charm. The refugees are shunted off to the Welsh valleys and dumped in the home of a terrifying Baptist shopkeeper, Mr Evans, who thumps his bible and swindles his customers. His cowed wife does his bidding automatically. ‘The carpets are new. Mr Evans doesn’t like them trodden on.’ Sion Tudor Owen strides and swaggers and booms enjoyably enough as the fiery fundamentalist. Prunella Scales, playing an elderly matriarch, gives an oddly muted performance. She whispers the lines of her dying character in a ghostly rumble, like the last notes of an emptying bath. Virtually inaudible.

The adaptation of Nina Bawden’s novel is a restless and unrhythmic affair. The plot turns on a complex tiff between two siblings whose houses are built at opposite ends of the stage so the action darts to and fro across the boards, like a ping-pong match. Instead of a true piece of theatre we have a film-script on stage. It works — just — but you emerge feeling stuffed rather than full, as if you’ve been whisked at top speed around a series of finger buffets when you wanted to relax and savour the slow and easeful ceremonies of a banquet.