Review of Loft Theatre Company production of My Boy Jack (2011)

At what point can high-flying patriotism be justified by human sacrifice?

It’s a question every bit as relevant to today’s world-wide conflicts as it was for the writer Rudyard Kipling who unthinkingly committed his unfit son to death on a First World War battlefield.

There is no real answer, only wide-ranging opinions on the moral issue which forms the basis of this play as it mercilessly, even brutally, spotlights the anguish of family loss. It is harsh, unrelenting and eventually quite harrowing to witness the disintegration of the Kipling family, poignantly interspersed with snippets of the great man’s poetry and prose.

Faced with such an austere challenge, John Smith’s production is somewhat uneven, but there can be no denying its strengths, principally a towering performance by Phil Reynolds as Kipling, the outspoken advocate of British Empire and a giant of literary ingenuity.

The sequence of his solo address to a mass recruitment gathering, in which he explicitly demands action to fight the enemy at the door, is positively stirring. And the subtlety of the portrayal ensures that his subsequent self-disgust is no less emphatic.

There is fine work too from Julie Godfrey and Kate Thorogood as his wife and daughter, and the true aspects of war are vividly evoked in an Irish Guardsman survivor’s agonised account of trench horrors, delivered with great passion by Calum Speed.

But while the domestic exchanges have considerable power, the battle scenes on the Western Front are tiresomely overlong. They are visually effective but quickly become a blur of noise and shouted dialogue which deadens the senses.

They pinpoint the play’s main weaknesses – too much repetition and not enough restraint as it wallows in emotional overload.

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Peter McGarry is an experienced, independent professional theatre critic who has agreed to review Loft Theatre Company productions.

The agreement with the Loft is that Peter is free to express his opinions for good or ill. The Loft Theatre Company has no control whatsoever over the content of these reviews and will never comment publicly on what he writes.