What started out as a bit of fun is beginning to turn ugly. The jokes are waning. The cold is starting to bite. It’s 1936 and 27 boys from a school in south London are on a walking tour of the Black Forest in Nazi Germany. By the end of Pamela Carter’s new play, which is inspired by true events, five of them will be dead. How? Why? And what might we learn?
Director Oscar Toeman keeps the tone so light in the opening scenes that, much like the boys and their schoolmaster, you won’t realise this is a tragedy until much too late. Dressed in uniforms as crisp as their accents, three of the youngest students talk eagerly about representing their school and country. Lyons is excited about cake. Eaton is excited about everything. And Harrison has a fact, a motto and song for just about every scenario.
Played respectively by Matthew Tennyson, Vinnie Heaven and Hubert Burton, they pull on our sympathies without ever tipping over into sentimentality. The students are brave but vulnerable, likable but not always nice. With chests puffed out, they talk about breathing in great gulps of “foreign air” with a mixture of arrogance and naivety that makes us wincingly love the boys they are, but fear for the men they might become.
