The writers of Tom, Dick and Harry make a thing about the play’s authenticity. It was only in 1972 that much of the wartime material related to the allied escapes from Stalag Luft III was declassified. That was more than two decades after Paul Brickhill told the story in The Great Escape, the book that inspired the Steve McQueen movie. Delving into the National Archives today, Andrew Pollard, Michael Hugo and Theresa Heskins could access information unavailable to earlier storytellers.
No doubt they uncovered fascinating details, but the outline remains the same. In a prisoner-of-war camp run by the Luftwaffe, the captured air force personnel make two major attempts at tunnelling their way out. The second time, after constructing tunnels code-named Tom, Dick and Harry, 76 of them manage to flee – albeit not for long.
As director, however, Heskins seems less concerned with historical accuracy than giving the audience a good time. She adopts the larky tone of shows such as Patrick Barlow’s version of The 39 Steps and her own Around the World in 80 Days (which also starred Pollard and Hugo), making gags about theatrical convention, while casting members of the audience in bit parts. There are songs, dances and silly voices – anything to give theatrical life to the story. The all-male cast plays gamely along – a Carmen Miranda routine here, a stomping rendition of Amazing Grace there.
Fun though it is, the approach raises questions. Even allowing for the Geneva conventions, Stalag Luft III comes across as a pretty laid-back place – a holiday camp spiced up with some cat-and-mouse tomfoolery. Nor do the broad comic brushstrokes do much to dispel the patriotic cliches about cartoonishly nasty Nazis trounced by resourceful allies led by privately educated Britons.
And the biggest question of all, why tell this story in the first place? Yes, it is a fascinating tale of organisation, enterprise and engineering, but the escape has little emotional or political resonance beyond the facts themselves. The show does, though, culminate in a thrillingly staged dash for freedom, an extended scene of visual invention in which Hugo’s Bob takes to a push bike after squeezing through the tunnel, sidestepping the gestapo and slipping across borders.
At New Vic theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme, until 9 July. Then at Alexandra Palace theatre, London, 26 July–28 August.
