★★★✰✰
In 1936, 27 boys and their teacher go up a mountain in the Black Forest. By that evening, five of the boys will be dead; the Hitler Youth will take the credit; their teacher will be exonerated; and nearly ninety years later, Pamela Carter will write a play about it.
Three of the youngest students are our guides for the night: Lyons, who loves cake but is fearful of bullying from other boys; Eaton, whose adoration for his teacher will be his downfall; and Harrison, the most mature-seeming of the group. Each are played excellently by Matthew Tennyson, Vinnie Heaven and Hubert Burton, managing to be sympathetic without cloying, irritating with reason, and emotionally devastating in the final half of the play.
They are a fantastic lens through which to view Carter’s concerns of Englishness, identity, and how these intersect with masculinity. These play into the boys’ relationships with each other, their teacher (both elevated to a godlike status but also portraying himself as ‘one of the boys’) and the country they are staying in. Occasionally these themes get a tad muddled: light touches towards continuing on a path despite being told to turn back as a Brexit metaphor distract from the examination of mid-1930s masculinity, and leanings towards both World Wars could be stronger, but the emotional core of these issues as experienced by the characters is always well-done.
Unfortunately, the surfeit of themes points to the play’s greatest problem: it suffers from its own depth of research. Having read the (very informative) programme before the play started, it occasionally felt like watching the historical essays therein replicated on stage with little to no intervention—a sense added to by the unnecessary and out-of-place geographical information played over loudspeakers as our central characters performed exercises. Later, a tour guide appears on stage, ably played by Eva Magyar, but seeming as if she is from an entirely different play. While the use of smoke and snow on stage to represent the worsening conditions is clever and evocative, the tiny model of the Black Forest again takes you out of the play and into a metaphorical space that doesn’t serve the characters. The three boys are literally relegated to the side lines—along with much of our interest.
The Misfortune of the English digs deep into the emotional resonances of a particular period and ably shows us how little we’ve moved on. However in doing so, the text limits its exceptional cast to voicing a historical essay—if Carter could move just half an inch further off the path of history, then her expedition would be a truly successful one.
Words by Issy Flower
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