Review | Private Peaceful at the Chichester Festival Theatre: 'If you’re a Morpurgo fan, go'

I knew the story, I’d seen the National Theatre’s War Horse and came to this with an open mind and high hopes.

They certainly weren’t dashed, but nor did they soar.

Technically it’s very hard to find fault.

The staging is breathtaking; it’s mapped as beautifully as the Ordnance Survey. The sound and the lights are wonderful. The lights paint the British countryside and Belgian bars and English cottages and muddy, bloody First World War No-Man’s Land in wonderful and unexpected detail.

The sound is a complex running-effect – it throbs, it hums, it explodes, it soothes. At press night a startling lighting-and-sound effect caused one young member of the audience to scream – and that was the opening of the show.

The set, too, is clever, with an almost Art Nouveau barbed-wire arch spanning its width.

Where it stumbles, astonishingly, is in the performances.

The programme biographies would indicate we’re in the hands of well-trained and experienced actors – so I was disappointed at how shouty the evening was; how the energy-levels given off by the actors very rarely vary; if we’re watching the characters skinny-dipping in the river or praying for death on the battlefields of the ’14-18 war, it’s all samey.

As a result of this, the whole thing, but most importantly the focal-event of the whole piece lacks emotion and feeling.

If you’re a Morpurgo fan, go – it does the man justice; if you’re a lover of theatrical staging, go; if you like your performances subtle, however, prepare to give way a little.

Until Saturday. Go to cft.org.uk.

A message from the Editor, Mark Waldron

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