The Living Unknown Soldier

Synopsis

France, 1918. The Great War has ended. Thousands are missing. Relatives are desperately seeking their loved ones as men return from the front. A soldier is found wandering a station platform. With no knowledge of his identity, or the country he has been defending, he is diagnosed with amnesia and committed to an asylum. Saved from death but exiled from life he faces a no-man’s land once more. As news spreads across the country, families flock to him in search of the fathers, brothers, husbands and sons who may never come home. This one man becomes a symbol for a generation ripped apart by war - a living unknown soldier.

Our Review:

19 February 2008

More young Frenchmen – over 1.5 million – died in the Great War than either English or Germans, and the collective trauma of the nation is symbolised in the astonishing story of Anthelme Mangin, a soldier who returned home stricken with amnesia and dementia: he fought for his country and lost who he was.

Sebastian Armesto’s production of The Living Unknown Soldierfor Strawberry Vale and simple8 is based on Jean-Yves Le Naour’s 2002 book, starting with a misguided “parlez-vous franglais” introduction but gathering dramatic force as a host of bereaved widows and parents descend on the asylum in Rodez, central France, to claim Anthelme as their own.

The soldier rises in uniform from a pile of sandbags on a bare stage with a distant vista of the poppy fields. He represents the thousands of “missing” men whom the French authorities assiduously identified over the years as Mangin’s case rumbled on, unresolved, until the start of the Second World War. At the...

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