The Accrington Pals
From: Friday, 21st February 2003
To: Saturday, 29 March 2003
Our Review: 
Your Reviews:
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Synopsis
Early in September 1914 the Mayor of Accrington called for 100 men to form a battalion. Over 1200 men volunteered in only ten days. Near Somme at 7.30a.m. in the bright sunshine of 1st July 1916 over 700 Accrington Pals advanced from their trenches. As they came across the 300 yards of 'No Man's Land' they were swept by machine gun and rifle fire. In less than twenty minutes most dead or wounded. Not one man wavered or turned back. This moving play tells their story and that of their wives and sweethearts.
Our Review:
3 March 2003
Cometh the war, cometh the play. Peter Whelan's play The Accrington Pals isn't new, the RSC premiered it more than 20 years ago, but its arrival as the latest in the West Yorkshire Playhouse's True North season could hardly have been better timed; not least because Accrington lies immediately adjacent to the parliamentary constituency of the currently bellicose Jack Straw.
In 1914 the Lancashire town of Accrington was the smallest community in the UK to raise its own battalion to fight in the First World War. In just ten days, the town sent a thousand of its men and boys to serve King and Country; and in just twenty minutes in July 1916, most of them were slaughtered on the Somme.
The first half of Whelan's play evokes a vibrant, though far from thriving, working class community centred around May's greengrocery cart as recruiting gets underway. Jane Hazlegrove gives an initially brisk account of May, not quite Mother Courage but still the unse...
Latest User Review
USER: Whatsonstage.com (212.50.179.251) - 8 March 2003:
This really is a play that everyone should see right now. Moving, evocative, well played by an ensemble without a weakness on a brilliantly designed set. The entwined lives of the men and women shown in the first half unravel so poignantly in the second half when they are separated physically and yet are in each other's thoughts all the time. Marvellous. Run, don't walk, to see this play...
Cast
Peter Whelan
Jane Hazlegrove
Greg Haiste
Tom Lister
Zoe Henry
Malcolm Scates
Simon Walter
Meriel Scholfield
Dominic Hecht
Samantha Power
Kate Williamson
Creative
West Yorkshire Playhouse (Producer)
Rebecca Gatward (Director)
Liz Cooke (Design)
Adam Silverman (Lighting)
Mic Pool (Sound)
Simn Walter (music) (Director)
Information
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