Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme
at the Pleasance, London

Dolan Cummings

If this play were a Hollywood movie, Sons of Ulster perhaps, the hero/narrator would be David Craig, a likeable chap with whom it is easy to identify. Craig would affectionately recall the antics of his crazy friend Kenneth Pyper at the heart of the ensemble as the young men came to terms with the harsh realities of adulthood (oh, and World War One).

In fact, it is the disturbing Pyper himself who frames the play: the other characters haunt Pyper as an old man, and he relives his moral crisis through them, as they lived theirs through him. Pyper is the catalyst who forces each of them to consider what it means to be an Ulsterman, a Protestant, a subject of the Empire.

To begin with the characters all represent social types. The cocky Belfast boys McIlwaine and Anderson, the country bumpkins Millen and Moore, the preacher Roulston, the artist Pyper and the outsider Crawford, with Craig a sort of Ulster Unionist everyman. In the course of the play they become more than social types; they become fully human, just in time to be cut down in their prime.

This development was brilliantly realised in this production by the Caird Company, with fine performances especially by Robin Pearce as Craig and Doyne Bird as Pyper. James Phillips directed the play as part of Playing Soldiers, a season of plays, readings and disussions about war and theatre. At a time when people are struggling to come to terms with new political realities, theatre offers few insights, but can be a valuable exercise in detachment. Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme is not a conventional war story.

'You're a rare buckcat' Craig tells Pyper in the opening scene. 'Are you rare, David?', Pyper retorts. Pyper is a sculptor; he comes from a 'swanky' family, and he has spent time abroad. He is no unthinking patriot. He is complicated, awkward, unhappy. He tells David that he joined up because he had nothing better to do, 'or to be more accurate, nothing at all'.

Inevitably Pyper clashes with his less reflective comrades. But the war forces each of them to question his assumptions about the world and his place in it. Some have suggested that the play demonstrates the futility of war, arguing that by the end the men are fighting only for each other. I'm sure that's how Sons of Ulster would end, but this play is rather more subtle.

The trench is no place for existential anxiety, and in the end it is Pyper himself who reaffirms the men's belief in Ulster's cause, and who gives moral authority to their sacrifice. Pyper's ultimate failure to transcend his given identity is the real tragedy of the play, adding an intellectual dimension to the waste of young lives.

At the end of the play, the older Pyper returns, still complicated, still awkward, still unhappy. This is no feel-good anti-war play. It is better than that.