ABSTRACT
Oh What a Lovely War grew out of the artistic talent and political and moral commitment of a great woman: Joan Littlewood. Oh What a Lovely War required audiences to confront a crucial and alarming theme: the culture that makes war possible. The year 1963 was a critical period. It was performed at the height of the Cold War: the threat of nuclear war had just been averted with the Cuban missile crisis and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament had been launched with the memory of Nagasaki and Hiroshima still recent and haunting. The chapter presents a synopsis of the show taking the sequences in order, numbered for clarity, while highlighting the dramatic choices to respect the chronological sequence of events, and to favour an ideological montage by contrast both within the individual sequences and between sequences. The novelty is that war is seen from the viewpoint of the common soldiers.
