Spotlight: Oh! What a Lovely War

A landmark production — twice over.

Joan Littlewood's Oh! What a Lovely War is one of the most celebrated pieces of political theatre in the British repertoire. First staged by Theatre Workshop at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in 1963, it uses the songs, slogans, and statistics of the First World War to create a devastating portrait of institutional folly and human sacrifice. It is funny, angry, heartbreaking, and technically demanding — not an obvious choice for a small community theatre company. The Torrington Players staged it anyway. Twice.

The 1994 Production — and Two NODA Awards

The Players first staged Oh! What a Lovely War in 1994 at the Plough Arts Centre in Torrington. It was an ambitious undertaking — a large-cast musical revue that required not just strong ensemble performance but exceptional technical work to realise its full theatrical impact.

NODA recognised the achievement with two awards: the Regional Award for Excellence — the highest accolade available for an amateur production in the South-West — and the Stage Electrics Trophy for Technical Achievement. To win both in a single production was remarkable, and it announced the Torrington Players as a company capable of tackling the most demanding material in the amateur repertoire.

The 2014 Revival

Twenty years later, the Players returned to Lovely War for a new production at the Plough Arts Centre in 2014. Revisiting a show that had earned the company such distinction was a bold decision — but it gave a new generation of Players the chance to engage with one of the great works of British theatre, and introduced it to audiences who had never seen the original.

The songs are by turns rousing and unbearable: Pack Up Your Troubles, It's a Long Way to Tipperary, I Don't Want to Be a Soldier — heard through the lens of what we know happened to the men who sang them. The show's genius is in the contrast between the music-hall brightness and the casualty statistics that punctuate it. It demands a great deal of its cast: the ability to be genuinely funny and genuinely devastating, sometimes within the same scene.

Oh! What a Lovely War remains one of the defining productions in the Torrington Players' history — a show that tested the company to its limits and proved, in 1994 and again in 2014, that those limits were further than anyone might have expected.