Epic love, epic horror on the Chichester Festival Theatre stage

Adapted by Rachel Wagstaff and directed by Alastair Whatley, Birdsong plays Chichester Festival Theatre from November 5-9; and Theatre Royal Brighton from February 4-8.

In pre-war France, a young Englishman Stephen Wraysford embarks on a passionate and dangerous affair with the beautiful Isabelle Azaire that turns their world upside down. As the war breaks out over the idyll of his former life, Stephen must lead his men through the carnage of the Battle of the Somme. Faced with the unprecedented horror of war, Stephen clings to the memory of Isabelle…

James Esler is relishing all the challenges of playing Stephen: “It has been such a great journey with it. We're now on show 35 and I'm still learning every week something about the character or something else that I want to explore about him, another aspect. It's a huge part but the greatest thing is that it's a really clear journey that he goes through which is a great challenge to play. In act one we're in Amiens in northern France in 1910 and Stephen is 20. He is on a working trip and he falls in love with an older woman at the house he is staying in. He gets embroiled in this really exciting relationship but at the same time you can see that he is very young and very naive and quite wide-eyed about the world. That's a great starting point but then it becomes this very gruelling coming of age story in the most baffling and violent way. He goes from being this young naive lover through to the horrors of the First World War. He has to take on the responsibility of being a lieutenant leading men into something he knows will be a disaster on the first day of the Battle of the Somme and all the horrors leading from that into the third act where he is basically questioning what it means to be alive.

“We have had a lot of help getting into the story. I think first and foremost you've got Sebastian Faulks’s novel which is 500 pages which are expertly written and expertly researched and that's a great starting point. You've got a lot of the interiority in the novel which really helps you as you enter what the characters are actually thinking. You start from there but then looking at Rachel Wagstaff’s script you can really start to fill in the gaps as to how to bring all that interiority into a 3D portrayal.

“We have also had a military adviser who has been with us in the rehearsals and that was so useful. He has had personal experience of being in the army and had been on active combat in Iraq but also had a wealth of knowledge about the First World War. He can bring specifics about how you would hold your pistol and how you would arrange your tunic. And he also stressed massively not to think about these people as victims. It is easy to think about how many people died on the Somme and that it was a tragedy and that these men were sent into slaughter. That is all there and that is important but it is our duty as actors to remember that these people were incredibly brave and came from all walks of life and on the whole they were not hardened. Some of them had just come into it on the first day of the Somme so you just need to be thinking that these are really normal people that could have been you or me, that they were not wildly different people. They could have been us.”

The production is being mounted for the 30th anniversary the novel: “And the story has obviously got such inherent drama. There is a love story which is a heartbreaking love story but then there is also the horrible and tragic story of what it means to be sent off to war and what it means to survive. This is an updated script from ten years ago and structurally it has changed. It's a different three-act structure now with two intervals and I think that's a great way to do it. But also the great thing is that the whole thing is really detailed with fantastic storylines. Our director has done a great job really focusing on each small detail. Even if there is a character that’s only in one scene and only has a couple of lines to say, they're still completely fully realised.”