STAGE REVIEW: Birdsong - at the Festival Theatre, Malvern, from Tuesday, June 26, to Saturday, June 30, 2018.

THERE’S absolutely no way you can watch this story of a romance played out alongside considerable death, destruction and despair, without having feelings of extreme sadness about the futility of war.

Birdsong Productions’ touring version of this stage adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’ hugely acclaimed 1993 novel is currently heading towards the end of its fourth and final tour, and it has lost none of its intensity.

Rachel Wagstaff’s stage adaptation of the lengthy original work has tightened up from its first time at Malvern four years ago and now runs at a shade under two-and-a-half hours. Just about perfect.

However, it still retains much of its haunting beauty as well as evidence of the wonderful kinship experienced by the men who daily found themselves on the front line or in the tunnels of destruction below. Men in constant mortal danger during the Great War - the war it was claimed was to end all wars.

Depressingly not so! And here we are 100 years on from the end of the First World War and still problems in many areas around the globe.

One message from Birdsong is that you are left with that empty feeling that many young men who signed up out of a feeling of adventure, and their duty to King and country, all counted for little as far as the upper ranks were concerned.

The action is as intense, as it is moving and also beautiful to a degree.

It also treats war with some contempt whilst saluting its heroes both unsung and somewhat forgotten.

Two of the central characters take it all stoically - the young officer Stephen Wraysford and the sapper sergeant Jack Firebrace - roles played with breath-taking empathy by Tom Kay and Tim Treloar. They’re from opposite ends of the class spectrum but here our heroes are both allowed full and equal measure as a bond develops, begrudgingly at first.

While they are steadily brilliant in their fairly straight-forward roles, Madeleine Knight is quite exceptional, faced as she is with a more complex character - a free spirit needing to escape a subdued existence in a loveless marriage and male-dominated world.

Isabella Azaire has frailties and her psychological problems worsen when war arrives, quite literally on the doorstep of her home in Amiens, near the River Somme. Meeting four years before the war the question is can Wraysford offer the opportunity of escape either then or later?

There are other commendable performances too from a cast well suited to this production.

And so, as carnage unfolds on the Front and below ground in the tunnels, the message and lasting impression is that power in the wrong hands is toxic and evil.

Moving, gripping and totally absorbing Birdsong provides much for the mind to consider when it comes to the horrors of war and why on earth is mankind tempted to go down this extremely sad and costly route.

AW