Three days in May

This play was near the end of its run, so a case of getting in before its too late. And was well worth it.

The May in question is May 1940, and the entire play is set within meetings of the War cabinet. Britain is in what Halifax described as its greatest peril since 1066. British forces are surrounded at Dunkirk, the French are about to capitulate and Nazi forces are greater than ours. The heart of the play is the debate of how to proceed - fight on alone or, as the French want us to do, send out feelers through Mr Mussolini as to whether peace terms could be negotiated. And fascinating debate it was. Wishful thinking as to whether Hitler might accept terms which leave us alone and maybe lose some colonies, therefore avoiding a thorough beating, or risking having the fight and possibly losing. Interesting imponderables were things like the forces in Dunkirk. The assumption was that only a few thousand might be saved. As it turned out quarter of a million were recovered. But they had to make a decision before knowing that.

Churchill of course wanted to fight. Alarmingly, it seemed he wanted literally to fight to the end, with women and children if necessary, to the horror of Lord Halifax. Labour representatives wanted to fight - a parody of Clement Attlee in this play seemed greyer than any grey man, including John Major, felt  that the working man wanted to stand up against Hitler. But Churchill needed to get the approval of his Tory party members in the person of Halifax and Neville Chamberlain in order to carry Parliament. Eventually he talks Chamberlain around to the view that Hitler could not be trusted (reminding him of Munich) and so there was no point in trying.

Lots of interesting points to think about. How close we might have been to coming to an accommodation with Fascism. And if we had, at what cost? How much the biggest of events may come down to individual personalities. This is of course the opposite of the fashionable view of history - that its not all about the important people, the kings and queens etc. But without Churchill its quite easy to see this particular pivotal moment in history could have gone the other way.

And how being right or wrong can just be a matter of hindsight. Was Churchill brilliant and brave, or just foolhardy but through various lucky breaks - good weather for D-Day and Hitler's disastrous invasion of the Soviet Union - actually got the right answer?

Anyway, as a play it was never less than engrossing. Warren Clarke was excellent as Churchill. (How do you advertise for someone to play the great man? "Man with big jowls."). I do not know how much was based on any evidence and how much just supposition, but most of it seemed convincing enough. And its in the nature of theatre that one feels more involved than one does in a film or TV drama.