‘Oh What a Lovely War’: the Texts and Their Context

This year marks no less than the twenty-seventh anniversary of the first performance, on 19 March 1963, of Oh What a Lovely War by the Theatre Workshop company at Stratford East – a production which has been alternatively mythologized as the apogee of the company's achievement under Joan Littlewood, and, by fewer but influential critics (notably the late Ewan MacColl), as its nadir. Even those who saw the show after its transfer to Wyndham's Theatre on 20 June 1963 may, as Derek Paget here illustrates, have seen a production which differed significantly from the original: while those who did not see either version (even if they can be persuaded that the subsequent film bears little relation to either) have to rely on the text as published by Methuen. But this, as Paget demonstrates, provides only one. albeit the most accessible, of the several sources of textual documentation: and in this article, derived from the author's doctoral thesis for Manchester University, he draws on the recollections of actors and other theatre workers as well as on printed, manuscript, and source materials, to illuminate the creation and, arguably, the subsequent dilution of this collectively created indictment of war.