Tom, Dick and Harry are the three tunnels dug 30 ft beneath the German POW camp Stalag Luft III in 1943-44 by captive allied prisoners of battle. The motion opens within the cockpit of a bomber hit by enemy hearth; it continues in prison-camp huts, takes us beneath floor into tunnels propped up by slats taken from beds, then brings us to the floor to look at escapees climb up via a gap and run as searchlights probe the sheltering darkness. We observe Bob via Holland and Belgium to the Spanish border and – cue daring leap over the barbed wire – security.
Facets of this story could also be acquainted from the 1963 movie The Nice Escape. On this new, spectacularly imaginative model, although, we don’t a lot simply watch as appear to stay alongside the prisoners. The three writers, Andrew Pollard, Michael Hugo (who additionally carry out), and Theresa Heskins (who directs) deliver us nearer to the realities of occasions by basing their play on supply materials, together with survivors’ blow-by-blow accounts.
The manufacturing, just like the escape itself, is daring and ingenious. Heskins has been creating a particular model since she grew to become creative director of this theatre-in-the-round in 2007. Key options embody extremely bodily performances incorporating clowning and sight gags, the interweaving of ground projections, sound and music to evoke locations, and viewers participation. All of those are current right here, which is what makes the manufacturing so daring.
Its subject material is lethal severe – of 76 escapees, 50 have been reported killed. The style of the telling, although, is humorous, even farcical: early on we're launched to a “translation machine”; when it's working, German characters converse English, albeit with quirky accents and syntax.
Partly, the tone displays that set by the prisoners themselves, as when, as an illustration, escapees are chosen by raffle at a Christmas live performance in plain sight of their captors. Towards this lightness, darkness is stark: the specter of a grenade being dropped right into a newly found tunnel the place males nonetheless dig; the fury of a guard, exclaiming, “Our households starve when you joke… your bombs are dropping on our properties” (elsewhere, remedy of captors generally descends into nasty caricature).
To succeed, escapees are stated to require “expertise and ingenuity”. As demonstrated by this forged and crew, the identical is true for theatre.
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