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[lastoftheboys-blog]

About our post-show talk with Kevin Ruane and Jan Harlan

Last night, we were joined for a post-show talkback at Southwark Playhouse by Kevin Ruane - Professor of Modern History at Canterbury Christ Church University and one of the UK's foremost experts on the Vietnam War - and Jan Harlan - long-time collaborator and confidant of Stanley Kubrick and executive producer on his films, Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987), and Eyes Wide Shut (1999). It was a privilege to hear them speak on topics as diverse as Belgian tank collecting, the self-fashioning of American national identity, anti vs. pro-war filmmaking, and the Micky Mouse Club soundtrack.

Jan kicked off the talk by explaining to us that, '[artists] don't strive for realism, they strive for real', and that this mantra was especially resonant for Kubrick. It was one of the features of the performance of Last of the Boys that Jan was most drawn to, in fact - that reality was heightened, or even distorted, to convey repressed emotions, ghosts, fears, desires. Indeed, he explained, this is the same impulse in filmmaking, to create an illusion of what's really there. Practically, that task is about building an environment wherein those events can convincingly take place. In the case of Full Metal Jacket, Beckton Gas Works in East London became the Vietnam of Kubrick's imagination, a world in which boys - grown, but emotionally incomplete - had been sent to perform the roles of men. As such, the casting and even the soundtrack was an attempt to convey a sense of doomed youth.

As Kevin explained, films continued to be made long after Communist tanks crashed through the gates of the Independence Palace in Saigon in 1975 (marking the end of the Vietnam War) because Vietnam represented, and continues to represent, a "David and Goliath story" of the world's greatest superpower being humbled and eventually defeated by a relatively tiny, distant, critically-situated, predominantly agrarian nation. So, on the occasion of Bob Dylan's 75th birthday, and as President Obama was addressing dignitaries at a historic state visit in Hanoi, it felt as if - for the day at least - we were all talking about the great untalked-about war.

[lastoftheboys-blog]

Join us for the post show talks!

Wednesday 18th May Q&A with the Cast and Director

Please join us for a post-show question and answer session with our fantastic cast and director John Haidar. Free to all audience members with a ticket to the show on the 18th May.

Tuesday 24th May The Vietnam War: On Stage and Screen

We will be joined by the celebrated film producer and long-time collaborator of Stanley Kubrick, Jan Harlan (The Shining; Full Metal Jacket; Eyes Wide Shut), along with Kevin Ruane, Professor of Modern History at Canterbury Christ Church University, one of the UK’s leading experts on the Vietnam War. The talkback will be chaired by the director of Last of the Boys, John Haidar. Free to all audience members with a ticket to the show on the 24th May.

Before shooting began on Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola explained that, ‘though it won’t necessarily be political – it will be about war and the human soul [...] it will be frightening, horrible – with even more violence than The Godfather.’ Ever since the final mass exodus from South East Asia in 1975 – and even during it, in the case of The Green Berets (1968), starring John Wayne – American involvement in Vietnam has been the focus of many of the twentieth century’s most towering achievements in cinema, with The Deer Hunter (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979), First Blood (1982), Platoon (1986), Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), Full Metal Jacket (1987), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), and Forrest Gump (1994) amongst the most celebrated with 19 Academy Award wins between them. Representations of the war and its enduring aftermath on stage are less frequent, with only a handful of works in comparison, including Tennessee Williams little-known one-act play, Green Eyes (1970), Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July (1978), John DiFusco’s Tracers (1984), and Bruce Norris’s Purple Heart (2002).

Buy your tickets here: http://bit.ly/24GMHs0

[lastoftheboys-blog]

Our director John Haidar’s recent trip to Vietnam

In his seminal 1955 novel, The Quiet American, Graham Greene writes that, 'Vietnam can hold you like a smell does.' If I was ever going to infiltrate the emotional and political context to Steven Dietz's play, I knew I had to go there and experience that part of the world for myself.

What I realised very quickly after stepping off the plane in Hanoi was that Vietnam is a country that continues to live with the questions of its various conflicts even today. In much the same way, Steven's characters are those living with these questions halfway around the world. They are the men and women who survived the decisions made in that time and continue to survive them on a daily basis and so the play speaks to the then and the now.

My time in Vietnam crystallised the notion that Last of the Boys is as much a play about 2016 as it is about 1966 and that it's principally an argument with America. Our job is to ensure we maintain that argument in this election year where there are still such huge social injustices, racial and class divides, where foreign policy is in a constant state of flux and globalisation is on the rise. Steven is resolute that his play is not a history lesson. Directorially, what I want to do is make a contemporary piece of work, to find out what is current in the piece, for instance, in light of recent hostilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere. I mentioned the US presidential elections and these have never been far from our discussions during this first week of rehearsals.

In addition to this being a story about a friendship that has it's genesis in the midst of a warzone, it's a piece of new writing that's also keenly focused on a forgotten generation of veterans and their families. In this way, it's the tragedy of the American establishment, epitomised by former US Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, who presided over the American war machine in Vietnam at the height of the fighting. Towards the end of his life, McNamara quoted a comment made by Joseph Lelyveld in The New York Times: 'When we [in America] talk about Vietnam, we are seldom talking about the country of that name or the situation of the people who live there. Usually, we are talking about ourselves. In fact, we probably always were.' That statement was reason enough to go to South East Asia and examine Steven's work through a different lens. 

Travelling from the Red River Delta in the North, through the Demilitarised Zone, to the fertile coastal lowlands of the South, I was lucky enough to speak with an infinite variety of people. After explaining I was interested in the events of the Vietnam War, almost all of those I talked to corrected me. 'You mean the American War', they'd say.

photo credit: Chrystal Ding

Get your tickets here! 

http://bit.ly/1RZ41Ri