Theatre / Reviews
Review: Keep the Home Fires Burning
If the Scottish independence debate has left you feeling a little patriotic, and this month’s wartime anniversaries appeal to your nostalgic side, then head to one-woman show Keep the Home Fires Burning at the Alma Tavern Theatre.
1940s characters and their songs are there to greet you, through a monologue performed and written by Amy Hamlen, who is word perfect throughout her 80-minute performance.
The show from Surrey-based Apollo Theatre Company is structured around women’s roles in six crucial wartime organisations, from the women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service to Queen Alexandra nurses.
There are some touching stories such as the Guildford Wrens setting up an impromptu canteen in the train station to welcome troops with lemonade and cake or the injured soldier entering a wartime hospital who declared that nurses were angels.
It’s a gentle evening, moving between the clipped tones of Amy’s 1940s diction, contemporary radio recordings and well-executed songs with piano accompaniment from Timothy Bond and James Church.
Despite the narrative approach there are some efforts towards the dramatic but overall the evening might have been made more dynamic by some more movement and variety in the way the women’s stories were recounted.
There is an obvious challenge for anyone rekindling the home fires of wartime Britain: to avoid sweetening the experience into a rose-tinted memory and instead work to tell it how it was, albeit seen from a modern viewpoint.
There were certainly moments in this production when, recalling merry stories of women who ‘fell in love’ with their wartime jobs, the nostalgia felt a little saccharine.
By Nicola Yeeles
Keep the Home Fires Burning is at the Alma Tavern Theatre at until August 30. Visit www.almataverntheatre.co.uk/theatre/what-s-on.html
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