War tale rations not very satisfying

Reporter: Paul Genty
Date published: 03 October 2014


Lotty’s War, Opera House, Manchester, to Saturday

BILLED as a “passionate wartime thriller”, Lotty’s War is Guernsey native Giuliano Crispini’s attempt to say something about the wartime Nazi occupation of the island.

What he says hardly paints an admirable picture of Guernsey womanhood: faced with the loss of her father, her rather manchild-like boyfriend and the commandeering of her house by the island’s new general, Lotty (Olivia Hallinan) becomes the latter’s forced housekeeper and soon his not at all forced lover.

She stays that way for almost five years, despite helping the local resistance (in the form of boyfriend Ben, Adam Gillen) by passing on troop information gleaned from a radio set. Call her conflicted, or perhaps just looking out for herself.

Crispini’s work asks the simple question: what would you do in similar circumstances? The Nazis, as is made clear, were — even under a relatively pleasant and civilised leader (Mark Letheren) — using slave labour, shooting locals for trivial reasons and deporting English natives to German PoW camps in retaliation for German incarceration in England.

But he doesn’t ask the question very deeply: in some ways the play is a taut mixture of romance and plucky resistance drama, but it suffers from packing rather too much into a couple of hours, and rarely gets under the skin of its characters.

There is little difference between Lotty in 1940 and Lotty in 1945, and what passion there has been has occurred around (but not on) the kitchen table, and has been mainly about coffee and tea.

Even General Bernberg’s confession near the end seems to have relatively little emotional effect on the girl.

Performances are generally OK: Olivia Hallinan is personable and does her best with the slightly ITV drama-like script, but Letheren seems rather young to be a general (presumably an affair between 20-something Lotty and a man in his 50s would have been a bit creepy).

I was a bit annoyed by Gillen’s portrayal of the former boyfriend though. He appeared to have a terrible headache for four years, if the constant pressing of hand to forehead was anything to go by.