Adam Donen’s Symphony to a Lost Generation

Charlotte Kasner at St Lukes, London
May 31, 2016

Alas the world has been plagued by wars, skirmishes and aggression which the ‘War to End All Wars’ not only failed to stop but in some cases precipitated. However, in spite of genocide, famines, mass migration, conflicts and other horrors that daily fill the news bulletins, there is a particular resonance about the First World War. At 17 million, the loss of life was horrendous, although outstripped by the 1919 influenza pandemic that killed between 20 and 40 million people worldwide and the 50 to 80 million who died in the Second World War (28 million of whom died from war-related disease and famine).

There remains however the sense that there was a loss of innocence with the first truly mechanised war mowing down men and animals indiscriminately. It was also the first airborne war resulting in life expectancy for pilots being measured in days. Their first flight was often their last and more than half of all recruits were killed in training. The war also heralded the first civilian bombing by air with Zeppelin raids being responsible for 528 deaths in Britain and more than 1,000 casualties in the three years of operation.

Documenting all this in anything other than a factual manner is problematic. Even the great John Galsworthy could not face it, reducing the five years of devastation to a mere sentence in his nine Forsyte Chronicles. A few have managed – notably RC Sherriff in Journey’s End – but many who attempted it ended up wallowing in clichés.

Unfortunately, Adam Donen’s Symphony to a Lost Generation is no exception. The format borrows heavily from Britten’s great War Requiem, undoubtedly the most devastatingly moving musical and poetic account of the First World War made in tribute to men who died in the Second World War. The work uses poetry by Schiller (a new setting of the Ode to Joy sung movingly and with precision by the VPO Choir) and Anna Akhmatova (July 1914), the latter in a setting for soprano sang by the stunning Yana Ivanilova. The music is not apologetic in picking up on various motifs from several composers but is competently written and played (by the Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra), although it’s not likely to win any awards for originality nor inspire any standing ovations.

The main selling point of Symphony to a Lost Generation though is the juxtapositioning of the music with film. The film has been assembled with undoubted skill, being both run behind and projected onto a gauze to provide a sense of depth. This however is also the major downfall of the work. Images flash by rapidly and jump from scenario to scenario creating a disembodied and therefore a distancing effect.

There is a thread running through of childhood sweethearts born at the wrong time and in the wrong place. She is wracked with worry as he departs cheerily to the trenches. He returns, a shattered shadow of his former self. Nothing original there and, although of course it happened to thousands and thousands of people, but depicting it this way reduces it to banalities.

The roles are danced by Natalia Osipova and Sergei Polunin although there is no ostensible reason why they should be danced at all. There is the bizarre effect of a man jeté-ing through the trenches for no reason as his comrades march beside him. Both dancers are under used and badly contextualised. There are also problems with the proportions of the holographic images; at times the two leads appear to be larger than the surrounding people, creating an off medieval perspective to the representation.

There are scenes that are extremely effective, notably the soldier drowning in mustard gas that wreathes it way insidiously from right and left until it pools into billowing clouds of death, and the tank that looms up and storms towards the audience like the famous Lumiere train in L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat.  But the newsreel images are indistinct and sometimes too brief to be effective. They appear in distorted bubbles that swim across the gauze like floaters in front of eyes that have stared into a bright light. Everything is interspersed with bangs and flashes and an odd cartoon sun.

There is a long, long section with buildings slowly collapsing into fire and rubble which inevitably brings to mind the current devastation in Syrian towns or Beirut in the 1980s – both a direct result of British interventions in Palestine leading up to and following the First World War. To his credit, Donen also features the infamous Armenian genocide although it is necessary to read the programme notes to appreciate the reference.

The work has insufficient originality to sustain its 80 minutes plus interval duration. Donen also struggles to bring it to a close. He settles on a strange parade of images that float across the gauze and then appear to be welded into the pages of a dangling tome. We see the usual suspects, Stalin, Kennedy, Mao (if Hitler was there, I missed it) and, for good measure, Edward Snowden. Quite how they connect to the First World War is left to the audience to deduce. I expect there will be as many opinions as there were audience members. He then produces the ultimate cliché, the falling poppies that turn to blood.

The evening was introduced by the Mayor of Islington who unfortunately called it an important tool for “celebrating the legacy of the First World War”: definite case of ‘think before you speak’. Alas, it mostly called to mind the debates between ‘legacy’ and ‘sustainability’ in the mockumentary 2012.

I suspect that the format actually prevents the one thing Donen hoped to attain: emotional engagement. It is not sufficient to just present a parade of horrors without a context that enables the audience to want to engage. He admits in his programme notes that his ambitions were arrogant. Sadly, I have to concur.