Liverpool Sound And Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Christopher Harrisson, Julian Spooner, Matthew Wells, Daniel Wilcox, Laila Woozeer.

There is a moment in A Strange Wild Song, a well written piece by Rhum and Clay, where the audience feels part of the action, the bombs being dropped from overhead planes that are falling around the near destroyed French village resonate and echo through 70 years and a couple of hundred miles and bring those in the auditorium face to face with one of the most inhuman parts of human history…and with one of the most interesting tales from World War Two.

The team behind A Strange Wild Song take the story of Belgian photographer Leon Gimpel who photographed a street neighbourhood in Paris during The Great War, especially a group of children who had formed their own personal army and transplants it to the fields and villages of France nearly three decades later. The four strong cast and the excellent musicianship of Laila Woozeer show dramatically how playing at soldiers as children in the rubble and destruction, the ease of innocent imagination can easily be transformed into a horrifying and distressing adult reality.

The cast earned their applause from the audience with aplomb, the portrayed the innocence of childhood with a series of clicks and mimicking noises they would have heard as bullets flashed around them and from bombs exploding near enough to maim and kill. There was also joy to be found in this brutal time and the arrival of an American soldier, portrayed superbly by Daniel Wilcox, causes the three brothers to have fun and enjoy being a child, something that is cruelly and heartlessly taken from them as the true horror of their games become frightening reality.

With the action placed in an imaginative and simple set, A Strange Wild Song is a magnetic, honest and disconcerting piece of work, full of innocence and beauty but with that little sharp jab of knowledge that the brutality of war was never too far away.

Ian D. Hall