A New World Theatre Club production.
Directed by Christine Mitchell.
Assistant Director Christine Probst.

Performed 11th to 13th May 2009 at the Carrè Rotondes, Luxembourg.
and
31st May 2009 at De Kam, Brussels.

A New World Theatre Club production for FEATlets Brussels 2009.

When will we ever learn? Again and again there is futile loss of life caused by squabbles over land, oil, diamonds, religion, and many other commodities. Some brave souls try to show us a different path but again and again we lose our way.

This NWTC Youth Group production was created from diverse selections ranging from Shakespeare and Shaw to Lennon, Ghandi and Obama. So many have encouraged their people to go to war, so many have perished, but still the wars go on and on.

Review by Tim Hancox

NWTC Luxembourg brought us a home-assembled (I assume it is not an “original script” if it consists largely of well-chosen quotes from the past?) Battle for Peace. A cast of fourteen, of which it is not unfair to say the older ones seemed more committed and aware of a production’s needs – but I guess that’s why we put the young ones on stage too: to learn. A few random recollections of an excellent meander through war and  warmongering: Queen Elizabeth’s ” … body of a weak and feeble woman ..” and Churchill’s ” ..We shall never surrender” could safely have been taken higher, theatrically: nonetheless, they were skilfully delivered.

The “Once more into the breach” was dynamically and perfectly timed on the way down the audience staircase. The “Tomorrow belongs to me” from Cabaret was hair-raising, literally, from a lovely single voice in a spotlight on the side of the stage, then joined by the rest of the company in carefully modulated groups – no wonder we end up fighting wars, with such an evocative and stimulating call to Youth! I wondered what they would do with the Nazi salute to end: yes, they did, entirely appropriately, but I am driven also to wonder irrelevantly if the Director thought to tell them it’s fine on stage, but too sensitive a thing to joke about off – I suggest this is a part of the purpose of Youth theatre. There was a Japanese sequence, based on Hiroshima, sensitively handled but other than that, the spectacle was anglocentric: nothing wrong with that, when Presidents Roosevelt and Obama have the gift of rhetoric too!