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Despite West End producers' and critics' expectations that it would never turn a profit, R. C. Sherriff's Journey's End (1928) became the most commercially successful First World stage drama of the interwar period, celebrated as an authentic depiction of the Great War in Britain and around the world. This article explains why. Departing from existing scholarship, which centers on Sherriff's autobiographical influences on his play, I focus instead on the marketing and reception of this production. Several processes specific to the interwar era blurred the play's ontology as a commercial entertainment and catapulted it to international success. These include its conspicuous engagement with and endorsement by veterans of the war, which transformed the play into historical reenactment; the multisensory spectatorial encounter, which allowed audiences to approach Journey's End as a means of accessing vicarious knowledge about the war; and a marketing campaign that addressed anxieties about the British theatrical industry. Finally, I trace the reception of this play into the Second World War, when British soldiers and prisoners of war spontaneously revived it around the world. The afterlives of Journey's End, I demonstrate, suggest new ways of conceiving of the cultural legacy of the First World War across the generations.

Listen to Captain Stanhope, who drinks himself into numbness, a role originated in London by Laurence Olivier: \"D'you ever get a sudden feeling that everything's going farther and farther away, till you're the only thing in the world -- and then the world begins going away, until you're the only thing in the universe -- and you struggle to get back -- and can't?\" Utterly conventional in structure and dialogue, \"Journey's End\" paradoxically anticipates the absurdists and existentialists who later reshaped the modern drama. Decades before Samuel Beckett presented life as an exercise in fruitless and ceaseless anticipation, [R. C. Sherriff]'s soldiers were already waiting for their own elusive Godot.

Within this group are Stanhope (Tom Wisdom), a brilliant young captain who only stays sane thanks to the bottle, the terrified Lieut Hibbert (Stephen Hudson), the calm 'uncle' Lieut Osborne (John Elmes), the doughty 2nd Lieut Trotter (Roger Walker) and the starry- eyed new arrival Raleigh (Richard Glaves).

l Journey's End is at Birmingham Hippodrome on May 23-28, contact 0870 730 1234 or www.birmingham hippodrome.com for ticket information

Seventy-five years after its first performance, David Grindley revives R C Sherriff's anti-war drama. Five soldiers are in a trench in the Great War two days before the Germans' offensive. Christian Coulson is the young lieutenant whose hero, Captain Stanhope (Geoffrey Streatfield) is being pushed over the edge by the horror of trench life.

The story is eerily familiar: Warfare without an exit strategy, the existential angst of soldiers as they await the next attack, the obliviousness and insensitivity of commanders-in-chief. No, we're not talking Iraq, but rather dispatches from another front: R.C. Sherriffs 1929 battlefield-life play \"Journey's End,\" set in the British trenches at the height of WWI.

Whatever the reason, director [David Grindley] leads a spectator to make connections all over the place, from Beckett (one person's decision that \"nothing matters\") to Milos Forman's film of \"Hair\" (that closing image) while fully conveying \"Journey's End's\" qualities as dramatic template.

The council has allowed Mesh to use the Kruitmagazijn for free, as its production of Journey's End - the company will return to the venue this time next year - will undoubtedly appeal to the many thousands of visitors to the battlefields of Ypres, not to mention schoolchildren studying the text of Sherriff's time-honoured play as part of the English Literature syllabus.Most of the artefacts and memorabilia are on hire from Khaki Devil, the go-to supplier for all things military, based in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk.Because Sherriff's play is in constant demand, Khaki Devil does what amounts to a Journey's End package in which you can pick and choose from hundreds of items from the Great War.[...]interested are institutions from the Imperial War Museum, the Western Front Association and the British Legion to the Passchendaele Museum and the Flanders Fields Museum, which is five minutes' walk from the venue.