War Songs is cunningly contrived, beginning with Ivor Novello's blusteringly patriotic Keep the Home Fires Burning, immediately undercut by Kipling's Tommy. Rosamund is as good an actor as she is a singer, and the spoken parts of the recital are as powerful as the sung.

 

She continues with similar contrasts between the rhetoric of war and its devastating effect on the people involved, both those who fight and those who sit at home, waiting for news of them in fear and anguish. It moves from the public and political to the private and personal, from poetry and prose to laughter and tears, from Schumann to Kurt Weill and Poulenc. Thus the popular Sister Susie Sewing Shirts For Soldiers is followed by James Fenton's devastating poem Cambodia, about the brutal maths of modern warfare.

 

By the time Rosamund gets to Novello's very different second contribution, We'll Gather Lilacs, the emotion in the room is overwhelming; the flowers are supposed to be for returning heroes, but we know they will never in fact come home again; the lilacs can only be gathered for their memorials. This is followed by the uplifting Everyone Sang from Siegfried Sassoon, then the bathos of There's Something About a Soldier, and finally a cry from the ancient past, from Euripides's Hecuba. “What's he to Hecuba or Hecuba to him?” Hamlet asks.

 

Rosamund's recital gives the answer. Hecuba's grief over the terrible tragedies of fallen Troy set a pattern for our whole three thousand years of war-torn civilization. The recent addition of letters and reports from world war zones increases the relevance to women and war.

 

Julian Mitchell – Author, Playwright & Scriptwriter