Journey's End

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

A play written by R.C. Sherriff and first performed in 1928, it tells the story of a group of middle-ranked members of the British army. The overall premise is "War is both unpleasant and unnecessary." However, it is shot through with a vein of dark humour, particularly from Mason and Trotter, making it ring much truer than many of its doom-and-gloom imitators.

The main characters are:

  • Capt. Dennis Stanhope, the Shell Shocked Senior (a rather tragic example, he's in his early 20s). He drinks heavily to deal with the war but won't take any time off because of a sense of duty and a fear that everyone he knows at home, including his fiancée, will find out what he's become.
  • Lt. Osborne, Stanhope's fatherly second in command
  • Second Lt. Jimmy Raleigh, Stanhope's old schoolfriend and future brother-in-law
  • Second Lt. Trotter, the token working-class officer
  • Second Lt. Hibbert, an officer who's as traumatised as Stanhope. He hopes to get home by faking illness.
  • Pvt. Mason, the officers' unnamed Deadpan Snarker chef
Tropes used in Journey's End include: