"It is an inefficient and obsolete weapon, sirs, of which our Army has many thousands: and you have, in your wisdom, asked me to guard it with my life, thinking that I would indeed do anything, anything, to preserve and shelter from all harm, a thing so beautifully useless, so poignantly past it, so wistfully outdated, as my youth, or a Bofors gun. I would, and I shall, lay down my life for it."
Commemorating the tenth anniversary of the death of playwright John McGrath, and unseen in a professional production in London since 1966...
Germany, 1954. A bitterly cold winter in the early years of the Cold War. In a wind-swept corner of a British Army base, six soldiers are posted to guard an obsolete anti-aircraft gun. Their task is futile and the gunners know it. Placed under the command of an inexperienced teenager, their boredom turns to frustration and their thoughts turn to trouble as the banter and squabbles of the barrack room harden into a battle of wills between a callow NCO who just wants to serve out his time and a disillusioned fighting man with his finger on the self-destruct button...
Directed by acclaimed new emerging director Robert Hastie, John McGrath’s startling, darkly comic depiction of young men coming to terms with a new, inhuman era of warfare is based on his own experience of National Service in the 1950s. Originally produced at Hampstead Theatre in 1966 with a cast including James Bolam, Barry Jackson and Brian Murphy, Events While Guarding The Bofors Gun was filmed in 1968 by Jack Gold as The Bofors Gun, starring David Warner, Ian Holm, Nicol Williamson and John Thaw. |
