THREE DAYS IN MAY

[Deanfan5]

It was perhaps very appropriate to see this play at the time that our Prime Minister was making such a Churchillian gesture at the EU treaty taks! This play (at the Trafalga Studios) focuses on the crucial three days in May (26th-28) 1940 when Churchill and the coaltion cabinet agonised on whether to sue for peace at the time when we were beaten back to Dunkirk and Belgium and France were collapsing in the face of Hitler's panza might. Was Mussolini going to be a useful intermediary? All in all these three days when we almost capitulated was the closest Hitler came to winning the Second World War. Churchill (played so effectively by Warren Clarke) went through mental anguish on this matter with the appeaser Lord Halifax the then Foreign Secretary (Jeremy Clyde) pushing settlement whilst the Labour members of the coalition were resisting the idea and encouraging Churchill to stand firm. The former Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (Robert Demeger) despite having waved the white paper earlier finally coming down on the side of 'no surrender'. Not an easy play but well done and certainly gave me an insight into history and complexity of Franco-German/British relations. A very interesting insight into Churchill who was far from being the 'bulldog' all the time. A man who had to agonise long and hard before he came out with the immortal words; 'You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: it is victory, victory at all costs,victory in spite of all terror, victory,however long and hard the road may be.'