Goodness me, how the very mention of Joan Littlewood’s 1963 ‘theatrical entertainment’, as she termed it, or the 1969 film version directed by Richard Attenborough, can get a certain kind of historian of the Great War agitated. The normal response is an impassioned damning of the piece for foregrounding a very particular view of the war, using a very limited range of sources cleverly manipulated to support a 1960s centre-left vision which has been taken as authoritative history by many people ever since.
