Journey's End Sherriff Analysis

In the play ‘Journeys End’ we learn a great deal about the playwright R.C Sherriff’s style. Sherriff first started to write the play in order to raise money for his rowing club. As Sherriff’s play was only to raise some money, they couldn’t spend too much on props and different backdrops so the play is just set in one place in WW1, the dugout.
Just having the play set in one place also makes the play less complicated and easier to understand for those who aren’t as familiar with war. As that’s what the play was for; to show people what their loved ones at war were really going through and the true horror of WW1.
Sherriff uses a group of WW1 officers in a dugout to represent the whole of WW1. Sherriff focuses on the conversation between two characters in most acts. In the group of officers each character has their own individual personality and issues, this gives every person in the audience a person to relate to as themselves. When bombs and machine guns are fired Sherriff only uses sound effects, this is an easy way to portray the act without the staging and props getting to complicated. It also creates more tension because the audience want to know what is going on. Has anyone got hurt? What is happening? The way Sherriff does this also shows us that perhaps when the men at war were being attacked everything was almost a blur and no

One is when Sherriff uses his personal experience to talk about the water tasting bad due to the disinfectant and that the tea tasted like onions- realism is also created here. Sherriff also uses personal experience by focusing on Hibberts fear when it was the build up to raid and how the men don’t like to talk about what is going on around them too much and try to distract themselves. The way we see Raleigh and Stanhope stunned in lonely grief shows though the men were supposed to be stereo typically “tough” around this era, they were still effected a