If it weren't taught in history class, the impromptu ceasefire during which 100,000 British and German troops laid down their weapons and left their trenches to celebrate Christmas together would sound like fake news. Those two days more than 100 years ago seem unimaginable in 2025.
The “docu-musical” All Is Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914, enjoying a remarkably understated production at Stage West Theatre in Fort Worth, makes the spontaneous event palpable, even if it never spread to all of World War I’s Western Front or in the same way. All Is Calm depicts it in just one corner of the bloody conflict.
Unfolding in just 70 minutes, theater director Peter Rothstein’s poetic construction began as a radio play on Minnesota Public Radio in December 2007 before premiering on stage later that month. It has gone on to become a holiday staple, eventually running off-Broadway and filmed for PBS five years ago.
It’s easy to see why. Relying on the letters and journals of 40 soldiers for all of its dialogue, All Is Calm is moving while avoiding sentimentality. Most of the quotations performed by a multiracial, multi-ethnic cast of 11 men and one woman are brief and to the point, documenting with a clear eye the impossible conditions of trench warfare, how their characters got there and the nasty business they are expected to do.
Seen last Sunday, the play derives its poetry from almost continuous a cappella singing, ranging from delicate to robust and marked by beautifully overlapping, choir-like harmonies. The suite of 35 songs starts with the traditional Scottish anti-war tune “Will Ye Go to Flanders?” It’s followed by other numbers about conflict (“When This Bloody War Iis Over,” “I Want to Go Home”) and well-known carols (“The First Noel,” “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”).
The legend is that a German soldier prompted the momentary truce when he emerged from his trench, hands up, singing “Stille Nacht” on Christmas Eve. That scene comes about halfway through All Is Calm, the combatants gradually meeting in No Man’s Land — the few yards separating their pits — to exchange food, rum and cigarettes, play soccer and discuss the situation they find themselves in, including their less than generous attitude toward their leaders.
At first, the songs alternate with the spoken material. But as the piece builds, the cast maintains a nearly constant, often wordless humming as a musical backdrop to the dialogue. The effect is mesmerizing.
Stage West’s first-rate production values begin at the entrance to the performance space, the walls covered with wood barricades, sandbags, barbed wire and vintage black-and-white war photos. The multitiered, triangularly shaped platform that serves as the set points toward an empty area, perhaps representing No Man’s Land, the actors facing away from the audience on either side.
It appears like a strange choice until the performers start retreating under the sides of the set and, in a startling moment, lining up atop it to look audience members in the eye. They have evolved from generic soldiers to vulnerable humans, just like the people in the seats.
All Is Calm doesn’t shy away from the realities of war, making it clear that this was but a brief, temporary respite. Tens of millions would go on to die in World War I. As one soldier is quoted as saying of the truce, “It’s a sight we’ll never see again.”
Details
Through Dec. 21 at 821-823 W. Vickery Blvd., Fort Worth. $54.50-$59.50. stagewest.org.
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