Gray Matter by Christopher Gray

Design often trumps content these days where newspaper articles are concerned. Thus it was last week in Weekend when my review of the Royal Shakespeare’s Company’s excellent new play The Christmas Truce was sandwiched between photographs of some of its characters which — though placed at my request — prevented me from writing all I wanted to about it. Specifically, I should like to have said a little more about Bruce Bairnsfather, who is both a character in Phil Porter’s play and the inspiration for its writing.

Bairnsfather’s is a name I had not heard until a few weeks ago; with such an unusual one I think I would have remembered it. But during the First World War and in the years that followed it was famous throughout the country, appearing at the bottom of funny, well-executed cartoons concerned in the main with services life. They were published weekly in The Bystander magazine, and many featured Old Bill, a long-serving squaddie with a pragmatic approach to Army life. In a deft touch by playwright Porter he gets a major role in The Christmas Truce, alongside the real-life Bairnsfather, whose involvement in the fabled event was described in his memoir Bullets & Billets, a major source for the play.

Old Bill’s warm regard for his colleagues and suspicion of his superiors gained through long experience are shown in telling detail. There is a lovely scene in which he comforts a windy colleague: “I’m fat! So I got double your chance of bein’ buzzed. Take a slice o’luck to snipe a skinny little lad like you.”

What helped to get him fat, jam, is also amusingly described: “Plum and apple, worst o’ the lot every blinkin’ time!” he says, unpacking a delivery from home. A tin of the same, presented as a Christmas gift to the Germans in no man’s land, provokes a similar response: “Pflaume-Apfel!” says one. “Bah! [Yuk!],” says another.

The cartoon character lifted the spirits of the fighting men and caught the imagination of their families at home. He even went on to become a star of the screen.

Bairnsfather, I should say, has a special link with the RSC, being a local lad who worked in his youth as an electrical engineer at the original Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. This makes it appropriate not only that he figures in the play but that he is also the focus of a well-planned exhibition on his life and work that can be seen in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre’s Paccar Room (next to the main upstairs bar) throughout the run (till March 15). It has been put together by Bairnsfather collector Mark Warby.

Also not to be missed by theatre visitors is a second exhibition, Infinite Variety, taking place until January 4 in the Ferguson Room of the Swan Theatre. This focuses on the beauty of the ageing female face — including the very famous faces of Bianca Jagger, Judi Dench and Vanessa Redgrave — and has been curated by RSC Associate Artist Harriet Walter.