[In the following review, Jeffery compares the stage adaptation of How Many Miles to Babylon? to the original novel.]

Twenty years after its publication as a short and elegantly crafted novel, Jennifer Johnston has herself adapted How Many Miles to Babylon? for the stage. The story concerns the relationship of two Irish boys, Alexander Moore, the son of an Ascendancy Big House, and Jerry Crowe, a peasant stable lad, as it develops and as they both enlist in the British army at the beginning of the First World War. The contrasts between the two: rich and poor; Protestant and Catholic; officer and private soldier, together with the growing depth of their friendship, provide the author with ample opportunities to reflect on the differing and often conflicting demands of private and public loyalties.

The rise of Irish nationalism, which was increasingly straining the fabric of the United Kingdom, adds further layers of tension, expressed through the political standpoints of the four main male characters: Moore, although Anglo-Irish, a Home Ruler; Crowe, a republican; Sergeant Barry, a rabid and sectarian Ulster Unionist; and Major Glendenning, an Englishman, quite unsympathetic to the “bog Irish” under his command. Barry and the major share a belief that the Irish are congenitally unreliable (“the Irish disease” is disaffection, maintains Glendenning), a view no doubt confirmed by the fact that both Moore and Crowe are disloyal, at least to conventional British military notions of honour. Moore's chief loyalties are to himself and to Crowe, a fact which at the end drives him to destroy his friend rather than see the army do so. Crowe's disloyalty is less subtle; he is an avowed republican who has simply joined up, he says, to learn to shoot a gun, which will be employed in the cause of Irish freedom. He is potentially the most interesting of the characters, and would perhaps have borne a fuller examination. In the midst of a conflict which Jennifer Johnston conventionally enough portrays as futile, Crowe remains enamoured of violence as a practical weapon. Neither play nor novel explore the irony that his violence is accepted (both by his friends and his enemies) much more readily than that of the war itself.

Two other characters complete the cast: Bennett, an English subaltern who provides some drollery, and Moore's manipulative mother, who pushes the boy to enlist for shabby private motives. Her presence is splendidly handled in Liz Cullinane's otherwise rather monochrome design. At the start of the play, when Moore is recalling the days of peace back home, his mother appears literally as a vision, an Angel of Mons, as it were, floating above the drab battle line. Later she moves about with a lit candle, like some latter-day Florence Nightingale, though she brings neither illumination nor comfort to anyone save possibly herself.

There is not a lot of action—the book, after all, was more contemplative than anything else. But in the absence, too, of any strong narrative thrust, the play threatens at times to become merely a series of rather static meditations, especially in the first half. We know that the principle characters are doomed—that seems to be a given for any Great War drama—but the ramifications of the crucial relationship between Moore and Crowe are not sufficiently integrated into the fate that overwhelms the two men to make the play a real tragedy, poignant and moving though it is.

How does the play differ from the book? Nearly half the novel deals with the period before the two boys reach France, but on stage this is treated with a few flashbacks and reminiscences. Moore's father does not appear in the play at all, and his physical absence simplifies the very equivocal relationship between Moore and his domineering mother, a woman “always either abstracted, or else wanting more than you can give.” The language of the play is rather rougher than the book—perhaps the passage of twenty years has permitted “fucking” to replace “bloody” (as in “Fenian bastards”), though this change may prevent the play following the novel on to as many school book lists. The casting of Sergeant Barry explicitly as an “Ulster prod” brings a much sharper edge to the relationship between the Irishmen, as Irishmen, at the front than is immediately apparent in the novel. The play, however, is very loyal to the text of the novel, and happily retains Jennifer Johnston's spare and expressive language. While the adaptation certainly demonstrates the difficulty of writing a play about a man thinking, the thoughts themselves, of Moore as he endures his “ignominious attendance on death,” remain beautifully constructed.