The Guardian
June 17, 2002
By Elisabeth Mahoney

Tennyson covered the basics well enough. In his rousing tribute to those involved in Britain's worst military blunder - the 1854 charge of the Light Brigade at the battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War - the Victorian poet got the suicidal nature of the charge right ("Into the Valley of Death/Rode the six hundred") and noted that the blame lay with the military elite ("Not tho' the soldier knew/Some one had blundered).

It would take 20th-century cynics to expand fully on the horror of losing 247 men and more than 500 horses in 20 minutes, and for nothing. Only now, thanks to a new radio version based on his unperformed play, The Charge of the Light Brigade (Thursday, Radio 4), do we know that John Osborne was one of those looking back in anger at the events at Balaclava. You could hear the playwright seething at the madness of it all.

Played as a model of quiet, sneering outrage by Michael Feast, Osborne was narrator and his stage directions were our moral guide through the terrible mess of war.

So we had incisive one-line summaries of the key players: the Earls of Cardigan ("a magnificent comic figure; arrogant, ungifted, impenetrable") and Lucan ("a thoughtful, introspective fool for all his brutality and ruthlessness"), the brother-in-laws whose petty squabbling and mutual contempt led to the fateful charge, and Captain Nolan (played by Joseph Fiennes with all the "hard wildness" Osborne saw in the Captain) who had to lead the charge.

With these characters in place, Osborne's focus was the outmoded, class-ridden ludicrousness with which the British campaign was run. At the front "remote, unworldly-looking officers recline in all kinds of attitudes, sometimes looking as if they were outstretched upon the lawns of Oxford colleges", saying things like "these contemptible Russians, savages, will have seen nothing like us in their lives". This would prove to be true, of course, but not quite as the officer intended. Lucan, played with gruff menace by Donald Sinden, strips lower-ranked soldiers of their blankets at night ("I will have no effeminate ideas among the soldiers of the Light Brigade".)

Maybe because we know the awful way the action went, the most affecting moments came from Osborne's directions, the words with which he delineated the backdrop of obscene horror for us and for himself. During a night storm at sea, injured horses are being shot and pitched overboard. "The horse hurtles downwards into the sea, its quarters stretched in the air. Nolan looks out to sea, the sounds of horses gone mad and being shot behind him. Yet another splash, then dozens of dead horses bobbing in the sea." The valley of death felt suddenly close and real.