Birdsong (play) Gregg Lowe, Joe Coen, Jack Hawkins, James Staddon and Annabel Topham. The play closed on January 15, 2011. The play reopened January 31, 2018 with its last show being performed July 21, 2018. Birdsong (play) Birdsong was a 2010 adaptation of the novel of the same title by Sebastian Faulks. The text was written by Rachel Wagstaff and the premiere production was directed by Trevor Nunn. That production began previews at the Comedy Theatre in London on September 18, 2010, and opened on September 28, 2010. The West End stage production's cast included Ben Barnes as Stephen Wraysford, Genevieve O'Reilly
Birdsong (novel) scholar Jerome de Groot calls "Birdsong" one of the first novels of its kind, creating a trend in the 1990s of literary fiction rethinking and reflecting on the World Wars and their historical legacy. Michael Gorra, a professor of English literature, argues that Faulks seeks to demonstrate that "the past can be recovered, its code can be broken; it can be used to add meaning to contemporary life. Its limitations can be overcome and its promises fulfilled because we know it can heal." The deliberate hiding of Stephen's stories, remaining silent to his family after the war's end and encoding