Shrovetide memorial: The Stonyhurst College 1930 production of Journey’s End

This article considers a school production of R. C. Sherriff’s 1928 anti-war play Journey’s End, at Stonyhurst College in 1930, under the direction of a Jesuit priest who had served as an army chaplain during the First World War. The production was presented on the occasion of Shrovetide which, the article argues, in tandem with a wider tendency of the beginnings of memorialisations of the war dead, effectively allowed for the production to be read in Catholic liturgical terms. Thus the production is considered as an intervention which sought to concentrate young minds on questions related to religious worship and commitment at the point of a rapidly changing world, and in anticipation of their own pending roles in the Second World War. In these respects, the article concludes, the production anticipated the concerns for liturgical renewal of Vatican II.

Citation

Halligan, B. (2025) Shrovetide memorial: The Stonyhurst College 1930 production of Journey’s End, The Downside Review.

Type

Journal article

Language

en

Description

© 2025 The Authors. Published by SAGE. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.1177/00125806251322101

ISSN

0012-5806

EISSN

2397-3498

Rights

Attribution 4.0 International

cb

Collections

Faculty of Arts, Business and Social Sciences