Humble Materials presents Jessica Noel’s All Quiet on the Western Front

The semi-autobiographical 1929 novel describes the horrors of World War I and the soldiers’ trauma when they returned home. The depiction of trench warfare was so unflinching that the Nazi party, on its rise to power, banned the book, calling it “unpatriotic.” Still, the book (and its writer) endured. Remarque would go on to write several more books with the Great War at their center, and All Quiet sold 2.5 million copies in 22 languages within the first year and a half of its publication—not to mention a long tail of additional print runs, as well as adaptations across several different mediums.

All of which is to say, All Quiet on the Western Front is a book that is as well-known as it is well-regarded. And choosing to take a classic work like this one and not just reimagine it but wholly reposition it is a bold move. But then, why expect anything less from Humble Materials, a company whose 2023 Fringe show recontextualized The Yellow Wallpaper into influencer culture?

The mothers and wives

Crucially, Humble Materials’s adaptation of All Quiet, written by co-director Jessica Noel, leaves the titular setting behind and introduces new characters: women who were at best briefly glimpsed or alluded to in the novel but who are fully actualized in this adaptation.

I’m not usually a fan of the female-character-who-only-exists-because-of-her-relationship-to-a-man trope, but in matters of war, the archetype is valid. These are the mothers and wives of the men in the trenches, the ones maintaining the home front while their men are off to war.

And so even as we get glimpses of the front as Remarque wrote it, we also see a mother receiving news that she’ll never again see her son. We see a wife sending hopeful correspondence, confident her husband will be home soon to meet the child who was born since he last departed. We see flashbacks to the soldiers as young boys learning to make bread in their mothers’ kitchens. The domestic realm and its inhabitants exist in the context of the war, but their experience of the war is vastly different. It’s the part of any conflict that is often downplayed, if not forgotten, whenever the men go off to fight.

Drums and bullets

While previous Humble Materials shows used pre-recorded and often-familiar music, All Quiet is performed to an original score, played live by a quartet of musicians just off stage right. The production is not, strictly speaking, a musical (there’s no singing) but a work of dance theater. Still, it’s rare for a dance production outside of the major ballet companies to include live accompaniment, so this addition was very welcome.

Beyond the novelty of the live band, though, was the fact that the band and performers were in sync in the battle scenes, with staccato drums standing in for a spray of bullets. The choreography here was not as literal or aggressive as it might have been, but the music does quite a bit of work in establishing where and when we are in the story.

For a novel, modern take on a classic, Humble Materials’s adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front is worth the trip to South Philly.