Back in the front line

With its focus on the ethics of carpet bombing and featuring a far-from-flattering depiction of Churchill, Soldiers riled the 1960s Establishment. Now it's in London again - and just as relevant

Theatrical scandals never die - they just moulder on the shelf labelled "unread plays". Because theatre is a live art, the best way to consign a play to the dustbin of history is to leave it unperformed after its initial run. This is what happened to Soldiers, Rolf Hochhuth's controversial 1968 play about Winston Churchill and the Allied bombing of German civilians during the Second World War.

Now the Finborough, a theatre pub, revives the play for the first time in London since its original run. And it opens on 27 July, the exact anniversary of the 1943 firestorm raid on Hamburg that killed 50,000 people. And while Soldiers is a classic Sixties cause célèbre, with libertarian radicals squaring up to crotchety conservatives, it also has contemporary resonance because it questions the morality of bombing civilians.

The story of the scandal begins, oddly, with a disgruntled theatre critic. When the legendary penman Kenneth Tynan accepted an offer from Laurence Olivier, the National Theatre's artistic director, to become its first dramaturg in 1963, he soon found that not only were provocative new plays rather scarce, but that the National's deadly rival, the RSC, was scooping them up. In 1964, Peter Brook caused controversy at the RSC with the Marat/Sade and, two years later, with US, which suggested that the London suburb of Hampstead should be napalmed to teach Brits about the evils of the Vietnam War.

Tynan was desperate to find similarly controversial material. Then, one day in July 1966, he was shown Hochhuth's Soldiers. He realised at once that this was "the kind of play that can help theatre to fulfil its role as a public forum". Not only did it scrutinise the morality of Churchill's policy of carpet bombing German cities in the war against Hitler, but it also accused him of complicity in the death of General Sikorski, head of the Polish government-in-exile who died in a mysterious plane crash in 1943. Churchill's motive, Hochhuth argued, was that he wanted to keep on the good side of Stalin, which meant breaking his guarantee to the Poles that their country would be free of Soviet influence after the war. While alive, Sikorski was a reminder of this broken promise and of Churchill's acceptance of Stalin's lie that the Soviets were innocent of massacring thousands of Polish officers in Katyn Woods in 1940. (Stalin blamed Hitler.)

Tynan, a romantic lefty, was thrilled with Soldiers. The pomp of Churchill's state funeral in January 1965 was still in the public mind, and here was a chance to attack a national hero who symbolised the Empire and conservatism. Tynan's memo to Olivier read: "I don't know whether this is a great play, but I think it's one of the most extraordinary things that has happened to British theatre in my lifetime."

There was only one problem - was the Sikorski subplot true? Hochhuth claimed that he had sworn statements from secret informers witnessed by eminent academics. Trouble was, these were in a Swiss bank vault and couldn't be opened for 50 years. And the only historian who supported Hochhuth was David Irving, an admirer of Hitler and a Holocaust denier.

Tynan hoped he could convince the National's board to put on the play, but expected "stink-bombs to fly". As the board meeting approached, Olivier got cold feet and his wife, the actress Joan Plowright, had to steady his nerves. Olivier decided he didn't like the "bloody" play but feared being "despised" by his wife if he appeared to be "frightened of doing new stuff".

On 24 April 1967, the board met. Its chairman, Oliver Lyttelton (Lord Chandos), was a former member of Churchill's war cabinet and thought Soldiers a "grotesque and grievous libel". In support of Soldiers, Olivier read out an extract from Aristotle's Poetics which said that "the artist's function is to describe not the thing that happened, but a kind of thing that might happen". The board was unimpressed and unanimously turned down the play, deeming it unsuitable. Olivier went public, deploring its decision.

Defeated at the National, Tynan decided to put on the play himself, but soon ran into another problem. The censorship laws forbade the granting of licences to plays that portrayed living people - and Soldiers featured Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris, head of wartime Bomber Command, in an unflattering light. Harris objected to the play, and although Tynan railed against the archaic Lord Chamberlain, there was nothing he could do. Still, the heat of his fury fuelled the campaign to abolish censorship. Eventually, after censorship was scrapped in 1968, Tynan put on his own production of Soldiers at the West End New Theatre in December 1968, although the play had by now had its world premiere in Berlin. Its British opening night was greeted with cheers and Tynan hailed "the essential sanity of English audiences". But his one-time rival, the critic Harold Hobson, whose daughter was married to Chandos's son, soon put the knife in, and other reviews were respectful, but not ecstatic.

Worst of all, Sikorski's pilot, Edward Prchal, sole survivor of the plane crash, decided to sue Hochhuth for defamation because the play - which closed after a mere three-month run - suggested that he was in league with the British secret services, who'd allegedly bumped off Sikorski. In 1972, Tynan lost the case, which cost him £20,000. But Soldiers not only hurt him financially, it also cost him his job - he left the National in 1969.

In style, Soldiers mixes fly-on-the-wall docudrama with imaginative peeks at its characters' private lives. The Swiss-born German playwright Hochhuth had previously written The Representative (1963), which pioneered a documentary style to accuse Pope Pius XII of failing to challenge the Nazi Holocaust. But, in Soldiers, as Tynan's widow, Kathleen, conceded, "none" of its accusations of foul play "stand up in the light of hindsight". Tynan himself had doubts and used the Voltairean defence of "disliking what a man says but defending to the death his right to say it". Neil McPherson, the 34-year-old artistic director of the Finborough, agrees: "If this was a play that just slagged off Churchill, I wouldn't do it. It stages a big debate between Churchill and the bishop of Chichester about the ethics of area bombing, a huge moral question which doesn't have a simple answer. So I hope there will be screaming arguments in the pub after the show." McPherson reckons that "George Bell, the bishop of Chichester, would probably have been made archbishop of Canterbury if he hadn't opposed the bombing". Most of British society in the 1960s had immense reverence for Churchill: McPherson quotes from a card the leader's own daughter sent him saying that she owed him "freedom itself" - as "all English people do".

"Somebody once claimed that the Finborough only does plays about genocide, war and disease - which I take as a compliment," says McPherson. "I'm currently devising a play about Brompton Cemetery, which is near the theatre. It was used to bury a lot of bomber command crew who had made it home, but didn't survive. Finding out about them prompted me to read Soldiers."

The play's director, 25-year-old John Terry, adds, "It's an enormous play, a huge piece of research, with 25 pages of stage directions before each act, plus a huge prologue and epilogue. Obviously we can't put all that on stage, but for me the primary theme is about political power and the morality bombing - and that comes across." What about the Sikorski subplot? "We have a right as artists to show things for which there might not be full historical evidence." Most history plays, from Schiller's Mary Stuart onwards, not to mention Shakespeare, have been elaborations on the truth. For Terry, the play is interesting not because of its scandalous past, but "because it presents the victors' history. The single, most comprehensive account of the Second World War is still Churchill's."

But although "you can draw contemporary resonances from it, it's not really about today. It's mainly about the unprecedented bombing of Hamburg, about which I knew almost nothing - although I had heard about Dresden, Cologne and Coventry. I've also talked to some German people of my generation and they'd never heard of it either, so I was attracted to the play because it seemed to be about hidden history - a forgotten episode, off-limits." Is the play still relevant? "Oh yes," says McPherson. "You just have to look at the American Shock and Awe attacks on Baghdad." But, even if he's right and war remains much the same as it did half a century ago, British culture doesn't. With the National currently preparing Stuff Happens, David Hare's play about the US administration's obsession with Saddam Hussein, the days when theatre was unwilling to criticise governments and its allies are over.

'Soldiers' previews from 27 July at the Finborough Theatre, London SW10 (020-7373 3842, www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk)