Terry Grimley previews a play which nearly never happened, but made a Dudley man's Hollywood career.

When David Grindley’s production of Journey’s End opened at London’s Comedy Theatre in January 2004 it was meant to be a programme-filler with an eight-week run.

In the end, it ran for 18 months, had two national tours and went to New York, where it collected a Tony Award.

As Grindley points out, the initial resistance he had to overcome in reviving R C Sherriff’s classic First World War play reflected the circumstances of its first production in 1929. In fact, he might not have got it on at all had he not spotted an opportunity to open it on the 75th anniversary of the original.

The story of that first production in 1929 is one of the great stories of 20th century British theatre. It eventually led to a shy insurance man from Surrey, who began writing to raise funds for his local rowing club, becoming one of Britain’s most successful screenwriters.

It also transformed an obscure designer and former actor from Dudley into a Hollywood director who created one of cinema’s most iconic images.

Sherriff, himself a First World War veteran who was awarded the Military Cross, decided to write the play as a kind of debt of honour to his comrades, but he had no experience of professional theatre and little idea of how to get Journey’s End put on.

The theatre establishment was far from keen on a play with no female characters, set exclusively in an underground dugout.

One of its objections – “no leading lady” – was adopted by Sherriff as the title for his autobiography in 1968. Besides, by 1928 people had spent 10 years trying to forget the war, and did not want to be reminded of it now.

The only person who could be found to direct it was the designer James Whale, who had never previously directed a play. A graduate of Dudley Art School, Whale had also served in the war and was captured during a “stunt” which sounds not unlike the raid which takes place towards the end of Journey’s End.

He began acting in a prisoner of war camp and after the war joined the Birmingham Rep, playing the assassin John Wilkes Booth in John Drinkwater’s 1918 hit, Abraham Lincoln.

For two rehearsed readings of Journey’s End at the Apollo Theatre late in 1928, Whale cast an unknown 21-year-old actor Laurence Olivier, a fellow Birmingham Rep graduate, in the central role of Stanhope, the young veteran commanding officer for whom a whisky bottle has become an essential part of his equipment.

Journey’s End finally found its way to a full production thanks to the intervention of flamboyant maverick producer Maurice Brown.

Fortuitously, Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst, the couple who founded Dartington College, had offered Brown money to put on a deserving play which could not find commercial backing.

By this time Olivier was contracted elsewhere and Colin Clive took over the role of Stanhope. After it opened at the Savoy Theatre on January 21, 1929, Journey’s End quickly became an international phenomenon, catching the flood tide of a resurgence of interest in the war, also reflected in numerous memoirs and novels, including Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, both also published in 1929.

In 1930 Whale directed the play on Broadway, and in the same year directed the film version, which gave him his break in Hollywood.

His next film was the immortal horror classic Frankenstein, with Colin Clive in the title role opposite Boris Karloff’s iconic monster. Whale remained in Hollywood until his death in 1957.

Although Sherriff wrote 11 more plays he never repeated the success of Journey’s End. But his career as a screenwriter, which began in 1933 with The Invisible Man, was more distinguished, including such landmark films as Goodbye Mr Chips, The Four Feathers, Odd Man Out and The Dam Busters.