THE DANGER TREE: THE GREAT WAR RE-IMAGINED
Scarlett and Marc struggled to articulate the devastating loss caused by the battles of WWI, which resulted in such widespread ramifications, so they decided to look for one story that could solve the problem by speaking for every other action in the battle. The exhibition takes its name from the only tree left standing on the battlefield during the fighting, one that lay in No Man’s Land roughly halfway between British and German front lines. When the 800 men of the Newfoundland regiment were ordered over the top at 7:30am on July 1st 1916, it was used as a marker where the men were directed to pass through a narrow cut in the wire to make an assault on the German line. The Germans, however, had already identified the location
minutes later, only 67 men had survived the onslaught.
The repercussions for Newfoundland as a country were enormous, not just from an emotional perspective, but by the end of the war the country had lost so
many of its young men that they struggled to repopulate their industries. This British colony lost its ‘dominion’ status and entered bankruptcy, eventually becoming a province of Canada. Scarlett and Marc felt that both on a micro and on a macro level this is a story worthy of the title of the exhibition. This collection challenges us to view alternative versions of the multi-layered, immersive work, seen through the words of the war poets and movingly expressed by leading British actors, Sean Bean, Christopher Eccleston and Sophie Okonedo.
and had their machine guns trained on it and, by the time the retreat was called 30
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