At Break of Day (French's Acting Editions)

At Break of Day is the story of two soldiers who make an epic journey home after a long war, encountering many different people on the way. Events become more and more dreamlike, indeed nightmarish, taking them not just along the road home but through a whole century and its conflicts. Along the way they quarrel, make up, quote Shakespeare, fight, comfort each other, joke, escape from prison, and betray each other. One of them records his thoughts in a notebook. Interwoven with the story of the soldiers is that of a young woman who has made her own journey to a distant land, to discover what happened to her great-grandfather. He disappeared after a long-distant war and she searches the battered notebook that once belonged to him for clues. The play presents an absurd universe where time and place shift alarmingly and which is haunted by the echoes of great disasters and great hopes, great poetry and great sorrow.