Making friends with the enemy - review of Scamp Theatre, Friend Or Foe

Friend Or Foe, by Scamp Theatre,at The Corn Exchange, Newbury on Thursday, October 13 and Friday, October 14

AFTER meeting “Joey”, the magnificent horse puppet at Highclere Castle’s Heroes at Highclere event on Sunday, I am more inspired than ever to save up the pennies and myself up to the West End to see the London production of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse. But in the meantime, I will continue to enjoy the plethora of touring productions based on Morpurgo’s many other children’s books, using the excuse that they’re good for George’s cultural education (although on this occasion he was unable to make it, so I took a rather older, hairier stand-in boy along to The Corn Exchange).

Written specifically to fit in with the National Curriculum Key Stage 2 topic of Second World War evacuees, Friend Or Foe tells the story of two London boys evacuated to a Devon farm, who find that they haven’t entirely left the Blitz behind when they spot a German bomber crash landing on the moor near their new home.

On a sharply raked stage (which, it was later revealed in a post-performance actors’ talk, played havoc with their calf muscles in rehearsal) designed to represent, not the expected countryside setting but a bombed house back in London, the boys told the story of their discovery of the surviving German airmen, and the changes it brought about of their views about “the enemy”.

Having worked with a movement director to use the set to its full advantage, including a beautifully-lit near-drowning scene inciting a heart-in-mouth response, the five-strong cast worked incredibly hard to pare down the complex to the elegantly simple. As well as the paring of the novel’s story to a manageable one-act stage play, the three actors playing the adults in the boys’ lives coped excellently with the many quick changes required, not only of costume but also accents (and sometimes language) and characterisation; from a curmudgeonly farmer to a half-starved German pilot, and from a widowed mother to a chain-smoking no-nonsense teacher.

The busy feel to this piece contrasts with the starkness of Scamp Theatre’s one-man production of Morpurgo’s Private Peaceful, but it is nevertheless another engaging production in which the warmth of Morpurgo’s words shines through, and one which works on many levels for young audiences, from the power of the touching story to the questions it elicits about the experiences of children in wartime. 

* First published in Newbury Weekly News on Thursday, October 20, 2011

A Peaceful moment in the Great War - Scamp Theatre, Private Peaceful review

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Private Peaceful, at The Corn Exchange, Newbury on Tuesday, February 15 and Wednesday, February 16

WHEN the then Children’s Laureate Michael Morpurgo wrote the novel Private Peaceful in 2003, he highlighted the plight of the 306 British soldiers shot in the First World War by their own side for desertion or cowardice, dismissed as “worthless men” rather than being treated as the victims of shellshock which many of them were. In 2006 the Government finally granted pardons to these men, but the story still resonates, both in the novel and this one-man play, devised shortly after the book’s publication.

The horrors Great War are seen through the eyes of Tommo Peaceful, an under-age soldier who enlists with his beloved brother Charlie, and whose experiences in the trenches contrast sharply with their Devonshire childhood, where a plane spotted in the sky rises over rooftops instead of plunging to the ground, and figures of authority are to be laughed about rather than feared. Even the death of their father in a forestry accident and the respects paid by his employer is bathed in a warmer light when compared with the devastation of No Man’s Land, where bodies lie unburied, tangled in barbed wire.

Recent RADA graduate Mark Quartley took Tommo through early childhood and first love and then to the trenches of “Wipers”, his innocent disappearing as the fields turn to mud, but his devotion to his family staying strong through to the big push where brotherly love and battlefield experience clash with blind obedience. The play ended with a left-turn from the novel, which I shall not explain for fear of revealing either, clearly rewritten to better suit the one-man performance, but also making for better dramatic impact on the many school groups present who were probably bracing themselves for an ending they thought they knew to expect after reading the book.

While Morpurgo’s other Great War tale, War Horse, continuing to thunder in the West End, with a Broadway run and Spielberg film in production, Private Peaceful demonstrates that even stripped back to one actor and a few sound and lighting effects, the tragedy of war as seen through the eyes of a boy not much older than most of those in the audience can still resonate through words with young people today.

• First published in Newbury Weekly News on Thursday, February 24

Down on the farm - New Perspective Theatre Company, Farm Boy review

Farm Boy, at The Corn Exchange, Newbury on Saturday, November 6

BASED on the Michael Morpurgo book written as a sequel of sorts to epic trenches tale War Horse, itself a hit on the London stage and with a Steven Spielberg film in production, Farm Boy was always going to be a quieter affair, but as it turns out, none the less powerful in the telling.

Every war hero deserves a happy retirement, and Farm Boy tells the story of how Joey, the titular horse of the first book, was finally released from his farming duties along with his mother, Zoey, after a thrilling ploughing match which set him against the newfangled tractor from a neighbouring Devon farm.

The play itself was set in the modern day, with the story of Joey and his owner Alfred - known as “the Corporal” since his return from the Great War - being told by his now-elderly son to his own grandson, a city boy inspired by farming life and his grandpa’s tales to take over the running of the family farm, and lovingly restore the vintage Fordson tractor which Joey and the Corporal had competed many decades before.

New Perspectives Theatre Company’s production was a two-hander between Grandpa (John Walters), a sometimes grumpy farmer with a fondness for whodunits, and the adult Grandson (Matt Powell), who could still relive the exuberant joy and excitement he had felt when visiting the farm as a child. Grandpa and Grandson took on the personas of their forefathers to tell the story of the ploughing match with a clarity which avoided confusion, even when Grandson was playing Grandpa as a boy, and Grandpa became his own father, struggling with a gammy leg from a war wound as he ploughed “straight and true” behind his two beloved horses.

The stark stage was furnished with just a life-size replica of the 1920s Fordson tractor which the Corporal first feared, and then built a relationship with when it fell into his ownership. The horse-drawn  plough may have been represented by a chair, but its full weight was clear to see as first father then seven-year-old son steered it in an apparently futile attempt to create as many furrows as the tractor on a cold November day.

The timelessness of farm life was contrasted with the modern world as Grandson, an engineering graduate, not only took over the farm but taught Grandpa to read and write  - he had never learnt as a child, having missed so much schooling to help on the family farm. Also present was a down-to-earth attitude towards death, as Grandpa wished that he could go while shutting the chicken coop for the night as his father had done.

There may have been no guns or tanks, although the War Horse tale was touched upon as a beloved family legend, but the tale of Joey and the tractor was just as gripping as any war story. The play, adapted from the book by Daniel Buckroyd was a tribute to the magnificent writing of Michael Morpurgo, and the author’s words were allowed to shine throughout.

• First published in Newbury Weekly News on Thursday, November 14, 2010