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

theatr

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