Private Peaceful Show read by Michael Morpurgo with Coope Boys and Simpson, Purcell Room Southbank London, England 2006.11.05 master MD aud FLAC




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Michael Morpurgo is the third Children's Laureate, and has written over a hundred books for young people, including Why the Whales Came and Private Peaceful is his most recent book. The Book tells of the last night of Tommo Peaceful’s life, while he’s waiting to be shot at dawn:
‘He wants to make the night last as long as possible.....Essentially it’s about the child behind the young man. I wrote it because the Government still refuses to pardon any of the 300 people that were shot. Most were suffering from shell shock and the trials were very brief, some less than 20 minutes.’

Michael Morpurgo was born in England and went to three different schools in London, Sussex and Canterbury. He studied for his degree at London University, taking English and French and went on to become a Primary School Teacher.

‘I get many of my story ideas from watching the children and by listening to what they say to each other, as well as what they tell me. I became a writer originally because I was sick of reading the same bedtime stories to my kids’ - Of which he has three and now six grandchildren.- ‘I started making up my own stories and I read them to my class at school. They focused on it and listened, so I realised there was something in what I was doing. Eventually I wrote a book and got lucky with a publisher.’

Morpurgo and his wife Clare, also a teacher, eventually left their jobs and created Farms for City Children. Groups of children from Inner Cities travel to the Morpurgo’s farm Nethercott, in Devon and spend a week on the farm ‘they learn how to milk cows, tend to sheep. Children become farmers and stay here for a week. They find out where their food comes from and how hard the work can be.’ That was in 1976 and the Farms for City Children now operate three farms in Wales, Gloucestershire and the original Devon site.

In 2003 Michael became Children’s Laureate, a post he helped create with the then Poet Laureate Ted Hughes. The award aims to celebrate and champion children's literature and the role they play in promoting literacy. Open to children's illustrators as well, the first person to hold the post was Quentin Blake, who was followed by the author Anne Fine. Morpurgo was the third laureate and held the position until 2005. ‘I didn’t realise how much work would be involved, I seem to spend all my time talking and telling stories - which I do enjoy - but little time writing.’ Morpurgo is passionate about children reading, and spent much of his time as laureate on the road, meeting children and talking with passion and enthusiasm about the work he does and the way he does it. ‘Reading is the most interactive medium there is. On televisions or film, you’re given a face, a place, and all the information. With reading, you’re simply given the skeleton, from which you can interpret this funny code we call words yourself.’


Simon Reade - Adaptor and Director

Q. How did the Private Peaceful journey begin for you?

The Today programme was interviewing the Children’s Laureate, Michael Morpurgo about his forthcoming book Private Peaceful. Michael talked about First World War soldiers, these young guys who signed up under age, often with the knowledge of the people that signed them up. They went to the front, then a lot of them got shell shock and were shot at dawn for cowardice in the face of the enemy, or desertion or insubordination.

Technically now we realise that this is illegal, even according to army rules, but they’ve never been granted a pardon in Britain. France has granted a posthumous pardon, as has New Zealand. Our governments have always refused.

Michael Morpurgo was talking about the book from this political perspective, but then he began to read from it and as he read I thought, ‘this is amazing! This is a dramatic monologue, all from the point of view of this young soldier’. Unusually for literature, it’s from the point of view of a Private rather than an Officer. We think of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, we even look at Sebastian Faulkes and it’s from the point of view of the Officer class and this was from the point of view of a very simple person and not even an urban person but a rural one.


Q What was your process in adapting the novel? Did all the material come from the novel or did you change things?

When you take a novel and put it into the theatre, you have to make it work as a piece of theatre. So, of course, you are faithful to the original spirit of a work, but sometimes a great piece of literature isn’t going to make a great piece of theatre. The first thing that you look for are all the dramatic arcs and journeys and when there are hurdles to jump. This is a rites of passage story with lots of dramatic vignettes along the way. It is about a young boy growing up, it’s also about the little man fighting against or fighting within something that the state and the world order was imposing upon him. The changes that you make in adapting are that you take out anything that doesn’t serve the essential dramatic purpose.

The most important aspect that people will notice has changed is the ending. What Michael Morpurgo does very cleverly in the novel is to pull off a great literary conceit. All the way through you think it’s Tommo that’s going to die, but of course it’s Tommo’s brother, Charlie, and it’s only right at the end that there’s this twist. In the theatre my first instinct in adapting it was how terribly disappointing, it’s a bit of a sleight of hand, we’ll have lived with this person all the way through the evening, and nothing’s happened to him other than he’s experienced things through his brother's eyes. So we decided to kill him. What was great about Michael is that he recognised that that would absolutely work in the theatre, and wouldn’t at all harm his novel, because his novel is always there for people to read.


Q. What made you choose to make it a one-man show?

The material demands it. Everything is seen from Tommo’s perspective and you don’t get other people’s perspective. Tommo conjures all this up in these last hours of his life. I think that the most faithful way of adapting this for the stage is to do it as a one man show where he creates everything for his and the audiences very eyes.


Q. How does Private Peaceful relate to a young audience as a piece of theatre?

First of all, it speaks directly to the experiences of somebody who’s gone from pre-pubescence, to pubescence, through adolescence and into young adulthood. That obviously speaks to young people.

Secondly, the reason that the First World War has always resonated with young people is because it was a lot of young people who were the cannon fodder, dying for a cause that they really didn’t understand. It touches all sorts of political and emotional buttons in young people. Connected with that of course is that we are doing this in the context of the latest war in Iraq, where young people, as young as teenagers, were dying for the political ends of America, of Sadam Hussein and of Britain and the rest of the European Allies. There’s an immediate connection with young men, and now women, going off to war. You can take a classic war and superimpose it on the present, without being too crass about it.

Thirdly, this is the kind of theatre that you can imagine somebody doing it in their own bedroom. Chucking their bed over and saying now this is a trench, or sitting on a box and one moment they’re at home and the next they’re in the middle of a market square. It’s non-literal theatre and children have the imagination to make that leap. And for adults watching it, it reawakens your childlike imagination; it has a young spirit about it.


Q. What do you think that the theatre performance gives to the audience that they don’t get by reading the book? Why adapt this for theatre not TV?

There’s a magical alchemy in theatre where you get excited by the artifice of it. You get transported on extraordinary journeys of the imagination with very few tricks, by the power of the word. There’s something brilliant about the imagination and the transformation that happens in theatre where you’re not spoon-fed. You have to actively engage with it.


Q. How was Michael involved in the process?

I corresponded with him whilst I was adapting it. He was involved in casting, and that was great. The book is set in Iddesleigh, where Michael has lived for 30 years. We went down there and Michael took us on a tour of the village and was involved in a very generous way. Then he came to the preview and gave very good notes.


Q. How did the design influence the way that you worked?

We went though a very interesting design process where Bill Talbot initially brought a model box that was packed full of set and masses of stuff and then Bill and I looked at it and said. ‘Lets chuck it out. It’s about the one actor and the storytelling and we’ve got to make him work hard’.


Q. Can theatre be a catalyst for change, political or otherwise?

Yes, I think so, not necessarily alone (although there will be examples of that). It’s a cumulative effect, you can become a more joyful, rounded person if you appreciate poetry and you see great theatre and enjoy films and watch good football matches. I think theatre is part and parcel of our rich culture. I think it would be naive to say any one particular play can have that effect.

We’ve played to lots of adults. It’s quite a rare thing that that adults are very moved by it in a way they don’t expect to be. When you think back to when we twelve, we were idealistic. Good theatre can make you tap into the idealism we had before we all became pragmatic.


Q What does a good piece of dramatic writing contain? What should young writers be aiming for?

When you look for a good story, you look for a journey in which you have been transformed, as an actor or as a member of the audience, or that the story has completely transformed all the characters in it. If you do something that is just a slice of life it can get really dreary. The really good soaps, like Eastenders, at it’s best, are fantastically operatic.

We always ask, ‘Has it got drama?’ But what does this mean? It just means that you have a protagonist and an antagonist and they’ve got a hurdle to jump over. One of them will win and one of them will lose and then you’ll get into another situation and that will synthesise and will form the next step of the drama.


Q. Did you make lots of changes in rehearsal?

Yes. Most of the changes that we made were cuts. I’m a great believer in cutting. When I was the dramaturge at the RSC I never talked about the text, I always talked about the script, because scripts are great malleable things that exist to be chopped and changed and recreated time and time again by actors, directors, designers and the rest of the creative team. They’re not sacrosanct blueprints, they’re actually raw material. Shakespeare would turn up and say, ‘I really fancy the actress playing Juliet I’m going to give her a good speech in Act 4. Wow, the guy playing Mercutio’s fantastic, lets rewrite something for him now’. I think that that’s the difference when you’re approaching theatrical literature. It’s rough and it’s ready and you suit the particular nuances of the actor that you’ve got, of the time that you’re living in.


Q, How did you work in rehearsals?

We did a lot of character work in rehearsal, looked at the detail. Obviously the main part is Tommo, but what we didn’t want to do was to make all the other characters caricatures. You want them to seem rounded. Even though you may only meet people very briefly we want the audience to feel like they know them. In the book, Michael sets things up that you think are quite innocuous at the beginning, for example, Jimmy Parsons has the fight with Charlie and gets kicked in the goolies –it’s a snigger line of course - goolies, procreation, manhood - and then it’s Jimmy Parsons who actually is the most cowardly person. But he’s the first person to volunteer as well. And you learn about Jimmy Parsons even though you’re hardly ever introduced to him at all.

Although tracks splitting here is hardly appropriate as it is one continuous piece, I have set tracks separating the songs and voice. No mics were used on stage. Applause has been dropped by 10db.



Track list

01 Introduction/bagpipes
02 Reading
03 Song - Young women
04 Reading
05 Song - Oranges & lemons
06 Reading
07 Song - Little Man
08 Reading
09 Song
10 Reading
11 Song medley
12 Reading
13 Song - Down upon the dugout floor
14 Reading
15 Only remembered
16 Reading
17 Oranges& lemons/reading
18 Lay me low


Michael Morpurgo Author/readings

Songs performed by:

Barry Coope
Jim Boyes
Lester Simpson

The trio’s sharp and evocative writing and arranging has brought commissions for songs and music from a wide range of organisations – and found a welcome place in the concert sets and albums of singers like June Tabor and Maggie Boyle. Following a request from Andy Kershaw, they provided the signature tune and songs reflecting the state of contemporary England for his BBC Radio One series Kershaw Comes Home, and to celebrate the Millennium, the town of Belper in Derbyshire invited them to create a suite of songs about its past, present and future. Their work for the Flemish arts organisation, Peace Concerts Passendale has involved them in specially created concerts of songs and music growing out of the events of the First War which have toured in England and Belgium, a commission for a Suite to mark the eightieth anniversary of the Battle of Passchendaele which has its first performance in the re-built town and collaborations with the sixty-strong World Choir, Wak Maar Proper, on a words and music commemoration of the Christmas Truces of the First War.

As singers Coope Boyes & Simpson have appeared on the Main Stages of Festivals from Cambridge to Bruges , Sidmouth to Skågen in Denmark , at Celtic Connections in Glasgow and Stimmen, Voices, Voix at Lörrach in Germany . They’ve broadcast live in the middle of a thunderstorm at the opening of the David Hockney Gallery at Salts Mill, given concerts in York Minster, Yprès Cathedral and the twelfth century Abbey Ar Releg in Brittany - and sung to an audience of twenty thousand at the Dranouter Festival in Flanders . In November 2002, they provided the songs and music for Some Desperate Glory, a memorable evening of First War poetry with readings by Oscar-winner, Jim Broadbent, Jane Lapotaire, Susannah Harker, Samuel West, Chewetel Ejifor and Saeed Jaffrey. Fittingly for such a collection of actors, the concert took place at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London ’s West End , temporarily displacing the run of Phantom of the Opera. Other recent highlights have been storming Main Stage concert sets at Celtic Connections and Cambridge broadcast on Radio Scotland and BBC4, joining twenty-one musicians from across Europe to create Seeds of Peace, an international concert marking the tenth anniversary of Peace Concerts Passendale in Flanders and a run of sell-out performances for the Christmas words and music production Fire and Sleet and Candlelight which featured the new six-piece acappella combination of Coope Boyes and Simpson, Fi Fraser, Jo Freya and Georgina Boyes .

Live concerts by the band have been broadcast on radio and television in Britain and Europe and on record their singing is heard as often on BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction as on Mike Harding’s Folk Programme on Radio 2 or Radio Klara, the Flemish classical music station. Songs like Lester Simpson ’s Polly on the Shore, Ao Tea Roa and Twenty-four Seven and Jim Boyes’ Unison in Harmony, Bringing in the Sheaves and Sharpen the Sickle have been recorded groups and choirs in Britain and North America . Whilst tracks recorded by Coope Boyes and Simpson themselves have featured in programmes as varied as BBC television’s Panorama, the BBC Radio 2 music documentary Harvest Home and the Channel 4 film, The Underground War - they even provide a musical test piece for the Cambridge University Advanced Course in English for Foreign Students.

Tours have already taken them throughout Britain , to the Netherlands , Belgium , Portugal , France and America . Their workshops for choral groups have crossed language barriers to encourage performance and partici pat ion in England , the Continent - and even Scotland . “Their voices weave through and bounce off each other with a powerful elegance,” wrote an American reviewer, “it’s nice to know that, even with the numbing array of technology available, the human voice is still one of the most expressive instruments around.