The bitter tears of mothers everywhere

REVIEW: Private Peaceful – Malvern Theatres (Wednesday, October 21 to Sunday, October 25). Wednesday and Thursday 10.30am and 1.30pm, Friday 6pm, Saturday 2pm and 7pm, Sunday 2pm.

Showtime! stars rating: * * * * *

BENJAMIN Cain you are truly destined for great things. I understand this is your professional stage debut, and already you’ve reduced my wife to tears.

What have you got to say for yourself you, you young thespian, you? The curtain’s come down, and now she’s sobbing outside the theatre, hanging on to the car park railings for support. You’ve broken her heart, Benjamin.

Me? Well, I’m choked up as well, something that has NEVER happened in a journalistic lifetime of reviewing plays and concerts. And mark my words Benjamin, I’ve reviewed thousands of shows. Hopefully, you’re proud of yourself. After all, everyone else is…

I knew that Michael Morpurgo’s play about a teenage soldier facing a firing squad during the First World War was going to be harrowing. But I never expected this.

Cain doesn’t just play Tommo Peaceful - he lives, inhabits and breathes the part. His entire persona becomes the country lad caught up in the recruiting fever that follows the outbreak of hostilities, right down to the rural accent, the corn shock of hair, and the endearing but tragic naivety.

Yes, and I’m there with him, every step of the way. For I was also a country lad, just like him, and but for a generational accident of time and distance, could well have been in his situation, transfixed by the excitement of the times, lured like a moth to the flame.

Peaceful languishes in the condemned cell on his last night of life. During those final yet endless, sleepless hours, he reflects on his brief existence. At dawn he will be taken out and shot by his own side, having been court martialled ‘for cowardice in the face of the enemy’.

Memories of fishing and summer swimming in the brook. Haymaking at one of the local farms. Fights in the village school playground. Going to church on Sundays, Jesus suffering on the cross. The woods, the fields, the sound of the birds. Yes, I also knew all this, which makes the experience all the more poignant.

For the words are all striking home fast and furious, every line of Morpurgo’s script, going straight to the heart like a bayonet thrust, exploding in the consciousness like mortar fire. And it’s almost impossible to bear, especially as we know that this night of sorrow must soon come to its inevitable, agonising conclusion.

And my wife, too. A wife, mother, grandmother with a grandson. She imagines how countless women’s hearts must have been broken between 1914-18. It’s not hard to put oneself in their place and empathise. How they must have felt during those long, bleak years...

We leave the theatre and straight into unseasonal sunshine, life-affirming rays that are in stark contrast to the darkness of the young soldier’s last hours. My wife and I struggle to process what we have witnessed, confused - and perhaps slightly perplexed - that a piece of theatre could have been so skilfully written and presented that it so easily overwhelmed us.

As for you Benjamin Cain, I would imagine your future is undoubtedly assured. Unlike, of course, the poor doomed lad you are so brilliantly - and heartbreakingly - portraying this week at Malvern.