Michael Morpurgo’s stories move from happiness and joy to human catastrophe in an inkling. He tells his tales through the eyes of adults and the eyes of a child – often one and the same, simultaneously. His writing is intensely dramatic, his characters endure extraordinary psychological journeys, and he is unflinching in his pursuit of emotional truth. This, combined with characteristic exuberance and joie de vivre, is what makes his work so theatrical and why I am irresistibly drawn to dramatise it.
Private Peaceful is set before and during the First World War – known as The Great War at the beginning of the twentieth century, in the vain hope that there would be no more wars after this ‘war to end all wars’. At the end of Tommo’s story, as he faces the ultimate adversity, we nonetheless hold faith that humanity must one day cease to send its young to unjust slaughter.
Toro! Toro! is set in a Civil – or Uncivil – War: brother against brother, family against family, Spaniard against Spaniard. And the Spanish Civil War also lured idealists from all over the world who had never before raised arms against anyone, who were now fighting for one ideology (International Socialism) against another (Fascism).
The Mozart Question features an adult musician, a violinist, whose Jewish parents have been snagged in a Europe devastated by the Second World War and its Holocaust. Yet even in the depths of their despair they can acknowledge the redemption that can be offered by their music.
Each of these three plays for one actor playing umpteen roles is inspired, if that can be the appropriate word, by the shock of war. Wars are ostensibly fought in pursuit of ideals but are always rendered absurd by the adults who take us to war, by their bankrupt morality and cynical materialism and casual indifference. It is the clarity of vision of the children who endure these wars, are orphaned in them, slaughtered in them, survive them against the odds, who are our beacon of hope. It is in these children and their future that the ideals to which we aspire are enshrined – and should never be corrupted to fuel the indecency of war. In telling these stories in the theatre, we bear collective witness to the tenacity of the human imagination, to the passion of the human heart, to the triumph of the human spirit – to the bright spark of humanity that urges us through the dark night of the soul.
Simon Reade, 2012