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Phil Hopkins
Group Travel Editor & Theatre Correspondent
@philhopkinsuk
10:17 AM 28th October 2014
arts

One All Powerful Voice For Peace(ful)

 
As Private Peaceful fought back tears at the injustice of his pending death, I looked sideways to see if the lady next to me could see the glint of my welling eyes in the Playhouse lights.

If there is such a thing as the sound of silence, it was all too evident as Andy Daniel told the story of the main character, how he stays with his dying brother and ignores his bigoted sergeant's command to engage in a suicidal push towards the enemy trenches.

It was destined to fail; it did. But as Private Peaceful returns to the safety of the British line, he finds himself summarily tried for cowardice, fleeing in the face of the enemy and destined to face the firing squad.

In the hours before his execution, sitting in the relative safety of his death cell, Private Peaceful tells us of his life, his brother Charlie, his first love Molly, life in the school playground and how the cynical recruitment sergeant so conveniently signed him up as an under age conscript.

There was so much cynicism in the First World War, political manoeuvring and an overbearing fear by the ruling classes that unless they made an example of so-called 'cowards' - the majority were suffering from shellshock - then there would be mass desertion with the resultant collapse of the British Army.

As I watched the production I thought of Wilfred Owen's poems, Futility and Anthem for Doomed Youth. It was so simple and, unlike Grounded which I saw earlier in the week, the main West Country character was so believable - an ordinary Joe from the sticks, naive in the extreme and thirsty for an adventure which rapidly turns into manhood, reality and sad regret.

With the benefit of time we can all shake our heads at the appalling injustices of the Great War, how insubordinations were punished with greater ferocity than by the 'Hun' soldier who, in a position of superiority, tells Private Peaceful to go (before I kill you).

In 2006 the British Government finally granted posthumous pardons to those shot at dawn for cowardice; most of their names never appeared on the thousands of memorials dotted across the country.

The film, The Four Feathers, dealt with the concept of cowardice in an earlier conflict, whilst Northern Broadsides' An August Bank Holiday Lark, looked at the devastation wrought on a small village by the First World War.

This time it was the story of one man and I was riveted from start to finish. Beautiful in its simplicity, a must see for warmongers.

Don't go to the Playhouse......run with all your might as if you were fleeing the Hun across No Man's Land. Lest we forget the horrors of war, this will remind you. Thank God Britain's three year conflict in Afghanistan is over.......that's how long the Foreign Secretary said it would last. Did I mishear something?

Tonight only. Run!

Private Peaceful
West Yorkshire Playhouse
7pm