A young man sits on a near-stripped bed on a bare stage. He's only 20, and this is his last night alive. It's 1916, and the Battle of the Somme is raging. Tommo Peaceful is going to die in the morning, not in the heat of battle, but shot by comrades who will form a firing squad. Tommo refused to go forward in the hell of battle when directed to by his sergeant. He's condemned and will die branded as a coward. The insanity of war, (and what without any extreme prejudice can be called the criminal insanity of World War I) has been captured with bleak, quivering intensity by Michael Morpurgo in his play Private Peaceful. It began life as a novel for children in 2003, and the author adapted it for stage a year later, its two main characters, Tommo and the big brother Charlie he worships, played by a single actor. The actor also steps into the other characters, from Charlie's sweetheart to the recruiting sergeant and the vicar of the home village. The premise is simple: Tommo wants to stay alive in his own heart for his final living night. He is terrified, and dreads looking at his watch to see the passing hours. But he forces himself to, and marks the time with different memories of his life, from mischief-filled childhood days spent fighting, fishing and poaching, through the darkening horizons of the looming "war to end all wars". When he joined up to be with Charlie in the ranks, Tommo didn't fully realise it was also the war that would end his life. Not until the endless hell of the trenches, foot-rot and lice, mud and rain, a cup of tea the only comfort. And all the time the bombardments and the intermittent surges forward to gain a few yards with a sickening cost of lives, until the ground is lost again in a counter-attack… with more friends lying dead, their eyes fixed on the lowering, hopeless sky. Then the day comes when Charlie lies wounded, as the company is surrounded on three sides by overwhelming odds. And the sergeant orders them forward to be mowed down. Tommo refuses: he has to look after Charlie. Morpurgo paints a livid portrait of a living hell, and the defiant ability to hold on to shreds of humanity even when mindless brutality seems the sensible option. The whole panoply of a war that ended the world as its participants knew it is laid out in a defiant testament that dares to trust in a better world to come. Did it happen? We're still debating.
