Private Peaceful

Private Peaceful is a one-man race towards a war we already know is coming. Benjamin Cain plays Tommo from childhood to the trenches, as well as everyone around him, with a pocket watch counting down, always in the background. Behind him, throughout, sits the familiar landscape of no man's land, barren ground and broken trees. Whether a schoolboy or soldier, the war hangs over the life he is trying to tell.

The one-man form is a formidable task, especially considering the proportions of Michael Morpurgo’s novel. Cain throws himself at the task, moving rapidly between characters and places with little silence or time for a moment to settle. The performance feels rushed. There is simply too much movement, too much speaking, and too little space between one beat and the next.

And the piece improves when it finds those spaces. Tommo’s teenage years bring a rare warmth, and the sergeant major’s recruitment speech has real force as Cain turns on the audience and gives us the rhetoric of pride and fear. It is in these moments that the production stops simply delivering the story and starts making us feel it.

The strongest moments are those when the production slows down. When the recurring “Oranges and Lemons” returns for the final time, Cain sings “and then comes to chop off your head” as he wraps puttees around his legs and the boy becomes a soldier. But the scenes of war have the means to go further. Searchlights, explosions and gunshots are there, and Holst’s Mars creeps in during the final push, but the full force of the sound and lighting is held back. The gunshots need to be louder. There are already enough words here.

The final beat cuts short Morpurgo’s ending and, in its dramatic reveal, finally finds the stillness the production has been missing. After all that movement, it is the pause that lands.

Private Peaceful by The Production Garden, Exeter Northcott. Credit Craig Fuller.