How I adapted Private Peaceful for the stage and screen – in pictures

I was lying in the bath one morning in the autumn of 2003. The BBC’s arts’ correspondent, Rebecca Jones, was on Radio 4’s Today programme interviewing the then children’s laureate, Michael Morpurgo, about his forthcoming book, Private Peaceful. He talked about some first world war soldiers, these young boys who signed up under age, often with the collusion of the people who signed them up. They went to the front, got shell-shock and some were tried and sentenced to be shot at dawn for cowardice in the face of the enemy.

In adapting Private Peaceful as a one-man play, I was playing a theatrical conjuring trick, summoning the world of the story in the mind’s eye of the audience. Above all I was wedded to the word. It was similar when I adapted the story for BBC Radio 4, except with the help of director and producer Susan Roberts I was also able to paint a soundscape – of rural Devon in a pre-industrial time-warp; of the mechanised cruelty of the first world war.
Photograph: Farrows creative

I sat up, thinking "This is amazing! A dramatic monologue, all from the point of view of this young soldier! Pure theatre!" Unusually for first world war literature, it’s from the point of view of a Private rather than an Officer. We think of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen - even Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong - their writing is from the point of view of the Officer class; and Private Peaceful is from the point of view of an ordinary soldier, not even an urban person but a rural one.

Everything is seen from Tommo’s perspective. He conjures all this up in these last hours before the firing squad at dawn. He creates everything before his and the audience’s very eyes. It’s demands to staged as a one-man show. However, I have also had the good fortune to adapt the story for a young cast of up to 30 (the National Youth Theatre are performing this version at the New Ambassadors’ Theatre in the West End this autumn), and for the BBC Radio 4, and for the cinema.
Photograph: Farrows creative

When you take a novel and put it into the theatre, you have to make it work as a piece of theatre. So, of course, you are faithful to the original spirit of a work, but the first thing that you look for are all the dramatic arcs and journeys and when there are hurdles to jump. Private Peaceful is a rites of passage story with lots of dramatic vignettes along the way. It is about a young boy growing up; it’s also about the little man fighting against, or fighting within, something that the state and the world order is imposing upon him. The story speaks directly to the experiences of young people who have gone through adolescence and into young adulthood. The reason that the first world war has always resonated with young people is that a lot of young people were the cannon fodder, dying for a cause that they really didn’t understand – and if they did, they may well have deplored once they had endured the fighting.
Photograph: Farrows creative

This play-acting you can imagine somebody doing in their own bedroom: tipping their bed over and saying, “now this is a trench”, or being one moment at home and the next in the middle of a market square, simply by articulating it. It’s non-literal theatre and children have the imagination to make that leap. And for adults watching it, it reawakens our childlike imagination; it has a young spirit about it.
Photograph: farrows creative/ farrows creative

There’s a magical alchemy in theatre where you get excited by the artifice of it. You get transported on extraordinary journeys of the imagination with very few tricks, by the power of the word. There’s something brilliant about the imagination and the transformation that happens in theatre when you have to engage with it actively. And not as one reader but as a group of people bearing witness.
Photograph: Farrows creative

I do believe you can become a more joyful, rounded person if you appreciate poetry and you see great theatre and enjoy films. I think theatre is part and parcel of our rich culture. We’ve played Private Peaceful to lots of adults – adults coming to the theatre unaccompanied by children. Adults are very moved by the play in a way that they might not have expected to be. When we think back to when we were, say, 12, we were idealistic. Good theatre can make you tap into the idealism you had before we all became pragmatic and compromised and adult and dreary.
Photograph: Farrows creative

Michael threw down the gauntlet when the book was published in 2003 by saying that it is surely a mark of a civilized people to admit its wrongdoings of the past. When we came to produce the play for the first time in 2004, that challenge had yet to be picked up which made me conclude that so-called Great Britain wasn’t such a cradle of civilization after all. Some people made those overfamiliar, jaded, specious arguments about not judging the past by today’s values – in fact Michael Portillo said words to that effect in a review of our production in Edinburgh in the New Statesman; he was otherwise impressed with the show, but it didn’t move him to feel remorse for not using his powers when he was Defence Secretary to grant the pardons. It took a few more years to civilise Great Britain.
Photograph: Farrows creative

I’m not saying Michael Morpurgo’s book, or our play, was single-handedly responsible. But I like to think that we must have played a modest part in the accumulation of self-evident truth that led to the British government eventually atoning for the sins of the state. We often think we can’t change things; we make excuses about having to do things by stealth, softly softly catchee monkey, by making evolutionary progress. We don’t want to upset the apple cart. But we should. And if theatre can be part of a constant changing process, a social revolution for idealistic young people to tip those carts over then we can all scrump those apples for the greater good… although perhaps I shouldn’t over-extend the metaphor. Or sound off about politics. I’m a theatre-maker, a dramatist. Let the play speak for itself.
Photograph: Farrows creative

Each dramatisation I have made is essentially Michael’s Private Peaceful, but each is unique to its medium. When writing the screenplay for the movie, the whole story became more literal, visualised not in our imagination, but seared into our iris by the moving picture. My endeavour is to embrace the story-telling vision of my collaborators which in the case of the show is primarily the actor, in radio the director, and in the film was the director Pat O’Connor, my fellow producer Guy de Beaujeu, the leading actors, and Morpurgo himself. The love affair between Charlie and Molly takes place off-screen in the novel because our narrator, Tommo, isn’t aware of what’s going on until Molly is pregnant. The reader has seen it coming; and so we created a montage sequence of Tommo working alone, visibly hurt at Charlie and Molly’s absence, while we see Charlie and Molly in the throes of love.
Photograph: Matt Humphrey

To tear the rift still wider between the Peaceful brothers, we decided to send Tommo to the Front in advance of Charlie. Charlie resists partly for political reasons – he doesn’t want to fight a capitalists’ war – and for personal reasons: he doesn’t want to abandon his pregnant wife and soon-to-be-born child. To mark the end of an era, to bring the community together in a bitter-sweet moment, the director asked me to write a village hall dance scene – he had created something equally moving in his film of Dancing at Lughnasa. Tommo and the lads were in the crisp new army uniforms saying farewell to family, to friends, to childhood, children dressed up as adults.
Photograph: Matt Humphrey

There is no fête in the novel, but this was another scene showing the whole community brought together, presided over by the Colonel celebrating Empire Day and the old Victorian order. There is no tug-of-war in the novel, not literally. It is, of course, a multi-layered visual metaphor, not least because a new arrival in the village, Molly Monks, steps in to give the final heave to claim victory for the girls against the incredulous boys. In the film her father has just been recruited to be the Colonel’s new gamekeeper following the death of the Peacefuls’ father. James Peaceful has been felled by a falling tree, losing his life while saving Tommo’s. To up the stakes, I also gave Molly a reason to be guilty about causing the death of a parent: her mother died giving birth to her. Photograph: Matt Humphrey

We chose to honour the scenes set in the Estaminet in the novel pretty much as Michael wrote them, especially pursuing the nascent love affair between Tommo and Anna, the Estaminet owner’s daughter. I also asked Michael to give the Estaminet a name: Le Cock & Bull, he wittily christened it, and the art department’s hand-painted sign duly arrived on set. We cast two authentic Flemish actors as the owner and as Anna, and they faithfully translated the scenes I had adapted from Michael’s original. The affair is cut short by the random killing of Anna by a misfired bomb. When Anna’s father tells Tommo, they are both visibly devastated. Photograph: Matt Humphrey

We were going to have a stag hunt: fabulous pictures and a whole rural society on the gallop. We couldn’t afford it. Michael suggested a village cricket match. It would look too posh, I thought. The director and I hit upon a pheasant shoot: guns blasting pre-echoing the war; the harsh cruelty of life in the countryside; the Colonel cheating against the complaining farmers: “My land, my pheasants,” sneers the late Richard Griffiths in his last ever film performance. The world was on the cusp of change. Photograph: Matt Humphrey

I christened the Peacefuls’ mother Hazel after one of my daughters. It’s a countryside kind of name, elegant yet earthbound, common enough yet with a charismatic Z at its centre. Casting Maxine Peake was a great match for the character’s rich zest of heartfelt integrity, playful wit, tough competitiveness, fierce loyalty. All those traits came to together when we set Hazel/Maxine off round the race course at the Empire Day Fête, a scene which requires no dialogue to tell its exciting story. Photograph: Matt Humphrey

In a children’s novel, a lot of sexual awakening is implied. You can be just as subtle on screen in intent, especially if it’s captured in the man-child gaze of a consummate performer like George Mackay, wise beyond his years. When I wrote the scene where Tommo spies Molly getting dressed, framed by her cottage bedroom window, I knew it risked looking too seedy, furtive, too erotic. However, it’s shot beautifully by Director of Photography Jerzy Zielinski, performed simply by George, and has a delicate sensuality where the actor shows us that he is falling deeply in love with Molly.
Photograph: Matt Humphrey

The Colonel’s dying wife is a long-suffering presence in the novel, maintaining a dignified silence to her husband’s indifference. We cast the exquisite actress Anna Carteret who captured the frailty and delicacy and pain of the role. She quite rightly teased me into writing her a few more lines on set, including the one she is about to ask her husband here: “Can’t we stay a little longer in the fresh air?” as he unceremoniously wheels her inside. Richard Griffiths then brilliantly ad-libbed the line “It’s far too cold” in the post-production dub: apparently caring, but showing that deep down he can’t be bothered with her. When the screenplay is published I’ll include that line as my own.

Catch Private Peaceful at The Tobacco Theatres, Bristol until 12 July 2014. Photograph: Matt Humphrey