YORK actors George Stagnell and Sam Hird are staging shows at the Edinburgh Fringe to pay tribute to the thousands of teenage boys who fought and died in the First World War 100 years ago.
Stagnell is performing Simon Reade's powerful one-man version of Michael Morpurgo’s Private Peaceful, the novel that did so much to raise awareness of the fate of the young British soldiers shot at dawn by their own comrades for supposed cowardice or desertion.
Directed by Mark Hird, the 70-minute play is already running in the Upper Theatre at Venue 9, theSpace @ Niddry Street, at 9.55am each morning this week until Saturday. From Monday to Saturday next week, it will move to 4.35pm at the same location, just off the Royal Mile, where Hird's 25-minute performance of George Butterworth’s Songs From A Shropshire Lad will follow at 6pm nightly.
Hird's concert features Butterworth’s song settings from from the book of poems by A.E. Housman that many young soldiers carried with them in the trenches. Butterworth himself was killed in the Battle of the Somme on August 5 1916, his death at the age of 31 a huge loss to British music.
George Stagnell as Tommo Peaceful in Private Peaceful
Musical themes from Butterworth’s songs are also used in Stagnell's Fringe production of Private Peaceful, where he plays 17-year-old Tommo Peaceful – and all the people he has known – as Tommo relives his life in his last hours before dawn.
In preview at 41 Monkgate in York in March, Stagnell earned a five-star review from The Press, whose reviewer encouraged him to take his “remarkable performance” to the Edinburgh Fringe.
Butterworth’s Songs From A Shropshire Lad reflect the themes of love and loss, the fleeting nature of life and the folly of war that made Housman’s poems so popular with young people 100 years ago. They are the same themes that have made Morpurgo's Private Peaceful connect so powerfully today with young readers and now theatregoers.
The songs will be performed by Hird, an 18-year-old actor whose baritone singing voice belies his youth, and pianist Sam Johnson, who arranged and plays the music for Private Peaceful, staged by York company Pick Me Up Theatre in York and now Edinburgh.
Next week's Pick Me Up double bill will be a chance to witness two resonant works that capture the mood and nature of a young generation whose hopes and lives were destroyed by war. Tickets are on sale on 0131 510 2383 or at boxoffice.niddry@thespaceuk.com
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