When you are an aspiring playwright and your step-grandfather was a decorated war veteran, the opportunity to convert his story into a play is too good to miss. We invited Ed Saunders-Lee to write about his solo show, I Am Yours Sincerely, on the life of Major John Cox MC (pictured).
Surprise, Kill, Vanish
I'm a recent Masters graduate of the Guildford School of Acting and where I began writing I Am Yours Sincerely. As part of my research, I visited the Imperial War Museum’s exhibition Spies, Lies and Deception which provided detailed insights into how Special Operations Executive (SOE) agents communicated without being caught. My stepfather, John’s son, preserved extensive records of his father, including photographs, letters, medals and memoirs, along with declassified military documents detailing mission briefs. I decided to use parts of these official documents verbatim and combine them with John’s memoirs and words from letters which he often signed, "I am yours sincerely”. I placed these in the context of some of his experiences to create the first draft of what I believe is a compelling biography; a play about friendship, bravery, loss and love.
In the Second World War Major John Cox MC was a member of SOE, also known as ‘Churchill’s Secret Army’ and ‘The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’. This secret organisation, formed in 1940, was given the remit by Winston Churchill to ‘set Europe ablaze’. Its members worked with the local resistance in occupied Europe and the Far East to sabotage the enemy and gather valuable intelligence. Major Cox’s mission involved parachuting behind enemy lines to carry out reconnaissance and espionage as part of a Jedburgh team, the clandestine operation that deployed three-man teams drawn from SOE, the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the Free French Central Bureau of Intelligence and Operations and the Dutch and Belgian armies in exile in order to assist allied forces with sabotage and guerrilla warfare. He was guided by their motto: ‘Surprise, Kill, Vanish’.
At times his words are heart-breaking and the events he relates often beggar belief. I decided to adopt a chronological approach, following him from university to becoming a decorated war hero. The story details his mission successes and failures and his evasion of capture, for which he was awarded the Military Cross and the Croix de Guerre and how at the end of the hostilities, while recovering in Ceylon, he met a young woman from the Field Auxiliary Nursing Yeomanry, who was working as a Morse code operator and became his future wife. During rehearsals the script was edited and refined to strike a careful balance between being an accurate and honourable tribute and an exciting, gripping piece of theatre.
As an undergraduate at Exeter University, I wrote my final dissertation on verbatim theatre, focusing on how to create and perform it ethically and sensitively. That research proved invaluable when I came to I Am Yours Sincerely. One of the challenges I encountered was relaying the more extraordinary parts of John’s story, such as the parachute jump. Enlisting the help of Lillie Prowse, another Guildford School of Acting alumni, as director, they developed creative solutions incorporating lights and sound effects to focus on John’s words describing the jump, rather than awkwardly physicalizing it in a black box theatre.
It was important for me to ensure the play maintained its focus on the letters that John wrote, often in dangerous and challenging circumstances, including on planes just minutes before jumping out. The recurring themes of these letters and the various difficulties he faced in writing them eventually became the cornerstone of the play.
This year marks the 80th anniversary of John’s first mission in France. To mark the event, the play will be performed on the anniversary of that day in 1944 when he took to the skies and, despite the danger, made his first parachute jump as part of his own war effort.
Performances:
June 25th: #FromtheFringe, New Wimbledon Theatre
June 28th-29th: Etcetera Theatre, Camden
August 2nd-10th: Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Space Triplex Studio
