Michael Morpurgos hugely moving, and very successful novel Private Peaceful made its debut at the Edinburgh Fringe last year as a one man show. This year it returns in a very different capacity performed by a youth group from Leicestershire in a style heavily dominated by ensemble work. The story revolves around the Peaceful family, and in particular their three sons Charlie, Thomas and Joey. After Joey is born with brain damage and their father dies while the children are young, both Charlie and Thomas are forced to work at the local colonels house with their mother, just to keep food in their mouth and a roof over their heads. Bullied by the Colonel and prevented from seeing his true love, Charlie joins the army at the start of the First World War, and despite being under-age, Thomas accompanies him. It is in France where the true horror and reality of war hits the two of them. Charlie makes it back to blighty at one stage, on injured leave, to see his newly born son, but his return sees the brutality and ruthlessness of English offers revealed when Charlie is court-martialled for refusing to leave his brother to die in the middle of no-mans land.
This is certainly an inventive interpretation of the book and some of the ensemble work, in particular when depicting either the mundane parts of army life or the drill that the two Peacefuls are instructed upon during their army training, is both well rehearsed and highly effective. However, due to the very narrated style of the piece, the scenes are continually interrupted by plot outlines and as a result it struggles to flow at times. The result left me with a slight feeling of a performance by numbers. I also found myself unable to warm to any of the characters, more a reflection on the stuttering adaption as opposed to the standard of acting, which meant that the harrowing fact that 314 men were executed for crimes such as Charlies during the war, didnt hit quite as hard as it could and should have.
