Private Peaceful - Exeter Northcott Theatre - Review

A single figure stands on a lonely bare stage, surrounded by nothing but a simple wire frame bed, a scattering of scratchy sheets and a backdrop of the countryside. But is that backdrop the rolling hills of home, childhood days spent playing in the woods and water, or a daunting danger laden sparsity of no mans land? For young soldier Private Tommo Peaceful, it is both. He’s counting down the hours, spending the night awake and alone as he thinks about his life, looks back on happy school yard days, time spent poaching and playing, whilst being forced to recount the terror of the war he is living through.

Benjamin Cain, fresh from graduation at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, in this production of Private Peaceful becomes Tommo Peaceful , the bright eyed young man from the countryside fields who’s spark is dimmed daily by the plight of war. Cain, who has a bright future ahead of him, here gives a a performance worthy of great acclaim taking on several personas, becoming several different characters as he walks us through his life. His father, mother, brother Charlie, childhood sweetheart Molly, angry strict military officers and soldiers, all of which played a role in his life up to this point. With parts of his story told as snippets bookended by the looming ticking of a clock, we seem Tommo as a young child complaining about the weight of his boots as he’s dragged to school, reliving his father’s final moments, falling in love and competing with his brother, to being called a coward and feeling compelled to fight. The wire frame bed becomes a trench look out, a tin hat atop his head, he’s a soldier now.

What Cain is able to do with this story, written by famed author Michael Morpurgo, is nothing short of extraordinary. For one performer to be able to hold an audience’s attention, have them hanging on his every word, for 80 minutes straight requires great skill. A one man show, in my opinion, runs the risk of becoming stale, of becoming lecture like with the feeling that you are simply being talked at but here, Cain fills the stage with energy, using all of the space and  and bringing each character to life in a way that proves each to be unique and worthy of the story they tell. You will Tommo on, although you know in the pit of your stomach like so many young man in the war, he may not make it home again to his cottage in the rolling hills.

Adam Foley’s lighting design and Jason Barnes’ sound combine with the acting from Cain to create the strongly contrasting worlds. The peace and tree dabbled light of the countryside is polar opposite to the grey of the battlefield, where soft birdsong is striped away and replaced with gunfire, the whistle that pre warn the explosion and the burst of blinding light that catch unaware. It all feeds into the idea that us as an audience are witnessing growing up and going to war through the eyes of this own individual who’s life once seemed so simple and who is now plagued by battle.

Michael Morpurgo’s stories most often come from truth, and Private Peaceful stands as a reminder of the trauma, the pain and the fear that soldiers, some just boys, went through during the war when they should have been seeing a whole life in front of them but instead could barely imagine tomorrow.