It
took twenty-eight years for Neil McPherson to write It Is Easy To Be Dead, the
writer and artistic director of London’s Finborough Theatre’s homage to First
World War poet Charles Hamilton Sorley, which arrives in Scotland this week for
a short run in Aberdeen and Glasgow following the play’s West End success.
McPherson’s original idea as a young actor in 1988 was to write and perform a
one-man show about Sorley’s better known contemporary, Wilfred Owen. A director
told McPherson that there were lots of plays about Owen already, and that he
should do one about Sorley instead.
McPherson
had been running the Finborough Theatre for seventeen years by the time he
began what would become It Is Easy To Be Dead, and programmed it as part of a
season to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the war. Keen to come
at things from a different angle, McPherson’s 2014 season included the
English-language premiere of German playwright Rolf Hochhuth’s Summer 14 – A
Dance of Death, which looked at the war from a German and European perspective.
The following year, McPherson wrote I Wish to Die Singing, a documentary drama
written in response to the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide,
when a million and a half people were killed in what was then the Turkish city
of Constantinople, now Istanbul.
The
real labour of love, however, came in 2016 when McPherson premiered It Is Easy
To Be Dead. The production was greeted with universal acclaim, was nominated
for an Olivier Award and transferred to the West End. When the play is revived
this week for dates in Aberdeen and Glasgow enabled by the show’s original
producer Breon Rydell in association with Edinburgh-based spoken-word night Neu!
Reekie!, it will be a homecoming of sorts for Sorley’s legacy.
“Sorley
is really important, I think, in terms of the First World War poets,” says
McPherson of the Aberdeen-born poet who was shot by a sniper during the Battle
of Loos in 1915. “He was writing the same time as Rupert Brooke, who is much
better known, but Sorley got the war before anyone else, and that’s probably
got something to do with why his work isn’t as well-known as some of the other
war poets.
“People
in 1916 probably didn’t want to hear how war is terrible. They weren’t ready
for it. Also, Sorley was something of an outsider in many ways. He was
Scottish, and went through the English public school system, and he spent what
we’d now call his gap year in Germany, and when war broke out he nearly got
arrested.”
McPherson is referring to the incident in Trier after Germany declared war on Russia when Sorley was detained for an afternoon before being advised to leave the country. On his return to the UK he immediately volunteered for the British Army, but his six months in Germany had left their mark.
McPherson is referring to the incident in Trier after Germany declared war on Russia when Sorley was detained for an afternoon before being advised to leave the country. On his return to the UK he immediately volunteered for the British Army, but his six months in Germany had left their mark.
“He
was able to see the war from both sides,” says McPherson, “and unlike Siegfried
Sassoon and people like that, he wanted to be a social worker. “As a poet,
Sorley was setting things up for Sassoon and Owen, but he was also someone who
was vibrantly alive. He came out of the English public school system, but
wasn’t in any way old-fashioned. He went to Marlborough College, and a lot of
other students there did. In this one figure of Sorley, you’re kind of seeing
all of them. So Sorley is quite this modern figure. He’s just a 19-year-old kid
on his gap year.”
McPherson’s
play focuses in part on Sorley’s relationship with his parents, without whom
the wider world might not know his poetry at all.
“They
had the money to get their son’s work published,” says McPherson, “and in a way
the play is as much their story as Sorley’s.”
It Is
Easy To Be Dead is told in the main through Sorley’s letters by the show’s
original cast. Re-directed for its dates in Scotland by Liz Carruthers,
McPherson’s play will open in Glasgow on Armistice Day. This will see the
culmination of a welter of First World War-based material produced on stage over
the last five years or so.
As
well as It Is Easy To Be Dead, Armistice Day will mark the opening of a new
production of Austrian writer Karl Kraus’s unwieldy epic, The Last Days of
Mankind, written in 1918 in response to the First World war, in 1918. The
National Theatre of Scotland, meanwhile, will mark Armistice Day with their
contribution to Pages of the Sea, a new commission from 14-18 Now, the agency
set up to commission new artworks to mark the anniversary. Overseen by film and
theatre director Danny Boyle, Pages of the Sea will see portraits of fallen
heroes created in sand across 32 beaches in the UK, including six in Scotland.
A new poem by Carol Ann Duffy will also be read.
Such
a level of activity demonstrates both the lingering power of the war and the
level of respect it is given.
“There’s
a sense in Britain that everything stems from the First World War,” says
McPherson, “and I don’t think that’s quite the case in other countries, even
though they had more casualties. I suppose there was a kind of innocence about
what happened, and an innocence lost. If it hadn’t been for the First World War
there wouldn’t have been a second, and without the Second World War there might
not have been a Cold War.”
In
terms of It Is Easy To Be Dead, it is also about paying homage to a neglected
but crucial figure.
“Robert
Graves said we lost three poets of importance in the First World War. There was
Isaac Rosenberg, there was Wilfred Owen, and there was Sorley. To think what he
already achieved in his writing and what he could have gone on and done, you
realise what a major loss that was.”
It Is
Easy To Be Dead, The Tivoli Theatre, Aberdeen, November 6-7; Oran Mor, Glasgow,
November 11-14.
The Herald, November 6th 2018
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