A celebration of resilience in midst of carnage at the Somme
A Wee Stories production whose narrative delivers journey on an epic scale
knew anything about him. He was my granny’s brother, and she died without talking about him or his death. So I’ve named one of the two men in the play after him, Peter Munro.”
At the end of his time in France, having found out where the war graves were, Johnstone made a very personal pilgrimage. “I’d just finished the first draft of the play, and just to be standing at his grave – probably the only person to visit it in the 98 years since his death – gave me a profound sense of what the Somme, and the other battles, had cost families all across the globe. And the thing was that in our family, and I think in innumerable other families everywhere, those who had survived never talked about it. When I must have been about 12, I kept on and on at my grandad until, for the first and only time, he answered me. He told me that he’d been in charge of the mail trains that took the dead bodies away. It’s hardly surprising he didn’t want to talk about it. Not even his son, my dad, knew that, but suddenly, the history isn’t in a book. It’s flesh and blood. It’s your own family.”
There was, meanwhile, another story that Johnstone wanted to tell, and that one was about the involvement of the Heart of Midlothian Football Battalion who also fought at the Somme. “I’d known this story for years,” he says. “But again, you feel it’s a part of the past that deserves to be acknowledged fully today. There was tremendous pressure put on the footballers to enlist – the team was, in fact, being called the White Feathers of Midlothian, with white feathers being the symbol of cowardice.
So Hearts players did enlist, and hundreds of Hearts supporters followed suit en masse within days. And most of them never came back from the Somme. Those who did had seen their lifelong mates – school pals, lads they lived next door to, worked beside – killed in front of them. I find it fascinating, moving, that many of the men who did return took to small-holding, took to the land and to planting crops, raising chickens, almost as a kind of self-healing.”
There’s a strand of that in The Man who ... but let’s keep that twist in the storyline a secret for audiences to discover for themselves. Meanwhile, Wee Stories is on the road again with a cast of three – Scott Hoatson, Belle Jones and Patrick Wallace – and crafty reinforcements in the shape of puppets, video and an atmospheric sound score by longtime collaborator, David Trouton. Johnstone himself abandons his director’s chair to play the “older cameo roles”.
He hasn’t, however, abandoned any of the impassioned belief he has in live theatre despite finding it a battle these days to secure the kind of funding and touring circuit that, in his view, engenders quality and box office appeal.
“Catch me with a few glasses of wine in me,” he says, “and you’ll get me ranting about whether theatre really has a mandate now, and whether we, as theatremakers, are admitting to the problems that exist with finding audiences, finding funding, staying relevant to the times we live in.
“But then, when we’re playing to a mixed, intergenerational audience and you can feel them responding, it’s so deeply fantastic, such a socially healthy thing to be part of, you realise you can’t give up the fight.” The Man who followed his Legs (and kept on walking) is at Dalry Town Hall tonight and Johnstonebridge Centre tomorrow. Full tour details at www. weestoriestheatre.org Neil Cooper IT IS a black and white world for Gerry, the football-daft 15-year-old who forms the heart of Lee Mattinson’s play, adapted from Jonathan Tulloch’s novel and filmed as Purely Belter 16 years ago. Gerry came into that world kicking and screaming, and he’s been kicking and screaming ever since. This is the case whether it’s in reaction to the brutality he’s grown up with while holed up in a Gateshead housing estate with his mum Dee and sister Claire, or whether it’s for Newcastle United, the team that has become the saviour of Gerry and his pal Sewell. If only they could experience the communal thrill of a game first hand, their lives would be complete.
This is how the pair end up embarking on a fundraising spree that includes breaking and entering their head teacher’s house and “twocking” – stealing – anything they can lay their hands on in order to be able to afford a pair of season tickets. Things don’t go to plan for the lads, alas, in Katie Posner’s slightly sprawling production for Northern Stage and Pilot Theatre.
Scenes are punctuated by a recorded commentary, while references are updated to include Newcastle United owner Mike Ashley and manager Rafael Benitez. The show is carried by Niek Versteeg and Will Graham as Gerry and Sewell, who lead a six-strong cast in what becomes a classic quest for heroes, even if Gazza and Alan Shearer are long past their prime. The result is an unsentimental rite of passage that takes in the darker edges of fractured family life, but still manages to offer some kind of hope.
‘‘ I found out both of my grandads were at the Somme. Obviously they survived – because here I am! I also had a great uncle who died in that battle