Wartime stories honour parents’ history
Two solo shows follow real life experiences
Paeka¯ka¯riki actor and director Jan Bolwell has a new show opening at Circa Two in Wellington next week, His/ Herstory, which is a double bill featuring two solo shows.
The two shows include I’ll Tell you this for Nothing directed by Jan, and performed by Kate JasonSmith, and Milord Goffredo written and performed by Jan, directed by Kerryn Palmer.
The show will be on from April 22-May 14 at Circa Two in Wellington.
Jan Bolwell is a performer, dancer, choreographer, director, playwright, and director of Wellington’s Crows Feet Dance Collective with an extensive career as an arts and dance educator.
I’ll Tell You This for Nothing
Phyllis Garvin, an Irish QA nurse on the WWII battlefields who lived most of her life in
New Zealand, was honoured with France’s highest decoration, the Le´gion d’Honneur for extreme bravery.
Sent to the front lines on D-Day, Phyllis’ hospital followed the battles through Europe and finally to the liberation of Belsen Concentration Camp.
Amidst this drama she found the love of her life, a Catholic, thus igniting a new and personal war with her mother, a Protestant.
In a solo performance written and acted by her daughter Kate JasonSmith, I’ll Tell you this for Nothing presents the dramatic and often humorous tale of her mother’s life in an acclaimed show about war, courage, danger and romance.
Milord Goffredo is Jan Bolwell’s dynamic re-creation of her father Geoffrey’s WWII exploits — a Dunedin butcher who became “a bloody legend” in a small northern Italian town.
Geoffrey hid in a cave for two years after twice escaping from his German captors.
During this time, he was looked after by a kind and courageous Italian family who nicknamed him Milord Goffredo.
Jan wrote this play to honour her father’s generation, men whose lives were shaped by their war experiences, and who turned to each other for support and comradeship in the post war years.
Geoffrey Bolwell’s story is typical of thousands of soldiers who suffered terrible wartime experiences post war trauma and the difficult adjustment to civilian life.