War devastation
Hot foot from playing a Second World War Nazi, Daniel Rainford heads to Guildford to play a First World War British soldier.
The piece is the muchdelayed Private Peaceful, Simon Reade’s stage adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s modern classic which comes to the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre from May 23 to 28: “It was supposed to happen two years ago. I auditioned in November or December 2019 and it was really exciting because it was my first big-scale theatre audition. I had a recall in December 2019 and they heavy-pencilled me over the Christmas and then I had to go for a third audition in January which was incredibly exciting and I got the part. It was my first big professional casting since drama school and then of course the whole world came crashing down. It was pretty horrible. We had got to week three of rehearsals and there were rumours of Covid at the time. We were all pretty nervous but I could not fathom the idea of a pandemic that would shut everything down.
“Everyone was chatting but I was thinking ‘No, we will be fine.’ I was pretty adamant and I was quite in denial and then the news hit... We were about to go into tech week so we had the show pretty much. I just felt sadness. When you are young, when you are in your early 20s then time is precious. I did feel like something had been stolen from me. And then Private Peaceful was supposed to happen again last year and then it got cancelled again and that was the point when I thought that maybe if it did ever happen they would think about changing the casting. There were still no guarantees but actually the casting director that cast me for this then cast me in a role at the Almeida which I would never have got if I hadn’t got the part for this. I did that in the summer of 2021. I was playing a soldier, this time in World War Two. The play was Once Upon A Time In Nazi Occupied Tunisia and I was playing a Nazi. I have to say I had a lot of fun. The Nazis were so ridiculous it. But it was a sinister comedy and we found the humour in the ridiculousness of the mindset of the Nazis.”
But now it is back to the British in the Great War: “Private Peaceful is an extraordinary story about the power of family and love and human connection and the depths to which we will go to protect the people that we love. It’s an incredible story. It is about these two brothers that have gone through so much together. They have lost family members and they have lost friends and they are very poor. They don’t have much. And then the war seems to them like an incredibly exciting prospect. It is a chance to experience new and brilliant things and fight for king and country and make their family proud... and then it is actually just chaos and destruction.”