Edinburgh festival: Growing up on the road to war
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 22/08/2007
Mark Brown reviews Private Peaceful and I Am My Own Wife in Edinburgh

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/exclusions/edinburgh/nosplit/edinburghfestival.xml

A story by former Children's Laureate Michael Morpurgo, adapted for the stage by Simon Reade (the acclaimed artistic director of the Bristol Old Vic theatre), Private Peaceful comes to the Fringe with the kind of pedigree the Queen's corgis would be proud of.


Private Peaceful at the Assembly Rooms
There are a number of special things about the play, which Reade dramatised from Morpurgo's award-winning children's novel.

In particular, the piece - for eight-year-olds and above - harnesses Morpurgo's gift for telling stories with a winning combination of clarity, muscularity and sensitivity.

Adapter/director Reade and the young actor Alexander Campbell succeed, for the most part, in finding a theatrical channel for the rites-of-passage tale.

Tommo, a young man from the West Country, recalls his life from his first romance and first job to the killing fields of the First World War.

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Campbell conveys excellently the innocence and decency of Tommo as, at the age of just 16, he leaves behind the religious austerity of his village and prepares to fight in Belgium.

However, some moments in the story, such as the early death of Tommo's father, are too little explored in emotional terms.

Such weaknesses are common in stage adaptations of novels, but rare in this production. Private Peaceful is a fine little play with much to engage the imagination of the young theatregoer.

I Am My Own Wife, from the Northern Stage company of Vermont, USA, is another one-actor play, with a distinctly different subject matter.

Based upon the true story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, it explores the life of the German transvestite and homosexual who managed, despite the apparently overwhelming odds, to survive both the Nazi regime and 44 years inside the Stalinist dictatorship of the GDR.

More often than not, the play relies upon the fascinating details of Mahlsdorf's life, rather than anything more theatrically inventive.

Actor Kevin Loreque is consistently engaging in the central role, but his playing of other parts, such as that of the play's author Doug Wright or, most excruciatingly, a gaggle of international journalists, punctures the attempted realism of the piece.

The play continues to fascinate, however, as it turns on an immense ethical question over the complexities of Mahlsdorf's alleged collusion with the GDR's notorious secret police, the Stasi.

'Private Peaceful' until Mon; 'I Am My Own Wife' until Sat. Tickets: 0131 623 3030

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/08/22/btwar122.xml

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Man [...] must count no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth." (Jean Paul Sartre, 1943)