Nottingham Playhouse has announced the cast for Simon Reade’s adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s World War I novel Private Peaceful.
Daniel Boyd who played Pip in the West Yorkshire Playhouse 2016 production of Michael Eaton’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations will play Charlie in Private Peaceful.
John Dougall will take the roles of Father, Colonel and Chaplain. He was the inspector in the national tour of Rachel Wagstaff and Duncan Abel’s adaptation of Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on The Train.
Robert Ewens will play Big Joe, Tom Kanji will be Munnings, Doctor and Grandma Wolf, Emma Manton will take the role of Miss McAllister, Daniel Rainford will be Thomas “Tommo” Peaceful and Liyah Summers, who was Anathalie in Katori Hall’s Our Lady of Kibeho at Theatre Royal Stratford East in 2019, will play Molly.
Private Peaceful tells the story of the Peaceful brothers, Tommo and Charlie, whose tough rural childhood, framed by the loss of their father, forges an irrevocable sibling loyalty—until one day when they both fall for the same girl.
When the Great War comes, 18-year-old Private Tommo Peaceful is in the trenches as he tells his story of courage, devotion, family and friendship on what may be his last night on earth.
Morpurgo said, “young men and women who grew up just like Private Peaceful, at home, safe with their families, went off in their millions to the battlefields of the First World War from all over the world. What followed was universal human suffering on a scale never witnessed in human history before.
“The universality of the tragedy disguises all too easily that each one of those who went was a son or a daughter, loved and so often lost. Private Peaceful was one of those.
“It’s so important to me, and not because I wrote the story, that his story and the story of all the others is told and told again. It’s wonderful to me that through this extraordinary play the story is being told in theatres all over this country.”
Private Peaceful is a Nottingham Playhouse production. It is directed by Elle While with design by Lucy Sierra, lighting design by Matt Haskins, sound design by Dan Balfour and movement direction by Neil Bettles. Composer is Frank Moon, fight direction is by Jonathan Holby and voice and dialect coach is Marianne Samuels.
The play runs in Nottingham from Saturday 12 until 26 February before going on a national tour, taking in Chichester Festival Theatre, Bromley Churchill Theatre, Cambridge Arts Theatre, Oxford Playhouse, Hayes Beck Theatre, Hull Truck Theatre, Bath Theatre Royal, Birmingham REP, Salisbury Playhouse, Blackpool Grand Theatre, Malvern Theatres, Coventry Belgrade Theatre, Guildford Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Crewe Lyceum Theatre, Norwich Theatre Royal, Richmond Theatre, Southend Palace Theatre and Cheltenham Everyman Theatre until Saturday 9 July.