Pip Cook’s Edie/Tommy, left, Josie Morley’s Nellie/Sydney and Keeley Lane’s Victoria/Mr Proud in Kate Bramley’s The Thankful Village
THIS revival of Kate Bramley’s feminist wartime comedy-drama on the home front marks the 11th anniversary of its commission on the centenary of The Great War.
It has been toured nationally four times by Bramley’s “theatre on your doorstep” company from Green Hammerton and premiered in France, rather further from your doorstep, in 2018, when an original cast member joined an all-French cast and crew.
For this all-too-brief return that will conclude with sold-out performances in Whitechapel, Preston on May 2 and Wath on May 3, writer and artistic director Bramley takes to the stage herself in tails to play a live score for the first time in a Badapple show after 27 years, calling on her skills as an international touring musician from the age of 17 to perform Jez Lowe’s score of original songs and music.
Her presence, whether on instrumental underscoring duty or accompanying the cast of Keeley Lane, Josie Morley and Pip Cook in song, adds even more poignancy to her story of hope, humour and humanity inspired by her trip to Ypres and the Flanders battlefield and written in honour of three remarkable figures: Staff Nurse Nellie Spindler, Sister Edith Appleton, whose diaries were invaluable for Bramley’s research, and Chaplain Tubby Clayton, whose legacy lives on at Talbot House, Poperinge.
“Amid tragedy, I was struck by the glimpses of joy, beauty and humour found in the darkest moments,” says Kate in The Thankful Times theatrical notes. “We invite you to share in a few laughs and a few tall stories as we pay our respects, in our own way, to those who have gone before.”
The Thankful Villages were those that lost no men in The Great War. Six such villages were in the north of Yorkshire, although Bramley chose to create the fictitious Thankful-in-the-Vale as her setting for a story seen through the eyes of three Yorkshire women from the same rural household, below and above stairs, from August 1914 to the war’s end.
She presents a recognisably Edwardian Yorkshire rural community, where superior, starchy, cold Victoria (Keeley Lane) is in charge of chatterbox house maid Nellie (Josie Morley) and daydreaming, wide-eyed scullery maid Edie (Pip Cook) in the White Horse coaching inn.
The village men – Victoria’s officer-class husband, Arthur, and the fresh-faced girls’ boyfriends, Sydney and Tommy – have signed up for the war effort, and to emphasise their absence, Bramley places her play in the gentlemen’s smoking room of the inn, designed in compact, travel-friendly Badapple tradition by Catherine Dawn.
As in Bramley’s two Land Girl plays from the Second World War, The Great War unfolds predominantly through the women’s eyes, with news sent home in letters and postcards from loved ones. This is complemented by interludes where the trio play the men on the front, when Lowe’s songs reveal his customary ear for a folk tune and his witty, poignant way with a line.
They mirror the songs of the time with such elan that you would swear they must have originated from wartime. They add to the storytelling, provide commentary and context, and plenty have the defiant humour so necessary to survive in the field of battle or in the loneliness and fear of separation, all the better for Bramley’s live accompaniment.
Each woman progresses and changes through the heightened experience of war, Edie losing her naive wonderment, if not her innocence; Nellie becoming a field nurse (in a storyline inspired by Nellie Spindler and Sister Edith Appleton); and Victoria finally breaking her cold front.
Bramley’s feminist undercurrent to these individual stories is the rising swell of the suffrage movement, as women took on roles previously the preserve of men, and so the play is a hymn of praise to suffragette activist Emmeline Pankhurst too.
Cook, who will spend the summer touring Twelfth Night as Viola and Maria with Miracle Theatre, draws on her talent for comedy, peppered with pathos too, as the ever-willing Edie.
Lane captures Victoria’s implacable, impervious, sometimes imperious nature, her frugality and winter-chill harshness, before a redemptive conversion at the close that would make Scrooge leap for joy.
The best-drawn character is Nellie, with her diarist turn of phrase in her journal despatches, performed so movingly by Morley, and it is her journey – and her passion for living life with a fury – that gives The Thankful Village its emotional clout and poignant final twist.
As in its 2014 premiere, and now amid the warmongering and rutting stags of today’s worsening male domination, it makes you thankful for the under-appreciated Great War service of women, whose story too often has been drowned out by the fusillade of men’s deeds fired off by history books. Bramley’s poetic work is more of a distaff companion piece to the War Poets.
Badapple Theatre Company in The Thankful Village, York Theatre Royal Studio, today at 2.30m and 7pm. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.