Brian Beacom

GIVEN that is has taken three decades for Neil McPherson to write his play about a Scots war poet, you suggest it had better be good?

“Well, I hope the audience will enjoy it,” says the writer, smiling.

There is every chance audiences in Glasgow’s Oran Mor will wallow in discovering It Is Easy To Be Dead.

This biographical play about the life of Aberdeen-born war poet Charles Hamilton Sorley was first performed at the pocket-sized but hugely influential Finborough Theatre in London’s Earl’s Court.

And such was the critical review (Five Stars from the Guardian) it transferred to the Trafalgar Theatre in the West End.

Neil explains why the tale of Charles Sorely, who died in battle in 1915, aged just 20, first struck a chord.

“Charles Sorley was Scottish, but he ended up in an English public school,” says the writer.

“He was something of an outsider, but he spent his gap year (before going to Oxford) in Germany. He managed to escape just before the war, although he had been interned for two days, and there was a real chance he could have been shot.”

Charles Sorley was the classic, well-educated privileged public-school boy. But future career plans involved becoming a teacher in a socialist working men’s college, or a social worker.

While in Germany he fell in love with German culture, and his landlady.

The young man who loved cross country running in the rain (a nod to his Presbyterian background?) was also a gifted poet.

His last poem read; ‘When you see millions of the mouthless dead/across your dreams in pale battalions go/Say not soft things as other men have said/That you’ll remember. For you need not so.’

“While all of the other war poets of the time, even Siegfried Sassoon, were writing about the great honour of dying for your country, Sorley’s writing was coming from a very different direction,” says Neil.

“He wrote of the horrors of war, about the notion young men were being sacrificed for nothing.”

The playwright adds; “If you look at his poetry, what’s remarkable is that he died so young, but he ‘got’ the war before any of the other war poets.

“His book of poems was published in 1916, and it was Robert Graves’ favourite book of poems who gave his copy to Sassoon.”

He adds, smiling; “We don’t know for sure, but we think there is a good chance he then gave a copy to Wilfred Owen.

“In fact, of the famous war poets Sorley is the daddy of all of them. He truly captures this sense of pointless sacrifice.”

Neil knew instinctively he didn’t want to write a monologue whereby an actor would simply recite war poems. That would be way too dull.

“I decided to include his family, and the inspiration for them came from my own great-grandparents.

“My great grandad was a very severe-looking Free Church minister from Kirkcaldy, and if you look at the many obituaries when he died, the first three or four lines all say ‘He did not suffer fools gladly.’

“But in the National Archives I discovered his eldest son, who could have been exempted because he was studying Divinity and was set to become a minister, went to war.

“He then went missing at the Somme. And in the Archives there are all these heart-breaking letters from my great-grandfather in which he writes and asks for information, ‘Do you have any of his belongings? Were there photographs taken on the battlefield?’

“What’s striking about this story is the juxtaposition between this very severe, scary, no-nonsense creature - and a man who finds himself pleading for information about his lost son.

“From that point of view, I wanted to write not just about another war poet but of the world he had left behind.”

The play is set in Sorley’s parents’ home, five years after their son as died, where his parents are preparing his letters for publication. And then Charles arrives on stage.

The dramatic narrative comes from moving back and forth from the trenches to the home, in the build up to Sorley’s death and covers the last two years of his life.

“You know he will die, but you don’t know when and you don’t know how.”

The play also features music and songs. “Poetry , at times on stage, can result in people turning off, but this stops that happening.”

The play’s success underlines Neil McPherson was right to return to his original idea of 30 years ago.

But how did it come about? And why did it take so long to see his vision on stage?

“I was a horribly obnoxious 18 year-old and it all began back in 1988, during the time of the Armistice Festival in London,” he says in self-deprecating voice.

“I phoned up a theatre director and said ‘Hello, I would like to write a play about Wilfred Owen.’

“Now, this man was very sweet and he didn’t tell me to go off and amuse myself. (Not actual word used.) What he did say was ‘Everyone wants to write plays about Wilfred Owen or Rupert Brooke. Why don’t you write about Charles Sorley?’”

The idea struck home, but then life got in the way.

Neil McPherson found himself in the National Youth Theatre , going on to become an actor.

That didn’t work out too well.

“I was in the West Yorkshire Playhouse dressed as a polar bear in front of five hundred screaming children and thought, actually, I don’t want to do this,” he recalls grinning of his career-changing moment.

Neil realised he was was better as a creator of theatre, finding the right new/very old plays to stage, discovering great young acting and writing talent.

He ecame Artistic Director of the Finborough Theatre 20 years ago, which specialises in new writing and classic plays, many of them Scots, such as works by James Bridie.

But what about his 30 year-gestation period, Neil?

“In running a theatre I read about 30-40 plays a week, and most of them are appalling,” he admits, grinning.

“And every time you start to write for yourself you feel you are adding to the appalling pile of s*** that already exists.”

Thankfully, he got past this notion. In 2015 Neil took to the laptop and created the very successful I Wish to Die Singing, a play about the Armenian Genocide.

And the notion of writing a play about Sorley was resurrected by thoughts of producing work relevant to the commemoration of World War 1.

“I only write about death,” he says with a wry smile.

Neil McPherson doesn’t simply write about death. He writes about the loss of life, about hope, and a young poet’s dreams of a future.

“Part of what makes Charles Sorley’s tale so relatable is that here we have a 19 year-old kid on his gap year who finds himself in Germany, and then fighting the Germans.

“And then after his death Robert Graves said the three greatest losses to English literature are Wilfred Own, Isaac Rosenberg – and Sorley.”

Neil McPherson is delighted Sorley’s story can be told in Scotland.

“It’s remarkable,” he says. “But this play sort of highlights how I work.

“Some of the plays I’ve produced over the years have been questioned, given they seem odd at the time.

“But I feel the ones that have worked have been the ones I’ve felt right about.

“At the end of the day, I can only follow my gut instinct. You do what you think is right and hope the public will like it.”

It Is Easy To Be Dead, Oran Mor, November 11-14.