![]() (Both were adapted by Simon Reade, who also directs here.) I haven’t seen the 2012 film-which marked the late Richard Griffiths’ final performance-but I’ll wager that this solo show, performed with great heart and ferocity by Shane O’Regan, is far more compelling. It’s an appropriately evocative name, and title, for Morpurgo’s tale, which has evolved from a book to a movie and, finally, to a play: a taut, tension-filled 85-minute one-man telling now at off-Broadway’s TBG Main Stage Theatre. “I knew at once that Peaceful had to be the name of my soldier.” “I was…intent on writing a novel about one of the soldiers who had been executed for cowardice or desertion during the First World War,” writes Morpurgo ( War Horse) in the author’s note to his 2003 novel Private Peaceful. His wife spotted it on a gravestone in a Commonwealth War Grave cemetery near Ypres, Belgium: Private T.S.H. Private Peaceful is such a poetic name for a soldier that it could only have sprung from the mind of a writer, right? But children’s author Michael Morpurgo can’t take credit for the military moniker. ![]()
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