In His Own Words

Robert Winslow, Artistic Director

Photo by Marlon Hazlewood

October 26th, 2010

I suppose I should wait a day for my weekly blog in order to recover a bit from my three-day tour to the World War I battlefields in France. But I think it's better to write now from the heart before too much of my conscious, orderly mind intervenes.

Walking in the driving rain in a Canadian war cemetery near Courcelette on the Somme Battlefield, attending The Last Post ceremony under the Menin Gate in Ypres, standing before the stunning Vimy Memorial to the missing Canadian soldiers of World War I, walking through a German cemetery containing 44,830 dead, visiting a newly created graveyard for Australian soldiers just identified this year after lying anonymously in a German burial pit near Fromelles for ninety years, being at the little hillside near Ypres where John McCrae wrote 'In Flanders Fields', all these experiences and many more humbled me and moved me greatly. There is no way to describe the scale of loss, pain, fear, bravery, sacrifice endured by those millions of young men who participated in World War I. There were so many stories of heroism, useless death, maiming of soul and body, triumphant victory, hellish battle that I will have to wait till I return to present some of my reflections to my community back home.

And the stories of the millions of civilians dispossessed of their homes, the experiences of the mothers and wives and fathers and daughters and girlfriends and children of the fallen, all these are part of the picture too.

What I have learned and experienced over the last three days has clarified somewhat the context for my new play about the war and its effects. By being in the places where these massive events took place gives a playwright more to work with as the imagination begins to percolate through the historical. I hope I can in a small way honour the memory of this time.

This past week I also visited The National Archives and the Imperial War Museum in London, reading through medical case files for shell-shocked soldiers and listening to many stories of war veterans at the War Museum's sound archive - testimonies given in the 1970s through 1990s by World War I soldiers, medical officers, nurses, ambulance drivers, officers. Again the context for my writing deepens and becomes more and more specific.

I also managed to take in Hamlet at the National Theatre in London last week. Very interesting production that was set in a kind of present-day police state. Apparently, Elizabethan England was a bit of a police state itself with lots of spies and surveillance of citizens and dissidents. The National Theatre's artistic director, Nicholas Hytner directed the production, which has received many accolades.

Well, I'm keeping it rather short this week and will touch base again next Monday after my return from East Anglia where I am visiting a theatre company called Eastern Angles and also learning a bit about the Saxons of what we call The Dark Ages.

Cheers.

Rob