Guest Blog: Playwright Neil McPherson On IT IS EASY TO BE DEAD

This play took me 28 years.

1988 marked the 70th anniversary of the end of the First World War. To commemorate it, an 'Armistice Festival' was held in London, which, like the Edinburgh Festival, included a fringe open to anyone. I am ashamed to admit that I was a rather precocious 18 year old, and called the director of the festival, Tim McHenry, to suggest my idea of a one-man play about war poet Wilfred Owen.

With more patience than I probably deserved, he said (quite rightly) that one-man plays about Wilfred Owen were very common, but, given my age, why didn't I think about doing a play about one of the youngest and less well known war poets - like Charles Sorley. That summer, I ended up getting a part in a National Youth Theatre production and so the play wasn't written, but I never forgot Tim's suggestion.

At first glance, Charles Sorley might seem to fit the stereotype of the gallant young public schoolboy officer pointlessly killed in action. But the truth is a little different. He was very aware of his privilege (he nearly left school early to become a social worker); he was an outsider (a Scot); he lived and studied in Germany directly before the war; and, crucially, he intuitively understood the horror and pity of war long before anyone else. This was a teenager who was writing "I should like so much to kill whoever was primarily responsible for the war" when most of his contemporaries (most famously Rupert Brooke) were still in the rapturous early stages of sacrificial patriotism.

Following the publication of his Marlborough and Other Poems in January 1916, poets like John Masefield (who called Sorley "potentially the greatest poet lost to us in that war") and Robert Graves (who thought him "one of the three poets of importance killed during the war" alongside Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg) were quick to realise that Sorley's death in the Battle of Loos in 1915 was a major loss. Robert Graves lent Siegfried Sassoon his copy of Marlborough and Other Poems, and Sassoon went on to mentor the novice poet Wilfred Owen, so Sorley's vision directly inspired the grim disillusionment of those who would become the Great War's best-known poets.

In attempting to write a play about the First World War, I was anxious to avoid the trap of repeating Great War clichés, and was influenced by the work of recent revisionist historians who are contributing to a more nuanced view of the conflict. For example, it was not always the case that all Allied generals sent their men to be slaughtered whilst they stayed safely ensconced in a château miles behind the lines, and so I was careful to include a mention of Major-General Frederick Wing, commander of Sorley's division, and just one of three divisional generals (a third of the total) killed in action during the Battle of Loos.

Inspired by my own family history, I felt that any attempt to tell Sorley's story would be incomplete without including those he left behind. My great-grandfather, the Reverend Donald Gray, was Minister of Pathhead West Church in Kirkcaldy for 32 years. The few photographs of him show a bullish, uncompromising figure, very much a Minister of Scotland's Free Church, and it is perhaps no surprise that all the letters of condolence written to his widow after his death in 1936 all included variations of the phrase "he did not suffer fools gladly" in the opening lines.

Donald's son, Frederick, was the golden boy of the family. Born in 1892, he won scholarships to both Kirkcaldy High School and Edinburgh University where, destined to become a Minister like his father, he studied Divinity. Graduating in July 1914, Fred could easily have escaped front line service by becoming a padre, or secured himself an officer's commission, but insisted on joining up as a private.

He survived six months on the Western Front, until November 15th 1916, one of the final days of the Battle of the Somme, when he was listed as missing in action. His company of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, like the Scots in their assault on Hill 70 at Loos, attacked too enthusiastically, and were caught in their own artillery barrage - suffering devastating casualties from what today would have been called 'friendly fire'.

Like Rudyard Kipling, whose son was listed as missing at Loos, Donald was broken by his son's disappearance. When his Church dedicated their war memorial to the war dead of the parish (including Fred), Donald had to find another minster to lead the service. Fred's War Office files in the National Archives include a series of heartbreaking letters from Donald, some written long after the war, begging for any news of his son.

When the 51st Highland Division Memorial was unveiled on the Somme battlefield in 1924, Donald was there. The contrast between Donald's intransigent personality, and his raw grief at the loss of his son, brought home to me how the Great War became - and arguably remains - an open wound on the British psyche.

It is Easy to be Dead runs at Trafalgar Studios 9 November-3 December

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