Darwin student Macsen Brown has spent half of this year immersed in the here and now of 2020s Cambridge, where he is pursuing an MPhil in Education. The other half, he has spent inside the head of a young Welsh soldier, held captive for ten months following the Battle of Arnhem in 1944.
Macsen plays Private Neville Neads, the real-life great-grandfather of Homerton student Izzy Lane. Based on Private Neads’ personal diaries, Izzy has crafted a verbatim play, Operation Market Garden, which debuted at the Corpus Playroom in the autumn and will head to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this summer.
“The play starts on Armistice Day, when he’s an old man remembering,” explains Macsen.
“But most of the plot starts from 1944, when they flew out to the Netherlands, and it follows from the battle to being captured and moving between camps. They were basically taken on a sort of forced march out of the camp by the Russians, and left to die, until they were found by the Americans.”
The diaries have been in Izzy’s family ever since, and form the basis of 80% of the play’s script. For Macsen, the key to his sense of connection with the character is in their shared Welsh identity.
“The diary is mostly in English, even though he was a first language Welsh speaker, as I am, because he was educated in English. He would have been educated in the 1920s, and in those days you got physically beaten for speaking Welsh at school. So he probably wasn’t hugely confident writing in Welsh. But Izzy said to me, every now and then, if he says “hmm?” or “what?” I can say that in Welsh. Which is fun.”
The obvious challenge of depicting a battle on a small stage with limited resources has become a virtue, resulting in a focus on psychological rather than physical experience.
“We tried to avoid having too many people on stage at once, because it’s packed into a tiny little room. A lot of it is representational – so the train is a bench – and it’s more about the words and the characters rather than a super detailed set.”
After suffering with laryngitis during the play’s initial run (“I lost my voice, which meant I was able to really embody the 200 days in prison!”), Macsen is looking forward to returning to the character in Edinburgh, where Operation Market Garden will appear for the final two weeks of the Festival.
“Playing Neville Neads has been particularly challenging because I’m keenly aware that he was a real person; and that the words I’m saying are not just ones Izzy has invented, but real, genuine thoughts he had during the darkest time of his life,” he reflects.
“Finding it in myself to do justice to a man who went through something I can never even begin to fathom has been really difficult. It has been an absolute honour to help tell his story, which feels all the more relevant today as I worry that the devastating human cost of war appears to be the subject of collective amnesia amongst world leaders.”
