Michael Morpurgo

20 | September 26, 2013 | cambridge-news.co.uk | Cambridge News

Theatre

I

T’S a voice that has gravitas, Michael Morpurgo’s. Not gravelly with wisdom or sparkling with giddiness, it folds heavily, seriously, meaningfully over syllables. It’s a true storyteller’s voice – a teacher’s voice.

Up there in the same literary realms as Pullman, Pratchett, Rowling and Blackman, the former Children’s Laureate has written a small library’s worth of books singlehandedly (more than 120 in fact); stories that brim with struggle and triumph, excitement and adventure, and obstacles to be overcome.

When we speak, the awardwinning 69-year-old is in the Isles of Scilly writing the latest addition to his collection. “I think it’ll keep its title, it’s not a bad one,” he says matter of factly. “It’s called Lucy Lost, and it’s about a girl who turns up on an uninhabited island. No one knows where she’s come from; she’s a wild child. And I’m not going to tell you anymore!”

From War Horse and Private Peaceful, to Kensuke’s Kingdom and The Butterfly Lion – the stage version of which is coming to Cambridge Arts Theatre next week – Morpurgo is what you’d call a master at crafting tales that explore the cruelties and wonders of growing up.

Ask him why his stories have such enduring appeal though (War Horse was written in 1982, The Butterfly Lion in 1996), and why they are so suited to film and stage adaptations, and he becomes almost exasperated, as though he hasn’t quite worked out his formula yet either. “You’d better ask one of the children that. Why? I don’t know,” he muses. “I think it’s very interesting, it’s never really clear why some stories seem to work and go on working and are loved, and others are less so.”

With The Butterfly Lion he puts it down to its brevity – “it’s a very big story in a very short space” – and its scope – “there’s a lion at its heart, it has war at its heart, there’s a love story at its heart.”

A war baby himself, the former primary school teacher (who taught for a time at St Faith’s in Cambridge), may not have deciphered what makes his tales so adored, but directors seem to have. Daniel Buckroyd is the man behind the current production of The Butterfly Lion which tells the story of a little boy called Bertie who befriends a white lion in Africa before being bundled off to boarding school.

As a grown-up, caught in the ravages of WWI, Bertie is determined to be reunited with his lion.

Bittersweet and shot through with yearning, the first time Morpurgo will see the show will actually be in Cambridge. Is it strange seeing his work take on a life on stage?

“It is strange, I look forward to it enormously and sometimes I’m disappointed,” he admits. “I have been disappointed in the past and then it’s vexing because the actors of course always work very, very hard and everyone has worked hard

As The Butterfly Lion heads to Cambridge Arts Theatre, ELLA WALKER talks to Michael Morpurgo about seeing his stories adapted for screen and stage, liking a bit of banter and being won over by the War Horse puppets

Michael Morpurgo ᔡ The Butterfly Lion, Cambridge Arts Theatre, Monday, September 30 – Saturday, October 3 at 7.45pm. Tickets £15-£27 from (01223) 503333 / cambridge artstheatre. purchase-ticketsonline.co.uk

to make some good theatre – great theatre – so when it doesn’t work it’s very difficult.”

But, he adds: “I can sit down with great confidence when I come to the Arts Theatre and know I’m going to have an extraordinary moment, because it is extraordinary to see your story taken and transformed and told in a very different way.”

The most famously adapted of his stories is of course War Horse, but despite its colossal, disarming

success with Spielberg’s crashing great Hollywood depiction and the still-running stage show, Morpurgo wasn’t exactly enamoured by its theatre beginnings at first.

“When I heard the National Theatre were going to do this story about the First World War with puppets I thought it was rather ridiculous because all I could think of in my head were pantomime horses,” he laughs. “They’re funny and they’re a joke, and how are you going to have

the equivalent of pantomime horses on the stage for a story that is as serious and sad and as epic as War Horse?

“So I didn’t think they could pull it off, but that was before I saw the work of Handspring Puppets. Then of course I changed my mind rapidly.”

Although not the beautiful, loping structures that make up War Horse’s Joey, a puppet does feature in The Butterfly Lion too (“I’m told it’s completely magical,”), but the

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Michael Morpurgo on. . .

“There’s this gradual realisation as you’re growing up that this world is a complex place – endings are not always happy” similarities with War Horse extend further than intricate puppeteering and images of World War I. “There’s this gradual realisation as you’re growing up that this world is a complex place and it is not simple and endings are not always happy,” says Morpurgo, trying to explain why he writes plots that often quiver with sadness.

“It’s quite right and proper that when a child is very young you tell them stories that have an ending which settles them down, which means they can go to sleep happy and they can be confident that the world is a place where they can love the people they love and know what they know.

“But I think quite early on they begin to suss out that it is a difficult place to be, this world,” he says, almost bitterly. “They also get little flashes of the news and they see terrible bombings in Syria and they see children gassed. I mean, they’re seeing these things, you know? So what you can’t do in the stories you write for them is you can’t avoid that, you can’t just pretend these things don’t exist and that actually you can tie a little pink ribbon round the world and make it all right again, we know it isn’t like that.

“I was a teacher for many, many years, and it’s part of the responsibility of any teacher to

educate children, to lead them if you can, help them comprehend the world that they are going to have to confront.”

He adds: “You’ve got to do it sensitively, of course you do, you don’t want to traumatise them or shock them, but you certainly do want them to be in touch with themselves and be in touch with the world around them. And a good book, a good story, can do that.”

Passionate, eloquent and never afraid to have an opinion, Morpurgo is just as forthright on the topic of authors who are lazy about writing for younger readers.

“One of the great problems with writing for children is, in the world

of adults, it has been considered to be a lesser thing,” he states. “Which is a shame because all our great writers, whoever they are, wherever they’ve been educated and however erudite they may be, they all started their reading with those people who wrote for children. That’s why they’ve become the readers and the writers they are later on.

“It’s very important that the quality of the literature you read when you’re young is good and that every book takes you to a place you’ve never been before, as well as being a good page turner.”

The highlight of being a children’s author though, he explains, is meeting his readers. “Maybe a

ɀ What he does in his spare time “I think up stories and walk and here I go bird watching and boating, that sort of thing. I tend to all the time be on the lookout and dreaming my dreams, I’m a great dreamer merchant really.” ɀ Writing for children rather than adults: “I was a child once, I find that difficult to believe now but I was, and I taught children from a really quite early age.

I was a young father, I was a young grandfather, so children have been at the centre of my life, all my life and so I know them very well. I’m not an expert on them but I know them, I’m used to speaking to them, I’m used to telling them stories.” ɀ The magic of puppetry: “What they do with very, very little material, these extraordinary people, these actors, these puppeteers, these creators, they can make a piece of cloth and a few sticks become something else and I think that it’s been a wonderful education for me to see what puppetry can do.” ɀ What would surprise his readers “I think what surprises people when I meet them is that my stories can be very sad, and upsetting, and that when they meet me they find me quite funny and ridiculous and laugh with me and they weren’t expecting that.”

mother comes up to you and says look, my child didn’t read books before he read The Butterfly Lion and it changed his life, those kind of moments are extraordinary,” he buzzes. “Then you get some kid that’ll come up to you and say, ‘I just read this book, what happens in the end?’ I say, I’m not going to tell you, read the end. ‘Tell me, tell me,’ – and you have a bit of an argument. I love that kind of banter.

“Finding out how the stories have affected people’s lives, that gives me huge, huge pleasure.” ɀ Michael Morpurgo will be doing a post-show talk on Wednesday, October 2.