Play inspired by reality of serving in a real cold war

Sitting at her grandfather’s knee, hearing stories about a little known part of the Second World War, writer Lizzie Nunnery knew she had a story in her hands that had to be told.

“The war was something he’d never really talked about, but then in the last ten years of his life, he started sharing all these incredible stories,” she says.

It was, she believes, a way for her grandfather to repeat the story of what he experienced to make sure the past remained alive once he was gone. And what stories.

“It’s a version of World War Two that doesn’t necessarily get looked at all that often,” she says. And she’s right. We probably don’t think of the work of the soldiers who took part in naval convoys to and through the Arctic. The conditions endured by her grandfather are, like most war experiences of those of that generation, the kind of thing few of us could imagine.

“He told me about when his ship was hit by a submarine and he was forced to close off the lower deck to save the ship, knowing that there were still men alive down there. He said he could hear the men banging and shouting to be let out, but if he opened the doors, the whole boat would sink. He told me stories about pouring boiling water on to the decks when the boats had frozen and stories of these conditions that were just incredible.”

Nunnery had the stories in her back pocket and the award-winning writer and singer knew that one day they would find a way to exist in the world.

That day came when director Hannah Tyrrell-Pinder asked the playwright if she had an idea for a play with music. Narvik was born and the play has been winning rave reviews on its tour. This week a delighted Nunnery discovered she had been nominated for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for the play. Nunnery has written all the songs as well as the script and, while the inspiration was the stories her grandfather shared about his time in the Second World War, she and her director used it as a leaping off point to do other research and tell other stories. The play became a tale about a Liverpudlian man and a Norwegian woman who are pulled together and torn apart by events of the Second World War. “Hannah read an awful lot of other real accounts so what we’ve ended up with is totally fictionalised but draws on real events in these other men’s lives, so hopefully it will be quite authentic and for me, I think the sea is such a great metaphor and I love the idea of being able to write about memory and about conflict using that metaphor,” says Nunnery.

It is an epic story – the Arctic, ships, space and time – quite the thing to achieve in any medium, but particularly in theatre it seems like quite the challenge. “If it were a film, you’d have a cast of thousands and a thousand more extras. In theatre it’s all about creating that abstract realism with what you have. Theatre allows us to use our imaginations and see that a cast of six can become a thousand men.”

Narvik, touring to York Theatre Royal, February 23, The Carriageworks, Leeds, March 9, Harrogate Theatre, March 14-18.