Friends host play to mark Quaker conchie’s 100th birthday
The play Conchies! is being performed to mark a milestone birthday
Lincolnshire Friends are celebrating the centenary birthday of one of the oldest surviving Quaker conscientious objectors (COs) by hosting a play about the pacifist training farm where he worked.
Donald Sutherland, 100 years old in June, worked in the partly-Quaker farming community that grew up around the villages of Holton-cum-Beckering and Legsby in Lincolnshire during the second world war. His hundredth birthday will be marked with two performances of Conchies! which tells the story of the farming community of COs who had been given exemption from fighting on condition they took up land work.
Ian Sharp, who wrote the play, told the Friend: ‘Over the last eighteen months the piece has been performed with Don often in the cast to enthusiastic audiences around Lincolnshire and to full houses at last summer’s Edinburgh Fringe.’
He said the story still strikes a chord with contemporary audiences. ‘At each performance, it takes on a deeper significance as the world around us becomes more dangerous and seems to call to us to be as courageous and single-minded as were those young COs of eighty years ago. Extinction Rebellion pointedly urge us today to drop the “objectors” and become conscientious protectors of our fragile planet.’
The show is on at Lincoln Meeting House on 16 and 23 June, with the latter performance for friends and family. Ian Sharp said he has rewritten the play ‘to put Don at the forefront. I start the new version by exploring the coincidence that Don was born on 18 June 1919, ten days before the Treaty of Versailles was signed, whose punitive terms imposed on the Germans is often cited as sowing the seeds of world war two’.
