The Christmas Truce

Diana Lampen reviews the recent RSC production

‘Old Bill’ by Bruce Bairnsfather: 1916), image from Bullets & Billets. | Photo: Project Gutenberg, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) recently offered a play for family audiences (children of 10+) at Stratford-on-Avon based on the 1914 Christmas Truce. Sadly, the run has ended, and there is no plan to bring it to London. For my husband and me it raised the question of how to introduce preadolescent children to some of the worst events of the twentieth century. Writers like Michael Morpurgo and Michael Rosen have highlighted the concern about how you bring the past to life without destroying young people’s hope and trust in the future of humankind, and given some models of how to do it.

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