Brummegem Pals

Jacky and Danny are two Brummie lads, best mates since their schooldays and apprentices together in the same factory.Their life is ordinary and unexciting but in the summer of 1914 the threat of war rumbled around Europe and by August Britain was at war with Germany.

Jacky thinks enlisting is the chance to get away from their humdrum lives, an opportunity for foreign travel with wages, clothing and bed and board thrown in! He talks Danny into joining up with him and despite being under age they enlist in the City of Birmingham’s 14th Royal Warwickshire Regiment, one of Kitchener’s new ‘pals battalions’ which recruited groups of local lads to train and fight together.

Danny’s Mum and Dad are horrified but he persuades them to let him go by promising his Dad that he’ll win a medal for his Mum. They complete their training but as they leave England for France the doubts begin to set in. They soon get their first taste of warfare.

They experience the full horrors and inhumanity of war, fear, death, the squalor of the trenches, gas attacks and incompetent leadership, tempered only by the comradeship of the men they serve with and their love for their families at home.

Don Maclean and Malcolm Stent lead a cast of thirteen. With songs specially written for the play and some familiar songs and music from the trenches this is the moving story of two ordinary boys, their lives and loves and their families caught up in the horrors of the war to end all wars.