Soldier Boy The Play Home page
Author and subject: Anthony standing next to Jim Martin's name at the Australian Memorial
Lone Pine, Gallipoli
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In September 2022, as I was helping our local theatre company paint the stage for a new production, I paused a moment, looked out at the empty auditorium and suddenly thought: “I know how I could do Soldier Boy on a stage like this.”
I’d long felt my novel about 14-year-old Jim Martin, the youngest Australian Anzac, could make a successful play or film. When it came out in 2001 with Penguin Books it was an immediate success. Even before official publication day, it had gone through five printings so popular was it with schools, as it still is. It won several awards, including a NSW Premier’s Award and a silver medal from the Children’s Book Council of Australia.
Hopes that it might lead to a dramatisation, however, never materialised. So that when I looked out from the Mordialloc Theatre Company stage that morning, black paintbrush in hand, the first thought was followed by a second: “I’ll write the play myself.”
Having been stage struck at the age of three (as I still am), and as an established author looking for something new to try my pen, I took up the idea immediately. Within a week I’d begun sketching scenes, and two months later I’d completed the first draft.
I knew the story so well, having told it many times to schools and events around the nation, and knew which were the dramatic highlights, what worked and what information was needed to impart the essence of this tragic tale to an audience.
Not that the work was by any means finished. Writing novels is very different to writing for stage or film, and the first draft of the script needed a lot more professional input before I might consider it complete.
I was extremely fortunate that my cousin, the actor Laura Iris Hill, had just returned after a decade performing in New York. Over the next year Laura worked closely with me refining and developing the script from an actor’s and director’s point of view.
We went through three drafts before a successful reading with some of Laura’s professional friends. I introduced two new characters – Jim’s friend Albert, and Rex Venables (who do not actually appear) – to give a more complete perspective on how the Great War affected many boys and their families.
The present version reflects the changes and improvements made following that reading and a second with members of the Mordialloc Theatre Company. No doubt further amendments might be made after seeing it in actual rehearsal. Even in class, teachers may find passages that could be modified, for live theatre is always a work in progress.
But as it is, I hope that schools, teachers, actors and audiences everywhere will find Soldier Boy The Play a worthwhile dramatic text in its own right, as well as a useful adjunct to those studying Soldier Boy the novel.
By investing themselves in the characters, my hope is they will have a better understanding of the people – young and old – their motivations, dilemmas and arguments both for and against the actions they took in what has become, as Christopher Bantick notes in the Introduction, a truly iconic Australian story of family and war.
The externals may have changed over the last century, but the internals of character and behaviour remain very much as they have always been.
A set of Teaching Notes for both Soldier Boy the novel and Soldier Boy The Play is available here.
The Australian Memorial at Lone Pine, Gallipoli
