David Haig on My Boy Jack @ Memorable TV

DAVID HAIG ON MY BOY JACK

My Boy Jack has been a labour of love for writer and actor David Haig for over 20 years, ever since a co-star on stage mentioned his striking resemblance to celebrated author Rudyard Kipling…

“The journey of My Boy Jack began in February 1985, when I was doing a production of Tom and Viv on Broadway. The American actor playing Eliot, Ed Herrmann, was a great Anglophile who particularly loved Rudyard Kipling. One day he handed me a biography of Rudyard called The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling by Angus Wilson and in the front cover he had written ‘here’s hoping your Rudyard comes to pass.’ I opened it and looked at the photograph and had this uncanny experience of looking at myself. Since then I’ve shown that picture of Rudyard to my children and they’ve thought it was me. The resemblance is extraordinary, almost unnerving. And so, gradually, I started researching the life of Rudyard Kipling.

“As the years went by, I discovered that Rudyard resembled my father psychologically, rather than physically, to an equally uncanny degree. My father was an Army officer for 20 years, then left the army and ran the Hayward art gallery for the first ten years of its existence. So here you have this paradox of a Victorian psychology with modern artistic sensitivity: it’s this contradiction in terms that is absolutely true of Rudyard Kipling, and possibly true of all Victorians who had any artistic leanings.

“On one side you had the magical, inventive father, creator of the Just So Stories and The Jungle Books, providing a wonderful environment for a child to grow up in. And on the other side you had the apologist for the British Empire who tyrannically pursued his son’s joining of the army and his involvement in the fighting of the First World War. That clash, I thought, was a fascinating combination.

“So, at a point in my acting career when I suddenly felt frustrated by always being a piece of the picture rather than having more artistic control over the entity, I decided to start writing Rudyard’s story myself. What came out of that was the stage play, My Boy Jack, which I completed 13 years ago. That played in London to some critical acclaim and, on the back of that production, the first screenplay was commissioned. The film version of My Boy Jack was written 11 years ago, 11 years after I was handed the biography of Rudyard Kipling by Ed Herrmann in New York. It’s taken 22 years to effectively realise this dream. Though I think maybe the climate is better now than ever for My Boy Jack. For a start, Daniel Radcliffe is now 18, whereas he was seven when I began writing the screenplay and could never have played Jack!”

Rudyard Kipling was one of Britain’s most intriguing and influential ‘stars’ – he could rouse a crowd into patriotic fervour, he had the ear of the King and he consulted on high level strategies to manage World War 1 propaganda. He was also the inventor of some of our most loved literature and was adored by children the world over…

“Rudyard had JK Rowling’s global power as a writer – their fame is absolutely comparable. Added into that mix was that he had the ear of the King and political influence.

“Rudyard is a paradoxical character, and so half the fun of writing him is illustrating that. When he is stirring the country up and saying that every young man who doesn’t volunteer for war should be shunned by his community, when he is making a statement as powerful – and in a modern context probably repulsive – as that, you can go full steam ahead because you know that, around the corner, he’s going to give a signed book with illustrations to an eight-year-old. He had a magnificent ability for lighting up children’s lives.”

Rudyard was publicly criticised for securing his severely myopic son John, or ‘Jack’ as he was better known, a commission with the Irish Guards. Jack was repeatedly turned down by medical boards yet both Rudyard and his strong-willed 17-year-old son refused to admit defeat when the rest of Britain’s boys were proud to be fighting on the front line. The poem My Boy Jack, written after Jack’s death, revealed a father tortured – in hindsight - by the part he played in his son’s fate.

“One of the vital things to realise about Rudyard and Jack’s relationship is that it wasn’t just Rudyard who wanted him to fight. Every boy of Jack’s age wanted to fight at the beginning of that war. It was the last war really in which an entire generation felt it their duty to fight for king and country, and Jack was no exception. The only issue is that he was chronically short-sighted, turned down by the army twice and the navy once, and should have taken a peripheral role.

“The relationship between Rudyard and John was not that of the cruel tyrant and the victim. But equally, that oppressive urging, that oppressive love, is off-putting to any teenager, whether today or in 1915. I often think that those fathers, and this is similar to my own memories of my father, are the most rewarding, fulfilling and magical when you’re younger. I imagine it was the same with Roald Dahl, JM Barrie, all the great children’s writers: youth is a wonderful time to live with an inventive parent. But when you get to the teens, Kipling’s Boy Scout-ish rigour kicked in and John would have desperately wanted to escape that.

“Jack, who was an ordinary kid really, also had to grow up with this extraordinary fame. There was so much to live up to, so much to aspire to. The final irony of John’s joining the army is that, having been in his father’s shadow, when he got to the front he achieved the independence and self-recognition that had always eluded him. When you read his letters home from the front to Rudyard, it’s a man talking, not a boy. Sadly, he only had that for two weeks. Daniel (Radcliffe) is the most extraordinarily grounded, down to earth, passionate, committed and intelligent young man, and brings all of those ingredients to the part of Jack.”

As well as being the story of a father and son, My Boy Jack also examines an extraordinary marriage – that of Rudyard and his publicly disliked wife Carrie, played by Kim Cattrall.

“Kim was right for the role because she recognised exactly why and how Carrie was crucially important to Rudyard. She related to this woman who is, on the surface, profoundly formidable, powerful and strong, yet so devoted to her husband and children. They were very unpopular in the village because they didn’t mix.

“I was talking to Daniel about this and he was saying it can be so easily misunderstood, that search for privacy. If your whole life is public, you ruthlessly pursue that privacy. The first scene with Carrie is her chasing the paparazzi off the lawn. It sets up the power and the control she had over the survival of Rudyard’s life and the essential nature of what Carrie brought to their marriage.

“What Kim brings to Carrie is an utterly unsentimental, quietly powerful portrayal and, because it’s unsentimental, when she is tortured by the loss of her son it is far more powerful than if she had ranted or raved. It’s also interesting that this quintessential Englishman should marry an American. I think Kim highlights that they’re culturally different. We worked very hard at creating that compatibility as a couple.

“Rudyard is highly combustible - he gets incredibly passionate and vehement about things and then very soppy and sentimental on the other side of the scale. Kim’s Carrie manages that very cleverly, and establishes the feeling she has seen that anger a thousand times before, that she’s seen the sentimentality a thousand times before, and that she just has to just put him back in his study where he’ll write another great poem or another great book.

“As the wife of the apologist of the British Empire, Carrie definitely supported the war. The question is did she support sending a son who was so profoundly myopic to war? I suspect she didn’t. Whatever the actual historical truth of Carrie and (Jack’s sister) Elsie’s perception of war, they are more important to me in providing the tension found within any modern family sending a son to, say, Iraq. Carey Mulligan’s (Elsie) brother went to Iraq with the TA, and one of the things she recognised in the script was how many of the conversations she had had with her brother mirrored those Elsie has with Jack. So if I have achieved a universal story or a family story it’s because of ultimately placing the women on one side of the barrier and the men on the other, producing that conflict.”

The exterior scenes at Bateman’s, the Kipling home, were filmed in the grounds of Bateman’s itself, which is now owned by the National Trust. David, like his co-stars, felt that recreating the Kipling family’s experiences in the actual environment in which they took place nearly 100 years ago added a certain gravitas to filming some of the drama’s most moving scenes.

“To come to the Kipling home on the last two days of filming was, for me, profoundly moving. We built the interiors of Bateman’s out in Ireland and I can’t praise the designer Dave Arrowsmith’s achievements enough, because what he built out in Ireland was the perfect essence of this Jacobean house we visited at the end of the shoot. Bateman’s is almost another character in the piece because it was so specifically chosen by Rudyard and Carrie in 1902. It was surrounded by an almost castellated yew hedge which meant the paparazzi couldn’t get in to disturb their privacy. And there were some rather wonderful coincidences filming. Daniel’s birthday in real life occurred while we were toasting an absent Jack’s birthday as the Kipling family. The second extraordinary coincidence was that the last day of filming at Bateman’s was on Jack Kipling’s birthday.”

David’s script focuses as much on the devastation of a family who lose a child to war as to the horrors of the trenches themselves. It is a focus often missing in the dramatising of war yet its one which makes My Boy Jack so relevant to its audience…

“Ultimately, what I find most moving about war is not necessarily the right and wrong, but the fact that every single casualty is an entire family devastated forever. If you have no religious faith, it is coming to terms with that young person being consigned to oblivion and how impossibly difficult that would be as a parent to bear.

“The chain reaction of a single death in Iraq is huge and yet in this particular war we’re talking about sometimes 20,000 men in one day. Rudyard never lost his faith in the rightness of the war but what he couldn’t bear was the thought that the country let those boys who fought down. After the war, he wrote a two-line phrase, through the eyes of the sons who died, which is: ‘If any question why we died, tell them our fathers lied.’ And that, to me, sums up what happened inside Rudyard’s head after Jack and all these other boys died.”

Now that filming has completed and David has moved onto his next project, starring in two plays at London’s Haymarket Theatre, he admits that the experience of having realised My Boy Jack after more than two decades of development was every bit as precious to him as the final product.

“I can unashamedly say that the experience of developing My Boy Jack transcends pleasure or displeasure. It was utterly consuming. Although it’s crucially important to me that it looks wonderful and that it works on as many levels as possible, actually the achieving of it is more important to me than the end result.

“ To see this relationship within this family realised, to see the soldiers going over in the pouring rain in the trenches, to see a No Man’s Land perfectly recreated in a farmer’s field in Dublin, to see the interior of Bateman’s and to recognise parts of the room and to feel it was our home for that brief period, was wonderful.”

My Boy Jack broadcast on ITV1 Sunday 11 November @ 9.00pm

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DAVID HAIG ON MY BOY JACK