Jack by Stephen Wale

Nineteen-seventy-three. Jack, now seventy-five, stands in a corridor waiting to be picked up for weekend release to his remaining family. While waiting, he crosses and recrosses his inner landscape, absorbed in the WWI events that tipped him into fifty years of institutional care. Jack tells of a time when little to nothing was understood concerning the response of ordinary men with orderly lives whose sense of secure being was destroyed by sights sounds and stresses too horrible for the mind to absorb. The enormity of the distress these men brought home forced society to accommodate them and, within the compass of the time, help to heal their suffering. Jack was fortunate in as much as he had his family until the end. Many of these irreparably damaged soldiers lived on into the 1970s, in large institutions, without family to anchor them. They just faded away, their contribution and their shattered lives seemingly unremarked. Jack is an attempt to restore their lives to memory. Based on the true story of writer/performer Stephen Wale's uncle who fought in the First World War and was subsequently institutionalised for 50 years as a ward of the state. Followed by a Q&A. ★★★★★ "a poignant, timely warning today. Jack reminds us that we ought not to forget the Fallen. We also need to remember the Damaged." - Counter Culture ★★★★★ "if you think you have heard them all over the years, then be prepared to be surprised by the honesty of this story as told by family member, writer and performer Stephen Wale." - Arts Review Edinburgh ★★★★ "impactful, pulling us into Jack's fragmented reality--a haunting glimpse into the toll of war that lingers long after the fighting stops" - Edinburgh Festivals Magazine "moving and powerful without ever being self indulgent. The power of the words took over. I felt you were being Jack." - Stewart Permutt Approx running time: 1 hour (incl. Q & A, no interval)