A new musical inspired by former Buxton resident Vera Brittain will premiere this summer and the show is dripping in poignancy, as John Phillips discovers
Writer and chief executive officer of Buxton International Festival Michael Williams couldn’t wait to tell the good news about his latest project to the one person who mattered the most, but real life brought a sad twist to the tale.
Michael, an acclaimed novelist and dramatist, had finally been given approval by the Buxton International Festival board to go ahead with his plans to write a musical about Vera Brittain.
For Buxton locals – or many across the country for that matter - Vera Brittain needs little introduction.
The town’s most famous daughter, she wrote Testament of Youth, the heart-breaking story of loves lost to the First World War.
Michael’s musical, The Land of Might-Have-Been - the title of a song of longing for a better world written by Ivor Novello for the post-war generation - will be staged at Buxton Opera House this July.
It tells the story of two parallel loves: Vera and Roland, her brother Edward’s best friend; and Edward and Bobby, a boy from the same upper-middle class set who formed the gilded youth of pre-First World War Buxton.
The person Michael was so desperate to tell was Shirley Williams, no relation but a friend who was not only Vera’s equally famous politician daughter but also a long-time supporter of the Festival.
‘Shirley was an inspiration for me because when I arrived in Buxton as CEO, she immediately took me under her wing,’ says Michael, who got the job in 2018 after leading Cape Town Opera from 2005.
‘She used to say “Michael, you need to do something musical about my mother’s life.”
‘I hate to say it, but I didn’t know who her mother was, and to my shame I ignored it.’
Coming from South Africa, Michael didn’t yet realise the immense impact mother and daughter had had on British history: Vera as a peace campaigner and champion of women’s rights, and Shirley as co-founder of the Social Democratic Party and a key centrist thinker who tried to break the Left-Right deadlock which has bedevilled UK politics for generations.
‘It was only when she invited me down to London that the penny really dropped,’ he reveals.
‘We were having fish and chips on the terrace at the Palace of Westminster where MPs and members of the House of Lords kept coming up to her for a chat. That really struck me and I quickly realised I was in the presence of somebody who was highly respected.
‘I thought to myself, I must do something about that musical.’
But the catalyst came when in 2021 when Michael mentioned to friends that the works of song-writing legend Ivor Novello had come out of copyright. They suggested using that music with a story about Vera Brittain.
‘I thought to myself, I’ve found my subject,’ says Michael. ‘Then I discovered that Vera was 21 when she said goodbye to Roland on his way to the Front and Ivor Novello was 21 when he had his break-out hit Keep the Home Fires Burning, released in August 1914 and the soundtrack of all those lovers’ farewells.
‘I thought, I must tell Shirley. So I left a message on her phone, wrote an email, then called her mobile.
‘I was so excited to tell her— but when I got home, I heard on the news that she had died the previous morning.’
The Land That-Might-Have-Been will have a deep poignancy for the many people who admire both women’s legacy.
However, equally, it’s a musical fundamentally written to celebrate life and the joy it was to have been part of that privileged set who also watched shows in Buxton Opera House, performed in amateur dramatics, played tennis, went to balls and most importantly, fell in love.
The First World War may be waiting in the wings of the story, but it won’t be centre stage in the show.
Michael, in collaboration with Iain Farrington, the composer and arranger who was commissioned to write organ music for King Charles’ coronation, have made sure that audiences will have a great and memorable night out.
Iain has re-orchestrated Ivor Novello’s songs for the modern day and there are two new numbers written just for the show.
Michael believes this will bring fresh fans to the Welsh songwriter’s work.
‘He was the Andrew Lloyd Webber of his day,’ argues Michael.
‘Incredibly, he once he had three West End shows running at the same time. His songs have an earworm effect because there is something Abba-esque about them.
‘The show is a book musical, which means there is dialogue interrupted by song with lots of dance and singing, like anything you’ll see on the West End of London.’
Michael has written many operas based on powerful historical characters, including Siddhartha, Nelson Mandela and, in 2019, Georgiana, the gambling addict wife of the Fifth Duke of Devonshire, who built Buxton’s magnificent Crescent, which won him a prestigious UK Musical Theatre Award.
The Land of Might-Have-Been has just as powerful a character at its centre.
After the horrors of the First World War, Vera decided pacifism was the only way forward, and in World War Two publicly denounced the carpet bombing of Dresden as immoral, earning the wrath of her fellow writers and Allied war leaders.
‘She was arm-wrestling with the likes of George Orwell and President Roosevelt,’ adds Michael.
But The Land of Might-Have Been is not all about Vera.
It is, in fact, just as much the story of her brother Edward, whose name is recorded on Buxton Cenotaph just a few hundred yards from the Opera House.
‘And it’s not based on Testament of Youth,’ says Michael. ‘It is based on the early life of Vera Brittain and Edward Brittain, falling in love in the perfect summer of 1914.’
Vera’s Roland and Edward both tragically died in the war, although Edward’s death is particularly harrowing.
Awarded the Military Cross for his heroism at the Battle of the Somme, he had been told by his commanding officer that he was to be court-martialled and stripped of his medal - for the crime of being gay.
‘Faced with that, he threw himself into harm’s way the following day and died, just a few months from the end of the war,’ says Michael.
‘Vera was called to the deathbed of that commanding officer. He told her what she had always feared, that it was an act of self-harm.’
The poignancy of Shirley Williams missing the show she so wanted to see will be underlined by her ‘appearance’ as a 14-year-old girl on stage, holding a copy of Testament of Youth and asking her mother if she had written it.
‘The ghosts of Vera and Edward will be sitting at your shoulder as you watch their modern-day counterparts on the opera stage,’ concludes Michael poignantly.
And they might just be singing along to Novello’s words:
‘We shall never find that lovely land of might-have-been
I can never be your king, nor you can be my queen.’
The Land of Might Have-Been, Buxton Opera House, July 7, 11, 15,18 and 21. For more details of the Festival, which includes jazz, books and concerts, go to buxtonfestival.co.uk
