As mentioned in the introduction, Death Us Do Part had a complicated history, starting life as an episode of an independent video series, being retooled as a standalone screenplay before finding its final resting place as a stage play. Each of those stages involved at least one rewrite and the story went through six drafts altogether before publication in its current version.
I thought I’d try and give you some insight into how a story can develop by taking you through the various drafts, the major changes made to them and the reasons why. It’ll help if you’ve read the play first (hint hint) but for those who haven’t (why not?) I’ll give you a basic outline first. Obviously that means there’ll be lots of spoilers so if you want to avoid them then read the play first!
Read it? No? Go away and read it! It’s not even expensive. I’ll wait.
Read it now? Good. Then we can begin.
Death Us Do Part concerns a solicitor, Jennifer Brown, who visits a Mr Macfarlane to draw up his will only to find him already dead and a mysterious stranger, the Outsider, in his house. They en-counter the ghost of a First World War British soldier who claims to be the Unknown Soldier, with no memory of his real identity. His arrival triggers flashbacks to the events of the war, when three shell-shocked soldiers, Brown, Simpson and MacFarlane, attempt to desert only to be hunted down by the bullying Sergeant Willis. Brown is murdered, Simpson is recaptured and executed by firing squad but Macfarlane escapes by swapping his identity papers with a dead and disfigured soldier so that he himself is believed to be dead. A draft of the will found in Macfarlane’s house reveals that he left everything to a fellow soldier called Adams and at first this is believed to be the identity of the Unknown Soldier. However, as the ghosts of the other soldiers appear, the truth behind events becomes clear. The first ghost is not the Unknown Soldier at all but another dead soldier who was passed over when the selection was made. The body really selected was the brutal Willis, whose ghost feels no remorse. The Outsider also turns out to be a ghost – that of Adams, whose identity Macfarlane stole in order to escape. Even Jennifer is revealed to be connected as Brown was her great great grandfather, the real circumstances of his death having been covered up as the British Army did not publicise how they dealt with deserters.
Up to speed? Good. Now forget all that because it started a bit differently.
There was a small independent video company making a series of videos about two characters called the Stranger and Miss Brown. Without going into detail, they were trying very hard to be a once popular TV series that was no longer on the air but with the names and so on changed to avoid copyright issues. I wasn’t a big fan but, having watched the first three, I thought ‘I could do that.’ So I did. I wrote them a script and sent it in on spec.
I started with the image of the soldier climbing the stairs, looking over his shoulder and vanishing. Not sure where it came from. Maybe I was remembering that Sapphire & Steel story with the ghosts in the train station. Anyone remember Sapphire & Steel? That was an eerie show. David McCallum, Joaana Lumley. The guy with no face in every photo ever taken! Brr.
Sorry, got distracted there. Ghost of soldier on stairs. Haunted house story then. The first thing that came to mind was the Unknown Soldier. What if he wasn’t really a hero at all? What if he was a bully or a butcher or even a war criminal? I assumed that, although we didn’t know his identity (obviously), we must at least know the rank and perhaps even the regiment of the body. I went to the local library – yes, a real library with actual books, the internet still being a twinkle in the milkman’s eye. I found absolutely nothing on the Unknown Soldier but I did find Julian Putkowski and Julian Sykes’s history of the firing squads Shot At Dawn, which determined the whole direction of the story.
I deliberately avoided the style of the previous three films as I thought that copying an old TV series in everything but name was a but silly. Being a screenplay, the original version had a lot more action, locations and special effects. The battlefield sequences took place on an actual battlefield, most of the house scenes took place in the bedroom and the two dissolved into each other as required. Ghosts vanished before the viewers’ eyes and emerged from each other’s bodies. There were far more flying objects in the poltergeist sequences and camera angles and cutting hid the face of the soldier killed by Macfarlane and allowed for a cheap shock when the Stranger replaced the body in the wheelchair.
There were a lot of major story differences in this version, most of which survived through to the fourth or fifth draft. It still opened with the old man dying (a scene based on a short story I’d written in a high school English exam) and at this stage neither the Stranger nor Miss Brown had any connection to the story; they were just mysterious investigators, in line with the existing series. The first section of the desertion, where Macfarlane kills the unseen man, was repeated a couple more times to firmly establish what was happening, and all of the war sequences were much shorter with less character development or background. I had a 50 minute running time to keep to and in those circumstances plot always has to take precedence over anything else.
The plot was pretty much the same up to the court martial but things were a bit different after that. Brown, Simpson and the (supposed) Unknown Soldier hunted Dexter across the battlefield only for him to be supernaturally replaced by Sugden. The Stranger was sent to the firing squad only to be rescued by Dexter. When Willis appeared he had no dialogue and no face. (Man with no face - I really must have been thinking of Sapphire & Steel!) The whole thing ended with the house blowing up as the boundary between it and the battlefield became blurred. Or something. There was also a coda at the Cenotaph where the soldiers all finally had their names added to a war memorial. But the biggest difference was the identity of the soldier who we now knew wasn’t the Unknown Soldier. In this version – and in all but the final draft – he did turn out to be Adams (and this was even used as his character name in the stage directions because I thought it would avoid confusion. In retrospect I think it may have caused it instead.)
So this was the first draft. The original. I sent it to the address on the back of the videos and was surprised to get an enthusiastic phone call from the producer/director who was very keen to make it. He was about to shoot episode four and would make mine as episode five. He requested some changes, which is pretty standard. The actress who played Miss Brown would be unavailable as she was going to America for a year so would I create a new female character who would be a one-off but had the potential to recur? The episode he was about to shoot had begun filling in some of the Stranger’s background. He couldn’t tell me much but would I drop some hints that he might have been a terrorist? There were also some practical and budgetary considerations but we agreed that we could get around those.
So while he shot episode four, I wrote draft two. I didn’t change much, really just the bits he asked for. I decided to name the replacement character Miss Brown too, as it allowed me to make her a relative of one of the soldiers and I could play on the Stranger’s amnesia as he tried to remember why he knew the name. I gave her a first name and a job so that she had a reason to be there. The terrorism aspect was more difficult. I’d been given virtually nothing to go on and I couldn’t invent much as I had no idea where it was supposed to be going. I came up with some vague story about him having been involved in a war where he was a member of an ambiguous cell (one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter) and was ordered, against his own better judgement, to kill an agent codenamed Miss Brown. Whether this was the previous Miss brown had to be left unresolved. The Stranger gradually remembered all of this as the story progressed and I tried to make it a parallel with the events of the desertion. Which was difficult because, frankly, it wasn’t. Not even close. It was just vague mumbo-jumbo to meet the vague brief I’d been given.
So I submitted the second draft. And then disaster struck. While shooting episode four the script had been heavily rewritten. The terrorist background had been fully explained and the series had shot off in a very different direction. My rewrite was exactly what had been asked for but unfortunately it no longer fitted. He felt bad and asked me to work on something else but Death Us Do Part had to be shelved.
Again, this is common in the industry. Lots of scripts get cancelled for all sorts of reasons. They also often get recycled and that’s what I decided to do. I’d rewrite is as a standalone story and submit it to the BBC, who at that time still made one-off dramas. The changes at this stage were mostly cosmetic. I changed the Stranger’s name to the Outsider because I apparently didn’t have much imagination. I decided that it would be better opening with the desertion because explosions and men running was a more dynamic start than a man dying of old age. I polished some of the dialogue and, no longer constrained by the series, tried to expand the terrorism background but still didn’t do it very well. Other than that it was largely the same.
The BBC wasn’t interested, mainly because they preferred to work with established writers on their one-off drama strands. They didn’t say whether or not they liked it. That’s something else that’s common in this industry.
Around this time I joined a local dramatic society where, among others, I met Phil Scary and Leigh Grieve. Through that connection I heard about the Scottish Community Drama Association’s (SCDA) annual Play on Words competition for one-act plays. Death Us Do Part was about the right length for a one-act play so I decided to try my hand at adapting it for the stage. Again, the changes to this version were fairly minor. The house scenes now all took place in the hall to avoid set changes. For the same reason, the battlefield was now realised on the same set with lighting and sound effects. Other than that it was more or less a straight adaptation.
Unlike the BBC, the SCDA did like it. It made the shortlist of the last twelve but didn’t make it to the final three. The judges (who included Richard Wilson, which I mention purely for the sake of name dropping) commented, rather astutely, that it might be better suited to TV. They also said something that I can’t remember about ‘most Unknown Soldier plays’. I wasn’t even aware that there were other Unknown Soldier plays. They made it sound like a genre but to this day I’ve never come across another. Does anyone know of any? Preferably ones that aren’t as good as mine.
The story was shelved for fifteen years. Yes, I’m that old, shut up. By now I’d published my first novel and knew that it would be a while before my second one was finished. I needed something to fill the gap so that my literally dozens of fans wouldn’t forget about me. Hang on – what about that old play? It was already written. I’d just need to give it a polish and I could have it out in a few weeks.
Ha! I dug it out, dug out the obsolete word processing software I’d written it on, converted it to a format that a modern computer wouldn’t laugh at and read it.
Oh dear.
Not that it was bad. Overall I was still quite proud of it. But that terrorism stuff still didn’t make any sense and the stage adaptation was terrible. How had it ever made the shortlist? Reading it with all those years of perspective I saw immediately that I’d just adapted it straight from screen to stage without making any concession to the fact that they’re very different media and work in very different ways. I still had lots of short intercutting scenes – great for screen, bad for stage. I still had all of the ghostly disappearances, which were almost impossible to realise on stage. I even still had the Cenotaph scene, pre-filmed and projected on to the wall. And, for no reason that I can fathom, I had this weird bit where the set started covered in white sheets, which rose ghost-like into the flies. What was I thinking?
I started by simplifying the staging, including adding the gas attack so that Adams’s face could be obscured by a gas mask rather than awkward lighting. I took out most of the ghost effects, although I had to leave one or two otherwise it wouldn’t be much of a ghost story. Then I decided to do some extra research. Now that I was an internet ninja (why do people say that? Ninjas are stealthy assassins, not experts in whatever field you’re discussing) surely I’d be able to find something on the Unknown Soldier. I did. I found the whole story of how he was chosen and I incorporated it into the story, giving Adams better motivation for his revenge. At the same time I brushed up on the history of the firing squads and added more detail, particularly the bit where Dexter had to finish off the wounded Simpson, which was based on a real account. I removed the hunting of Dexter and the Outsider almost being shot by the firing squad because they were impractical on stage. I replaced all of this with the gas-masked soldiers dragging Brownie off to hell and finally turning on Adams. Most significantly, I realised how monumentally stupid it was not to have Willis’s ghost speak. I wrote a new scene there and also made another – failed – attempt at the terrorism subplot. I was worried that it wasn’t really connected to the main story and I had the brainwave of overcomplicating it by making an older Macfarlane the one who gave the Outsider his orders in a conceit that was even more implausible than an episode of Hollyoaks.
I knew it still wasn’t right but I didn’t know quite why or how to fix it. I needed help. So I did what I always do. I called in Phil Scary. He knew exactly what was wrong with it. Too many short scenes. Too many repeats of the initial desertion. Most of the soldiers needed fleshing out. It was too obvious that the first ghost was Adams. There was no reason for the gas-masked soldiers to turn on him. Phil didn’t know how to fix the terrorism stuff either but after a long discussion we finally worked out what the problem there was. The terrorism angle had only been introduced to serve someone else’s agenda and had nothing to do with the story. The Outsider did need to have some connection to the story but it needed to be something different. And then it hit me: he was a ghost too. He was one of the soldiers. In fact, he was Adams. That was much better and less predictable. I made him a conscientious objector who refused to kill to save his fellow soldier but was then forced to defend himself. That gave me a new identity for the first ghost (although we never learn his name because it would just get in the way). I removed one of the repeats of the desertion and went back to the original opening of the old man dying, which we both agreed worked better on stage. I expanded pretty much all of the sequences to flesh out the characters and give them more background. I added some war scenes too, including the one in Dexter’s office. Phil had suggested removing Sugden, who he felt was redundant, but if I did that, Willis would have no-one to talk to so instead I expanded their scenes together. And I made two more changes. The first ghost was now credited as Unknown Soldier, partly because Phil had found it confusing when he was credited as Adams and partly because I no longer had any other name to call him. I’d also realised that Jennifer’s role had become more dominant than the Outsider’s so, although it’s really an ensemble cast, I elevated her to top billing.
This is the draft that you’ve all read. (You have read it, haven’t you? Don’t make me come over there.) I was much happier with it. All of the problems had been solved and it was ten times better than any of the previous drafts. They’d all failed because I’d been unwilling to change enough. It only started to work when I radically altered things. Now I thought it was good, Phil thought it was good, when Leigh proofread it she said she kept having to reread it because she was getting caught up in the story and trying to work out who the Unknown Soldier really was. In fact, by the end she still wasn’t entirely sure, which wasn’t my intention but was okay if it meant that it made people think.
Six drafts may sound a lot but actually it isn’t. Some scripts go through far more than that. Hopefully I’ve given you some idea of what’s involved in getting a script from initial ideas to something that actually works. And if you found this difficult to follow, you know what you have to do: read the damn play!