My Boy Jack by David Haig

Exactly 100 years after the end of the First World War, Balham’s award-wining theatre group, Southside, will perform ‘My Boy Jack’ by Olivier award-winner David Haig, at Chestnut Grove Theatre @ Chestnut Grove Academy, Boundaries Road SW12.. Performances Wednesday 24 to Saturday 27 October 2018, Wednesday to Friday at 7.45 pm Saturday at 3.00pm. Box office: 07914 657524 or book online.

About the show
Rudyard Kipling, acclaimed author of ‘The Jungle Book’, pulled strings to enable his only son to join the Army at the beginning of the First World War. John (known as Jack) was very short-sighted and had already failed three medical tests to be an infantry officer. But Kipling – an ardent imperialist – was determined that John should have the chance to prove himself as a warrior in what Kipling and many others saw as a moral crusade.

When John is reported missing after the horrific Battle of Loos in 1915, Kipling and his wife Carrie begin their own crusade to discover what happened to their only son.

‘My Boy Jack’ is a deeply moving drama that traces John’s journey from the Kipling family home in Sussex to the trenches of the Western Front – where the bespectacled John has to earn the respect of ordinary soldiers in the Irish Guards.