Opening this week

A dozen years ago, on the night of the 70th anniversary of D-Day, theatre audiences in Chichester sat entranced at a remarkable new play chronicling the painfully fraught hours building up to the launch of the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6 1944.

That play was Pressure.

This week the film version of Pressure opens in cinemas around the world – a remarkable journey for a piece which still lingers powerfully in the minds of anyone lucky enough to have seen it in Chichester.

In the tense 72 hours before D-Day, with the fate of the free world hanging in the balance, Pressure offers the true story of Scottish meteorologist Group Captain James Stagg, who advised General Eisenhower on the crucial weather forecast for the D-Day landings.

The play was written by David Haig who starred in it in the Minerva – and who returned to Chichester earlier this summer with his new play Magic.

“I'm really proud of Pressure,” he said. “It has had such a long and productive journey. That was in 2014 and I remember doing the show in Chichester on the anniversary of the landings. It was an extraordinarily resonant experience and then to revive the play four years later and then tour it again and then take it to Canada as well. And all this evolved from this very specific hero, a meteorologist persuading the mighty Eisenhower to change the time of the landings.”

Now there is the film. It opened in America on May 29 and now in Europe this September starring Andrew Scott as James Stagg in a cast also featuring Brendan Fraser, Kerry Condon and Damian Lewis.

“I'm not in it. They asked if I would like to play one of the smaller roles and I don't mean this to sound in any way self-important but I just thought that having played Stagg 300 times I would rather just watch and enjoy the film!”

Pressure takes us back to the incredible tension at Southwick House near Portsmouth in the

days immediately before D-Day as the military supremos agonise when to go ahead with the biggest invasion Europe has ever seen.

One last crucial question remains: will the weather be right on the day?

Supreme Allied Commander Eisenhower’s dilemma is that there are two definite forecasts. American celebrity weatherman Colonel Krick breezily predicts sunshine, while Dr James Stagg, chief meteorological officer for the Allied forces, forecasts a storm...

“There is just something about the story,” David says, “and about Stagg, this unsung hero, a man from a very humble background, this son of a plumber, this Scot who joined the meteorological service, this man who stood up against the mighty Americans and said ‘You really must delay D-Day by 24 hours.’”

Because Stagg stood his ground, 70-80,000 lives were saved: “This huge Michael Fish hurricane hit. The landing craft were flat-bottomed. They would just have been turned over, and the men would have drowned.”

Stagg’s genius was that he then noticed that a storm near Newfoundland was slowing down: “Though the hurricane was still blowing, he said ‘If you go tomorrow you will be fine.’”

David, who played Stagg in the play, believes the man’s advice was founded on the brilliance of his science, but also on his instinctive understanding of the volatility of northern European weather. With these two things, he managed to convince Eisenhower.

Against him was the US celebrity weather forecaster, a man who had saved Hollywood millions with his forecasts for the film industry. But Stagg knew that Krick’s methods were wrong. Krick pointed back to weather patterns going back years.

“Krick was saying ‘This happened in 1902 and 1923, and you are absolutely safe’, but what he didn’t know was the extraordinary volatility of the British weather. In effect, the play is a thriller about the weather, and that’s what people have been saying as they have been coming out, which is very gratifying!

“Ultimately, you have got these three human beings within this hugely-pressurised situation down at Southwick House, and the fourth character is the weather.”

The play came about because the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh wanted a Scottish story. Its artistic associate John Dove asked David if he had heard of Stagg: “I said no, but I researched him and was immediately caught by him. I then thought if you could do the four-day countdown, you would have the microcosm within the macrocosm, with the weather outside.”

David, whose film credits include Two Weeks Notice and Four Weddings and a Funeral, never intended to play Stagg himself on the stage: “Initially, we asked one or two very high-status Scottish actors that you would immediately know if I said the names. They both loved the play, but weren’t able to do it. Once those two options had gone, everyone then said to me ‘Why don’t you do it? I was very relieved that it happened that way.

“When I wrote My Boy Jack (the story of Rudyard Kipling and his grief for his son, John, who died in the First World War), there were certain things in Kipling that reminded me of my father and of myself. It was a personal journey for me.

“This was different. Because I didn’t have myself in mind, I didn’t therefore have the complications I would expect of being in my own play.”

David found that he could easily separate David the actor from David the writer, even to the extent of putting himself in the third person in rehearsals: “Now what did he, the writer, mean here?”, he would ask.

David’s playwriting began in the mid to late 90s: “I started thinking that I wanted to take more control of the whole entity, rather than just being a part of the picture. The moment I started writing, I realised that I enjoyed the balance between the showing-off side of my nature and the side that likes sitting for seven to eight hours in front of a laptop and not having to communicate with anyone. I have found that that balance has been rewarding, and I would like to have that counter-balance for as long as possible.”