Eastbourne trauma play would have been so right for our times...

Sadly, that won’t be happening now, depriving us of the chance to see a piece with special resonance for our times.

Tim sets the scene: “After a long service career, Tommy attempts to fit into civvy life but as the world conspires against him, nothing is safe from his increasing outrage –Post Office queues to Ikea, computer games and smart-phone zombies, all feel the force of Tommy’s frustration as the walls close in and crash around him.

Tim adapted the play adapted from former soldier Neil Blower Watkin’s acclaimed diary: “He wrote it as part of his recovery having served in the tank regiment and served in Iraq.”

Tim was then approached to turn it into a stage show – “which was mostly a question of cutting and editing. We are talking about getting 45,000 words down to about 10,000 words. And the idea was to keep it direct and simple.”

Tim initially wrote it as a solo project for a younger actor, and it proved hugely successful. It went to New York, but on their return the actor became unavailable – and with the next performance looming, Tim himself stepped in to perform it with just 48 hours remaining to ensure that the show went on.

“Being older gave it a different perspective, and Tim has made the show his own ever since: “The character is very down to earth. He never expected to amount to much. He says rank was never what it was about for him.

“He did 22 years and then eight years beyond as a reserve, and he comes out of it all thinking he is going to have no trouble finding a job. He thinks the world is his oyster. But he finds out that things that happened to him revisit him and he goes on a downward spiral. He engages through humour. He is a very chirpy character, and you get examples of military humour, but you begin to realise that this character is damaged and you start to see the cracks in his make-up. We follow his spiral downwards, but we take him through and he comes out the other side. There is hope. And the key to that is (the charity) Combat Stress. He picks up a phone.”

And that’s the crucial message: he talks and they listen: “It’s a message that goes way beyond the military, and that’s just what comes out. The final message is that we all need to communicate.

Tim draws on his own life: “In my own personal experience, there have been things that have been incredibly traumatic for me. There have been all sorts of things in my life that I didn’t realise had impacted on me in quite such a way.”

Inevitably the message of communication is even more crucial now than it has ever been. There have been plenty of predictions that, as/if we emerge from the Covid era, there are going to be countless people standing on the precipice of PTSD.

“There is a significant rise in male suicide, particularly at the moment. We have got a real mental-health pandemic coming out of Covid....”