Originally, The Swastika Party was going to be set during our own decade. The Producer, Augustine Flint-Hartle, a recent graduate from a drama school in the UK, had asked me to write a play for four women, bemoaning the fact that there were few plays with challenging roles for women being written these days.

I have always been fascinated by the power of symbols and how we can be inspired and corrupted by communication which uses them. Overt use of the Swastika is still illegal in Germany, a symbol which was corrupted by the Nazis and now is a symbol of hatred and totalitarianism for virtually all of humanity. The same symbol was once and still is in the Hindu faith.

We are surrounded by symbols; the advertising industry uses and abuses them. The fashion industry and the worlds of health and safety use them. We wear them. They are on all of our products and the services we use.

Augustine and I were at a birthday party in Brighton which had a 1940’s theme. Augustine had dressed up for the occasion (see the photo above!). I hadn’t bothered and was dressed in my writers’ black! My youth was filled with memories of my own father’s memories of the War, of his evacuation, his experiences in the East End. My mother’s experience of War in Harrogate. She was young but her own father was a veteran of the Somme and worked for the Civil Service in London in the second world war. I had an awareness of the Blitz. Of Moseley and anti-Semitism and of rationing at an early age. My grandmother was a towering personality who was scared of thunder yet had refused to leave her kitchen when the bombs began to fall each night.

Only recently we watched (so like a Movie) the bombs falling on Bagdhad. The flashes in the night sky, the film footage from above of laser-guided missiles.

Augustine was talking about the play at that party and I was taking photos, enjoying the impossibly expert dancing to war tunes, there in Brighton in 2004! It was as if her 1940’s persona at that party turned to me and said: “Set the play in the Second World War. Then it will be even more of a play about today.”

Restless to write, the play was finished within the month. A play about war and symbols, but mostly a play about people and what is important to them.

After research and immersing myself in my family connections to the play’s content, the play was workshopped and redrafted several times. It now stands at seventies minutes and one act!

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