Playwright Natalie Songer: 'I felt we had to keep these stories alive'

This is exactly what happened to Norwich-based playwright Natalie Songer who uncovered a complex international story – that is both tragic and uplifting – while researching the lives of two of her uncles. The story proved to be such a revelation that Natalie has adapted the story of her search for her family’s story into a one woman play which will tour Suffolk, Norfolk and Essex this autumn.

It’s a story that takes audiences from occupied Holland in World War II to the outer reaches of the galaxy via NASA and the Space Race. It’s a story of resilience, of adaptability, fortitude and sacrifice.

“Satellites is a bittersweet, epic story of family, war and space travel. It tells the story of my two uncles Tom and Cor Gehrels who were separated from one another in World War II. Both were part of the Dutch resistance. Tom survived and emigrated to America and became a scientist while Cor was captured and died in a concentration camp shortly before the end of the war. It’s sad that they started in the same place at the outbreak of war and ended up in very different places.

“They were both very remarkable people, very accomplished young men and yet their stories were fading over time – a very short space of time. Before I started researching their story I didn’t know the exact details of their lives and what they had endured and what they had achieved.

“It hit home to me that memories are really fragile. Two generations on, they were already starting to fade from view. Once I discovered what had happened I felt we had to keep these stories alive and in a way reunite the two brothers because their stories are inter-linked in a most extraordinary way – crossing time and continents.”

Natalie is a storyteller at heart and uses theatre as means of getting her stories across. She loves sharing extraordinary tales with the enthusiasm of an evangelist. She loves nothing more than engaging with an audience and sharing her love for the material and for her subjects.

Talking to her you realise that people lie at the heart of everything she does. They are rarely rich and famous people but rather they are forgotten, slightly obscure people, modest people, who have been sidelined by history, but nevertheless have extraordinary stories to tell.

She has created work around the largely unknown queens of England, the Suffragette movement in Ipswich and now an epic autobiographical family drama which reaches out to the stars.

Natalie trained as an actor at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland before gaining a Masters in Arts Administration from Goldsmiths. Since 2008 she has been making shows and collaborating with East Anglian companies such as The Mercury Theatre, Colchester; the New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich; Eastern Angles and Tusk Theatre in Ipswich as well as the Battersea Arts Centre in London.

She also directed Footsteps, an Ipswich-based walking tour/promenade performance by Ipswich playwright Martha Loader, which told the story of the local Suffragette movement by anchoring the action in the real locations where events happened.

The origins of Satellites, her latest show, started in her young teenage years when she became fixated on becoming an astronaut and the family gave her the address of Tom who was, by that point, living in Arizona.

“At the time he was working as an astronomer, so I wrote to him asking what was the best way to go about being an astronaut. I was serious about it. I wanted advice. He, very kindly, wrote a letter back and we became pen-pals. On one occasion he sent me his autobiography. It was called ‘On The Glassy Sea’ and in the accompanying letter he said that the book contained family stories that were really important to know

“But, when I looked at it there was a lot of very complicated science in there and I wasn’t really old enough to understand it, so I just put it on a shelf and largely forgot about it.

“When he died in 2011, I was 21 and remembered I had the book. I took it down and started to read it and was just blown away not just by the amazing life that he had led but also the story of his brother that I barely knew about.”

Fired up by the stories in the book and feeling that there was more to discover, Natalie set off on a journey of discovery which took her first to Arizona where she met Tom’s immediate family and gained access to Tom’s archive which is housed at the University of Arizona where he was a professor.

“I had a wonderful time going through boxes of stuff, photographs, papers, fascinating things and made some fascinating discoveries there and that archive has become a very important part of the show.”

She then flew to Leipzig in Germany and visited the camp where Cor died just as the war was coming to a close. “That was a very difficult experience. Very sobering but something I’m glad I did and something everyone should do just once – even though it’s not very comfortable – just to try and understand the horror of what happened.”

She said that when thinking of a way to translating this epic research trip into a coherent drama, she quickly realised that simple was best. Satellites has become a three-pronged narrative which is told through Natalie’s eyes. We see the different stories come to life through her eyes as she unearths different elements of her uncles lives.

There’s also a dramatic irony which sits at the heart of the narrative – a fact that her uncle Tom battled hard to come to terms with.

Natalie explained that there was quite a large age gap between the two brothers. Cor was the elder brother (in his mid-40s with a family) and worked as an engineer for Phillips, the Dutch electronics firm. He was arrested and then imprisoned in 1944 which prompted the 18 year old Tom to disappear one night.

“He set out to try and find his brother – in the courageous, unthinking way that 18 year olds do. He set off on his bike and by sheer luck found his way to the British Army in Belgium.

“He was evacuated out and sent to Britain where he trained with the SOE (Special Operations Executive) to work behind enemy lines disrupting roads and communications. He was parachuted back into Holland with the task of co-ordinating the various resistance groups.”

She said that Cor too was working for the resistance while he was working for Phillips and it is believed that he was betrayed by one of his colleagues or by a member of the resistance who had been compromised.

She said that it quickly became clear that Tom idolised his brother – he loved the fact that Cor had been in the merchant navy and saw him as something of an adventurer and for decades after the war, he refused to believe that Cor had died in the manner that he had.

“He desperately didn’t want him to have died in the way that he had heard – Cor had died of starvation in the run-up to liberation which is just the cruellest fate because he was just weeks away from freedom.”

The other fact that Tom Gehrels found hard to stomach was the fact that Cor, because he was an electronic engineer, was interned in a work camp that that built the V2 rockets. The V2 rocket was designed by German scientist Wernher Von Braun, who, after the war, was recruited by NASA to project manage America’s role in the space race and designer the Saturn V launch vehicle that put man on the moon.

“I spoke to the archivist at Cor’s camp and she went through the paperwork they had on him and explained what life would have been like for them and his last few days which was terribly difficult to hear, particularly when you are related to that person. It really brings it home that this does happen to ordinary people.”

She said that Tom was very conflicted by the fact that his career in the space programme would not have been possible without the suffering of his brother and the others in the work camp.

“He found it difficult to work in the same organisation as Von Braun – in the 60s particularly – when he was hailed as the man who got America to the moon. My uncle Tom never got over that. He was very angry by the way that Von Braun had been adopted into American society. He wrote many article for scientific journals and newspapers about Von Braun’s past but it never managed to change anything.”

She adds that there are still many grey areas in Cor’s story and where there are holes in the narrative she has used dramatic license based on the facts that do exist. “It’s also a bit strange and surreal in places but everything has been researched and there is nothing in the play that couldn’t have happened.”

Satellites, by Natalie Songer, one woman’s journey to discover her family history, opens at Colchester Arts Centre on September 21 and goes on tour across Suffolk and Norfolk before finishing its run at St George’s Theatre, Great Yarmouth on October 8. Full list of venues and booking information can be found on Natalie Songer’s website.