War & Peace Quote by Trevor Nunn

"In my early years, my father was away as a soldier in the war. When he came back, work was very difficult to come by. Even though he was a highly skilled man, a maker of furniture, the payment for that work was very poor"

Trevor Nunn, Director

About this Quote

Memory does double duty here: it’s personal history, but it’s also a quiet brief against romantic myths of postwar renewal. Nunn frames his childhood with two absences - the father gone to war, then present but economically sidelined - and the whiplash between those states supplies the quote’s emotional engine. The sentence structure is tellingly plain, almost procedural, as if he’s learned that the story doesn’t need embellishment. The understatement is the point.

The detail that lands hardest is “highly skilled… maker of furniture.” Craft is supposed to guarantee dignity: a trade you can touch, measure, pass down. Nunn undercuts that comforting idea with the blunt reality that skill can be socially invisible when the market decides it. “Payment… was very poor” doesn’t just describe low wages; it signals a collapse in the bargain between labor and value. The father returns from national service only to meet a country that can’t (or won’t) translate gratitude into opportunity.

For a director, this isn’t incidental biography. It sketches the conditions that produce a particular artistic temperament: alert to class, to the gap between effort and reward, to the way institutions consume people and then leave them to scramble. It also hints at a household where making things - literally building furniture - is contrasted with scarcity, a tension that can sharpen an attraction to the theatre’s strange economics: ephemeral work, precarious employment, meaning assembled from limited materials.

Subtextually, the “war” is less a heroic backdrop than a force that rearranges family life and labor markets alike. The quote’s intent is to locate ambition, empathy, and perspective in that rearrangement.

Quote Details

Topic	Father
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About the Author

Trevor Nunn (born January 14, 1940) is a Director from England.

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