My Boy Jack (play)

My Boy Jack is a 1997 play by English actor David Haig. It tells the story of Rudyard Kipling and his grief for his son, John, who died in the First World War.

The title comes from Kipling's 1915 poem, My Boy Jack.

My Boy Jack played at the Theatre Royal, Nottingham, in 2004. It then toured Oxford, Richmond, Brighton, Norwich, Cardiff and Cambridge, with the newly formed Haig Lang Productions. In America, My Boy Jack has been performed under the title My Son Jack.

A television drama based on Haig's play was filmed in August 2007, with Haig as Kipling and Daniel Radcliffe as Jack Kipling. It was distributed by Granada and Ecosse Films. It was broadcast on ITV1 and TV3 (Ireland) at 9pm on Sunday 11 November 2007, Remembrance Day.

John Kipling's body was never found, despite his father's extensive search. In 1992 the Commonwealth War Graves Commission claimed to have identified his body. However, Tonie and Valmai Holt (authors of the successful Major and Mrs Holt's Battlefield Guides) doubted the "identification" and researched John's life and death in detail, writing the first biography of John Kipling, entitled My Boy Jack? In November 2007 the Imperial War Museum mounted an exhibition covering John Kipling's life and included a section on the Holts' doubts about the identification of his corpse. The ITV drama does not claim to be a documentary account, but a representation of the experience of so many families who lost sons during the Great War.

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