Learning about your grandfather’s experiences in World War One is one thing, dramatising them on stage is entirely another, but actor Cameron Stewart says reading his grandfather’s diary entries about life at the front compelled him to give them a wider audience.

Cameron’s one-man show, My Grandfather's Great War, which earned him nominations as Best Actor at the MEN Awards and Best Solo Show at The Stage Awards 2008, calls in at Norden Farm in Maidenhead next week.

Cameron says: “There was a chap behind a machine gun post, and my grandfather talks about how he defended it with a pistol and how he’s worried about running out of bullets and then he writes ‘so I took a smoke from my pocket’.

“He took out the post with his pistol while smoking a pipe, when I read that, I thought I should do something.”

What Cameron did first, was to record the diaries of his grandfather Captain Alexander Stewart as a talking book, which later aired on BBC Radio 4’s The Today Programme and was subsequently published as A Very Unimportant Officer by Hodder & Stoughton.

He then teamed up with director David Benson and devised the one-man show, which has since won rave reviews.

Cameron’s experiences show that persistence can pay off, but performing his grandfather’s wartime endeavours night after night must take some doing.

“It does,” Cameron admits. “It’s something I’m very close to and I found around Christmas time I started stuttering a bit in ordinary life, and somebody said to me, ‘Are you sure you’re not suffering from secondhand shellshock?’ “When reading the diaries, I would occasionally burst into tears. It’s as if I’m doing the grieving that he never overtly did for all those who died around him. He was the only survivor. Imagine it – if you went to work and by the end of the day all of the friends in your office were dead – it’s not something we have ease with doing.”

Although only young when his grandfather died, Cameron has fond memories of the man he portrays. “My grandfather died when I was seven but I remember him vividly, and I talk about that in the show.

“Playing my grandfather, I have a genetic memory as he’s my flesh and blood. Intially, I was nervous, I thought soldiers might be offended by my realistically pacifist approach but I haven’t had any negative comments at all, they’ve been touched and moved by it.

“There was a time when some local kids wanted to interview me after the show. I said how I felt a bit of a wuss talking about what’s happened to me in light of what my grandfather went through.

“Then this young girl said, ‘You know you shouldn’t feel like a wuss as what you’re doing with this is courageous. My friend and I wouldn’t have know anything about it, if you weren’t doing that’.”

My Grandfather's Great War comes to Norden Farm Centre for the Arts, Maidenhead on Thursday, February 26 at 7.30pm. Tickets: 01628 788997.