Lecture Topics

April 1st, 2010: Donna Coates

Lecture: (Not) About Heroes: Canada and the Theatre of War

Until the late 1970s, Canadian playwrights seemed reluctant to write about war, but all that began to change in the late 1970s, with the wildly successful national tour of the offbeat music about a neglected national hero, Billy Bishop. The play, by pianist song-writer John Gray, featured actor Eric Peterson who, in a tour-de-force performance, monologued and sang his way through seventeen roles.

Shortly after, John Murrell's Waiting For the Parade, which features a group of women coping on the Calgary home front while their men away fighting, also appeared. While both plays have had sustaining power and continue to be taught and performed across the country, not many playwrights followed their lead until the twenty-first century, when the production of Canadian war drama suddenly began to "explode."

My talk, which will analyze plays by many of the country's best-known playwrights such as Stephen Massicotte, David French, Vern Thiessen, Jason Sherman, Marie Clements, Sharon Pollock, Wajdi Mouawad, Colleen Wagner, Judith Thompson, and Guillermo Verdecchi and Marcus Youssef, will demonstrate that while the first popular war play in Canada may have been about a war hero, few playwrights followed suit, as most cast a critical eye on either the role of the Canadian military or the government during the First and Second World Wars and contemporary warfare.