Theatre as Class Struggle: Myroslaw Irchan’s Ukrainian Canadian plays

Myroslaw Irchan (1897-1937), the pen-name used by the left wing author and dramatist, Andrii Babiuk, was the most famous Ukrainian-language playwright in Canada in the 1920s. After moving to Winnipeg from Soviet Ukraine in 1923 on the invitation of the Ukrainian Labor-Farm Temple Association (ULFTA), Irchan played a key role in the cultural and political life of the organization, which was then at the peak of its influence. During his time in Canada he authored ten original plays, a manual of stagecraft, two volumes of memoirs, a novel about immigrant life, and a collection of short stories (as well as several poems and numerous journalistic pieces!) in an intense burst of creativity spanning just six years. He also translated and produced adaptations of four additional plays that became part of the repertoire of the Ukrainian immigrant stage. Returning to Soviet Ukraine in 1929 (despite ominous signs of the Stalinist Terror that was about to descend with full force upon Ukrainian society), Irchan was subsequently denounced as an “enemy of the people” and arrested in a major purge of Ukrainian Communist intellectuals in 1933. Sent to a hard labour camp in Siberia, he was summarily executed in 1937, only to be posthumously rehabilitated during the Khrushchev thaw of the 1950s. My paper will discuss the class politics of the agit-prop plays that Myroslaw Irchan wrote or had mounted by amateur and semi-professional theatrical groups that were then active in Ukrainian communities across Canada.