Sherrill Grace: Answering
Fair
Liberty's Call: Canada's Theatre of War
Over
the past 15 years Canada has produced a large number of artistic works
that
represent war. This phenomenon is
apparent in literature, painting, film, and drama, and my question is
why? I will approach my question from two
perspectives:
first with a general overview of the variety of contemporary Canadian
artistic
representations of war, with a focus on drama; second by more closely
examining
Sharon Pollock’s Fair Liberty’s Call.
Pollock’s play is itself part of the recent theatre of war
phenomenon
but it is also an important play that establishes, I believe,
parameters for
the wider context that I am identifying.
The play is historical, documentary to a degree, epic in style
and
scope, and, I argue, an allegory for the Canadian nation. In profound
ways it
is also an anti-war play. It was
commissioned for Stratford, where it premiered in 1993, but it has not
had a
major Canadian production since. While I am of course especially
interested in
this one, very rich, complex play, I am also pondering what I see as a
wider
cultural phenomenon, and I am asking to what degree (if at all) Pollock
has
broken new ground with this play.