Appropriately enough for a play which has been revived many, many times, there are actually two published versions of this play. The main one was published by Talonbooks in 1981. This was a relatively short time after the play opened in Vancouver in 1978 (roughly around Remembrance Day). The play was written by John Gray, though the original idea actually came from Eric Peterson, who played Billy (with John typically playing piano accompaniment). It sounds like a very collaborative effort throughout. Comparing the two plays, the introduction for the original edition is a bit droller, focusing on how they wrote this play, largely because they were unemployed theatre-types with nothing better to do. The recent edition (2012) focuses more on the different interpretations (and other actors) after Eric and John more or less retired from performing the piece. The introduction also explains how and why Albert Schultz (the disgraced AD of Soulpepper) convinced them to revive the play in 2009. There is a bit of a twist, which they worked out with Ted Dykstra. This time around, the play is much more explicitly a memory play and Billy is an old man, going through his old trunks, reminiscing about his wartime exploits.
This is obviously the version I saw. Indeed, the remount travelled back to Vancouver (I think just before I made it out there) and then came back one more time to Toronto, and I caught it in 2017. I was certainly glad to see Eric Peterson in the role, though I had seen him in a couple of other things by that point. There is also a DVD shot in 2013, and that is probably worth checking out if you never saw Peterson (in his prime or as the aged Bishop).
While the set-up and staging is fairly different between the two plays, interestingly enough the actual dialogue is identical in the two versions, except for the last couple of pages. If it is a young actor in the role then Bishop becomes a recruiting officer giving a speech to the young cadets enlisting for WWII (as he did in real life) whereas if it is an older actor, then there is another letter from Bishop to his wife, Margaret, about missing war.
Regardless of the age of the actor, it is quite a bravura piece of theatre. The actor must play Bishop, as well as a dozen or so other characters he interacts with (a drill sergeant, generals, an upper-class lady, a torch singer and even King George V). He also must be able to sing reasonably well, since Bishop (sometimes supported by the piano player) has a number of songs.
The play follows Bishop from his early days in Canada where he barely squeaked through Royal Military College (and he might well have been expelled if he hadn't enlisted as soon as WWI broke out), then he ships out to the front. He tries to figure a way to get out of the mud and is convinced to try out for the Royal Flying Corps. His progression isn't that smooth, but he eventually becomes a much decorated hero, at which point he is sidelined, as it would be too demoralizing were he to be shot down. It's a clever and fairly humourous piece, carried along by Peterson in all his roles. I think there is no question it works better on stage than on the page, but that isn't always an option (always an issue when studying a play). If you can check out the 2nd edition, that is probably the way to go, but as I indicated the differences are pretty slight overall.
No comments:
Post a Comment