A place for politics

• By KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE
• Theatre Critic
• Originally published in The Globe and Mail, Oct 29, 2004.

So what will it take to get Canadian political theatre into our theatres? Do we need a 9/11 of our own? Or should we join the United States in war, to follow the example set by Britain where Tony Blair’s decision to join the U.S.-led war in Iraq has reawakened the political beasts in British playwrights and audiences?

Although an argument can be made that most English-Canadian theatre is political in the sense of carving out its niche away from American and British influences, overtly political, lifted-from-headlines theatre has been too sporadic to constitute a recognizable trend in our theatres.

If you exclude well-intentioned but juvenile Fringe or SummerWorks productions, the only major Canadian play in Toronto to deal directly with world events of the past three years was The Adventures of Ali & Ali and the Axes of Evil at Theatre Passe Muraille. For our theatres, the “war on terrorism” and the Iraqi war might as well be happening in some parallel universe a million light-years away.

There are, of course, exceptions to the political malaise. In his own satirical way, Michael Hollingsworth is one. Another is Jason Sherman, the most politically engaged playwright for well over a decade, particularly on Canadian responses to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Despite a remount of The League of Nathans at the Factory Theatre and a Dora-winning production of Remnants at the Tarragon last year, Sherman noticed that requests for remounts of his earlier political plays are dropping and new ones are not being commissioned by very “cautious” artistic directors. When I suggest that perhaps a country’s political theatre is as active and controversial as the country itself—meaning that Canada’s peaceful reputation is hardly the ideal background for overt political drama—Sherman is ready with a rehearsed answer that indicates he’s heard it all before and he’s not buying it.

“Every culture can be asking, ought to be asking, questions about itself, its own mythology,” says Sherman. “Part of our own mythology is that we’re a nation of peacekeepers. Is that true? True, we could dredge up some examples that will contradict that notion. Why don’t we write plays about that? They’re not much in evidence. When it [political drama] does appear and it’s not up to artistic scratch . . . that one piece tends to take the hit for the whole genre.”

What’s a political boy to do? “You can either sit and stew about it, and God knows I’ve done plenty of that,” Sherman says, “or you can try to do something.”

Sherman being Sherman, he opted for the latter. He joined forces with Ross Manson, Lara Azzopardi and Andrew Soren to create The Wrecking Ball, an evening of political cabaret made up of short plays written specifically for the event. For the inaugural show—all four hope it’ll be more than a one-night stand—Sherman, Judith Thompson and David Young have contributed a new piece each. Also featured is the Canadian premiere of The Retreating World, a monologue on Iraq by American poet-playwright Naomi Wallace. David Buchbinder and his session men will provide the musical interludes.

But if world politics are the controversial content of The Wrecking Ball, the cabaret format is another often-misunderstood and abused art form in Toronto where it’s been turned into a dressed-up workshop of works in progress. The Wrecking Ball, with its emphasis on newly and specifically created short dramas, brings back two twins separated at birth: dissenting politics and traditional cabaret.

News of The Wrecking Ball hit my desk at the same time that a revised edition of Lisa Appignanesi’s authoritative study The Cabaret is about to hit a discerning bookstore near you. (By another coincidence, the CBC’s two-part political thriller H{-2}0, with Paul Gross as an ideologue who takes over Canada, concludes the same night as The Wrecking Ball, on the eve of the U.S. elections.) Appignanesi’s book focuses on the avant-garde artistic cabaret associated with France in the late 19th century which “blossomed into a unique medium for political and cultural satire in the German kabarett of the 1920s and early thirties.”

Cabaret has shadowed key moments in the history of Western modernism. “It was modernism’s youthful, light-hearted, sometimes raucous, late-night doppelganger, its urban underbelly of utopian hopes twinned with laughter,” writes Appignanesi.

In this post-postmodern age, cabaret is ready to play the same cultural role. Despite its name, The Wrecking Ball may well be the first building block on the way.

The Wrecking Ball can be seen on Nov. 1, 8 p.m. PWYC and donations. Factory Theatre Studio Caf�, 125 Bathurst St. Lisa Appignanesi’s The Cabaret is published by Yale University Press on Nov. 18.

_{2004 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.}

• 2 01 2005 - 00:00