Soldiers’ stories

Christian Goutsis plays soldier Robert Ross in the Theatre Calgary production of The Wars. (David Cooper/Theatre Calgary)

In the gap between the writing of a play and its premiere onstage, a lot can happen in that bigger theatre known as the world. When Dennis Garnhum and Vern Thiessen sat down to pen their respective dramas about Canadian soldiers in the First World War a few years ago, they had no idea they were creating works that would tap into the country’s zeitgeist today.

“When I started this project, Canada was not involved in Afghanistan, and now we’re in the middle of a war,” says director-turned-playwright Garnhum, whose dramatization of Timothy Findley’s The Wars debuts this month at Theatre Calgary. “When I started, [The Wars] didn’t have particular relevance, and now it’s the daily news. The timeliness is eerie.”

Thiessen, whose play Vimy will be unveiled at Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre in October, says his story, begun in 2003, was meant to mark this year’s 90th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, not mirror today’s headlines. “You pray to the theatre gods that your plays will be meaningful regardless of when they premiere,” says the Governor General’s Award-winning dramatist. “But I would be thrilled if Vimy makes people reflect on Afghanistan. That would be great.”

Both new plays view war from the ground level, training their sights on Canadian soldiers, the ordeals of the battlefield and the psychological effects of warfare. The Wars, based on Findley’s famous 1977 novel and directed by Garnhum, follows the young, sensitive Robert Ross (played by popular Calgary actor Christian Goutsis) from a green recruit training in southern Alberta to a heroic officer making difficult choices amid the muddy, bloody hell of the Western Front.

Playwright Vern Thiessen, whose new play, Vimy, will premiere at Edmonton's Citadel Theatre in October. (The Citadel Theatre)

Vimy, directed by James MacDonald, is set in a field hospital in France after the April 1917 storming of the German-held ridge, an allied victory in which Canadian troops played a decisive part. Thiessen focuses on four wounded soldiers from across Canada — a Québécois butcher (Vincent Hoss-Desmarais), a First Nations scout (Sheldon Elter) from Alberta,  a Winnipeg labourer (Mat Busby) and a canoe-maker (Phil Fulton) from Ontario — as well as their Nova Scotian nurse (Daniela Vlaskalic), as he re-examines the battle that became a landmark event in shaping the country’s national identity.

The question of self-image seems especially appropriate as Canadians find themselves taking a key role in a foreign conflict once more. “With the war in Afghanistan, some people look at that, and they identify that as a great Canadian thing,” Thiessen says. “And then there are other people who think that’s not what the identity of this country should be about. It all boils down to how we want to be perceived as a country.”

Neither play, however, is an all-out attack on war. “That’s not my particular interest,” Thiessen says. “My concern is with human beings in a horrible situation, like the guys coming back from Afghanistan, and how any soldier has to deal with the effects that would have on your life.”

Garnhum, who knew and worked with the late Findley — and refers to the novelist-playwright affectionately by his nickname, “Tiff” — says he approached his adaptation of The Wars from an adamantly antiwar stance, but found his views challenged in the course of turning the book into a play.

“Tiff is brilliant at both articulating the cost of war, but also the power of heroism,” he notes. “This is, believe it or not, meant to be an uplifting story. Robert Ross is this young man who is not an ideal candidate for war, but he persists, he does it and he succeeds; he doesn’t turn away and say no. I’ve had to change my attitude to war to more closely match Tiff’s, to understand that complexity and duality. At the beginning I was basically antiwar; now I’m trying to make it a two-sided conversation.”

For Garnhum, who directed Findley’s last two plays at the Stratford Festival, adapting The Wars has been a labour of love that began shortly after the author’s death in 2002. He has been writing and workshopping the script since then, and brought it with him when he became artistic director of Theatre Calgary in 2005. His production, boasting a cast of 16, is being co-presented with the Vancouver Playhouse, where it will run in October.

Playwright-director Dennis Garnhum. (Theatre Calgary)

Garnhum is well aware of the risks of opening a big, untried play at two of Canada’s major public theatres, especially considering The Wars is now a standard text in high schools and universities. “I’ve taken a lot of liberties with it,” he admits. “I realized if I didn’t, it wouldn’t work as a play.” But he says Findley, a man of the theatre, would appreciate that.

Thiessen, an ex-Edmontonian who has premiered several plays at the Citadel, including Shakespeare’s Will and the Governor General’s Award-winning Einstein’s Gift, also knows he could receive some flak for Vimy. “I’m really opening myself up to criticism [by writing about Vimy Ridge],” he says from New York. “I tell my American friends it’s like writing a play about Gettysburg. I can see the e-mails coming now: ‘Dear Mr. Thiessen, I recently saw your play and I noticed some historical inaccuracies.’ You just can’t win, writing a play about such a huge mythological event in most Canadians’ minds. And yet these are the things that I think playwrights in our country need to tackle.” His research included poring over journals and other first-hand accounts of the battle, some of them unpublished, and making a couple of visits to Vimy in northern France, now the site of Canada’s largest war monument, where commemorative ceremonies were held this past spring.

Garnhum has done his homework, too, which included having real Canadian Forces personnel put his cast and crew through a day-long boot camp to give them a taste of military discipline. “They pushed and shoved us and paraded us around, taught us how to use guns,” he says cheerfully. “They treated us very much like Word World I soldiers. The man leading us had just come back from Afghanistan, so he was telling us all about it. For all the news reports you hear, there’s the other half you’ll never hear, because it’s too unspeakable.”

Both Garnhum and Thiessen say if there’s one salient difference between the soldiers involved in Canada’s NATO mission and the young men who sailed off to Europe in 1914, it’s that the modern military is much less innocent.

“Today’s soldiers obviously know what they’re going into, in a way that they didn’t back then,” says Thiessen. “I’m just in awe of the Canadian Forces, those men and women who go over there and risk their lives. That doesn’t necessarily mean I agree with everything they’re involved in, but the sacrifices that they make on behalf of the country are truly astonishing to me.”

The Wars runs Sept. 18-Oct. 7 at Theatre Calgary and Oct. 13-Nov. 3 at the Vancouver Playhouse.

Vimy runs Oct. 20-Nov. 11 at the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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