Wherefore art thou Canada?
Stratford Festival turns the spotlight on our country’s history.
They stick out immediately from the 2017 Stratford Festival lineup: two plays featuring vivid moments from Canadian history, real and imagined, alongside Romeo and Juliet, Tartuffe, and Guys and Dolls.
The Komagata Maru Incident tackles the 1914 barring of a shipload of Punjabis, many of them Sikh veterans of the British army, from Vancouver. In The Breathing Hole, commissioned by the festival, a polar bear witnesses the first contact between European and Indigenous North Americans, the Franklin expedition, and passengers cruising an ice-free Arctic Ocean.
Antoni Cimolino, artistic director of the southwestern Ontario theatre festival, spent years considering how to mark the sesquicentennial in a thought-provoking way. “Canada is very much worth celebrating, but we have to acknowledge that it’s a recent nation set against a backdrop of people who’ve been here for thousands of years.”
The Canadian plays fit his vision of a season examining the complexities of identity — think of Romeo’s anguish at being a Montague, or Tartuffe’s hypocritical piety. Likewise, if Canadians see ourselves as a welcoming nation, how do we account for acts of racism and exclusion? “We’re never very far from parts of our history we’d rather not remember,” Cimolino observed.
He said The Komagata Maru Incident playwright Sharon Pollock welcomed the chance to expand her 1976 work to include more voices, especially those of the passengers, and to incorporate traditional Sikh storytelling.
Playwright Colleen Murphy and director Reneltta Arluk, who has Inuvialuit, Cree, and Dene roots, spent time in the Far North with an Inuit sister organization before staging The Breathing Hole. Several cast members are Indigenous; like others in the Stratford company, they have roles in multiple productions.
Franklin and his shipmates are treated with dignity. “Sending up members of a British expedition would be the easiest thing in the world, but these men lost their lives,” said Cimolino.
The plays represent a departure from the self-congratulatory history Canada has tended to celebrate — an important step, he said, in “the push and pull of how we identify ourselves.” The Komagata Maru Incident runs from August 5 to September 24 and The Breathing Hole from July 30 to September 22 at the Stratford Festival.