ONE FROM THE ROCK
Newfoundland’s entry into Canada dramatized at NAC
When an adaptation of Wayne Johnston’s Newfoundland-centric novel, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, opens at the National Arts Centre next week, it will be a dream fulfilled for Jillian Keiley, artistic director of the NAC’s English Theatre department.
For starters, Keiley is a Newfoundlander who is always proud to bring stories from her home province to a national audience. This one is especially close to her heart, not only because she, like every Newfoundlander, grew up hearing the tale of how the island came to be part of Canada, but also because she was the founder and artistic director of Artistic Fraud, the theatre company that first mounted the production.
What’s more, the NAC run marks the first time Robert Chafe’s adaptation will be performed outside Newfoundland.
The play tells the story of Joey Smallwood, the charismatic character who became Newfoundland’s first premier, his role in bringing the Dominion of Newfoundland into Canada’s confederation and his fictional nemesis, Shelagh Fielding, the dogged reporter who questions his every step.
“Newfoundland may be the only place in history that we know of that gave up its dominion voluntarily,” observed Keiley in a phone interview from St. John’s, where she is directing rehearsals. “It wasn’t taken over. We actually voted ourselves out of nationhood.”
She’s quick to note that she’s proud of her country, and the play is definitely not anti-Canadian. Rather, its tension is rooted in the divisiveness of the issue at the time. Fifty-two per cent of people voted in favour of joining Canada in the 1949 referendum; 48 per cent voted against.
In Keiley’s own family, for example, her grandparents were in favour of joining Confederation. Her husband’s family members were not.
“The day it happened — April Fool’s Day, 1949 — they pulled down their blinds for weeks and everybody wore black. It was a big deal,” she said. “People took it really hard. There was that sentiment that Joey Smallwood sold us down the river.”
It’s an aspect of Canadian history that was brought to life in Johnston’s novel, a Canadian bestseller published in 1998. It was nominated for both the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award. Chafe’s theatrical adaptation was commissioned by the Shaw Festival, but it was Keiley’s former company, Artistic Fraud, that jumped on producing it. It debuted in January 2015.
One question is whether the story will be meaningful to audiences outside Newfoundland. Absolutely, responds Keiley, and not just because there are so many expat Newfoundlanders scattered across the country.
“It’s also just a great story,” she says. “There’s the romance — or non-romance — between these two characters who really want to kill each other all the time, and then the political story. It was a really big deal here, but a lot of people don’t know of it.”
Parallels can also be drawn to the current political situation in the United States, and the tension following the presidential election. “The world could have gone in such polar opposite directions,” says Keiley, comparing it to the Newfoundland referendum. “The vote was really, really close.”
The production features 10 actors, including Newfoundland actor Colin Furlong as Smallwood and Saskatchewan’s Carmen Grant as Fielding.
“When I was doing auditions for Joey, as people know him, I was careful that it would be someone who could play him really truthfully,” Keiley said. “He was a signature kind of guy, really short and he had a huge short-man complex. He was always hopping on his toes and jumping to meet people eye to eye. Colin does a brilliant job with him. And Carmen, though she’s from Saskatchewan, actually plays the very soul of Newfoundland in her portrayal.”
Keiley, who founded Artistic Fraud in 1994, came to Ottawa in 2012 to be NAC’s artistic director of English-language theatre. Her four-year contract at the NAC was renewed last year, putting her in place until 2020.
Rather than create a new work from scratch, her strategy has been to seek out creation companies worthy of investment under the NAC’s Collaborations program.
“A new work takes much longer and is much more expensive to make than a work you already know,” Keiley said. “There are already a lot of really fine creation companies in the country. They make brand new work and create new work, and have the machine in place to do it. What we have at the NAC is a reasonable budget.
“So when I’m programming at the NAC, I look to these projects first and see if we can put extra money or skill sets into it to make the work stronger.
“My focus is to make sure it’s really strong, world-class. That’s why it’s so important to me that the work is given the time and resources it needs.” lsaxberg@postmedia.com twitter.com/ lynnsaxberg