RETELLING HISTORY
Shaw Festival brings patriotic tale of 1837 revolt to a modern audience,
To commemorate Canada’s sesquicentennial, the Shaw Festival is looking back at the time of Confederation — 30 years prior, in fact, to the year1837, when a small army of farmers and labourers attempted an illfated rebellion against the government of Upper Canada.
At the same time, 1837: The Farmers’ Revolt, written by Rick Salutin and Theatre Passe Muraille in 1973, is a vestige of the Canadian theatre movement of the 1970s — a time when dominant plays from the U.S. and Britain were being countered with fiercely patriotic stories about Canadian lives.
With the subject matter and collective structure (many characters appear through monologues, short scenes and group songs), the play has found a life in high school productions, but in the professional theatre world, it took an outsider — the new Shaw artistic director, Tim Carroll (a Brit, no less) — to introduce 1837 to a new generation of theatregoers and reintroduce it to those who caught its premiere. Director Philip Akin has a formidable task with this 1837, since the play’s nationalist pride is presented today in an atmosphere where nationalism has taken an extreme, dark turn — which certainly isn’t remedied if the material comes from almost exclusively white male perspectives.
Ascene in which a farmer travels to Detroit, where residents welcome him with open arms, booming industry, free universal education, religious tolerance and, in fact, refuse to let him go back to the country where he came from, shows exactly how different the world of the play and the world of present-day reality are.
Akin makes many smart decisions in order to bring 1837 into 2017 — the cast plays parts across age, race and gender, allowing the cast to reclaim these roles, with great performances from Donna Belleville, Cherissa Richards, Travis Seetoo, Jonah McIntosh and Ric Reid as William Lyon Mackenzie. The movement by Esie Mensah — who, among other things, choreographed Rihanna’s music video for “Work” — gives the show a strong intercultural heartbeat and rhythm and takes on new meaning when the farmers lift up their fists in resistance
The play’s nationalist pride is presented today in an atmosphere where nationalism has taken an extreme, dark turn
to oppressive authorities.
Rachel Forbes’s set design also makes an unheard voice represented — with tree stumps, a log ramp and a backdrop painted in a style influenced by Indigenous artists such as Norval Morrisseau and Daphne Odjig. In a play about arguments over land ownership, it severely complicates who we are rooting for when we hear the plight of the farmers, and why. The design is not quite enough to offset the omission of this perspective, especially when the set pieces featuring these Indigenous designs are dead trees. In the decades of Canadian theatre that followed the debut of 1837: The Farm- ers’ Revolt, the collective creation form has evolved and heightened. Though the structure of 1837 holds up, the straightforward narratives in each short scene is of another era.
Despite its timeliness, the updates to casting, the revisioning of the story against a backdrop of lost Indigenous voices, the urgency of this Canadian classic falls a little flat. Still, the play’s re-emergence is a long time coming.