Theatre of War
The Globe and Mail’s new theatre critic Kelly Nestruck asks an excellent question in today’s paper. Why aren’t our theatres looking at Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan?
It’s true that Scorched, East of Berlin and Wild Mouth, all at the Tarragon recently, looked at the psychological consequences of past wars. And at Canadian Stage, Judith Thompson’s Palace of the End and Studio 180’s production of David Hare’s Stuff Happens, used the Iraq war to reveal the opposite: how individual psychologies ripple out to create war cultures.
But Nestruck is right that we’ve been silent about the Afghan war/occupation, whatever you want to call it.
He’s not quite accurate in saying that Toronto theatre is fairly apolitical. After all, it’s been dominated for decades by plays which look at identity politics, or which offer a satirical slant on politics (Videocab, or George F. Walker in his own way). But if he means we don’t have a tradition of examining our lives in ways that go beyond the psychological, then he’s right. We don’t tend to examine how our institutions, our economic systems, our neighbourhoods all play a part in making us who we are.
Perhaps one reason we don’t see anything about Afghanistan is our tradition of timidity. Nestruck himself spells it out very well in an article he did for This Magazine in 2006. Just to quote him briefly:
“When folks like [Tomson]Highway and [Jason]Sherman are ditching the theatre for novels and TV because of our theatres’ genteel desire to please everybody, it’s clear that taking the path of least resistance has become a serious problem. Theatres are flirting with the possibility of irrelevancy, because they are afraid to be relevant and make any decisions that could possibly be construed as controversial—afraid of losing subscribers, of imaginary mobs descending on their auditoriums, of angry columnists lambasting them, of perturbed donors putting their cash elsewhere…. And while producers, directors and playwrights are self-censoring because they worry about rocking the boat, they have failed to notice that it is politely and silently sinking.”
There’s another reason, too. And that is that Afghanistan is hard. Reading Outside the Wire, (first-hand accounts of Canadians in Afghanistan) or Sarah Chayes’ brilliant book The Punishment of Virtue or watching her talk about the situation recently on PBS, it’s clear how muddy it all is. Are we an occupation force? Are we fighting a nebulous American-led War on Terror? Are we peace-keeping? Nation-building? Are we preventing human rights atrocities? Or are we committing them? What is our mission anyway? And on and on. But of course theatre doesn’t have to answer those questions, it has to pose them. It has to dramatize those questions. It’s hard to do that and to do it well. But that has to be our challenge.
- 17 04 2008 - 14:39
