Written and Composed by John Gray with Eric Peterson
Directed by Ted Dykstra
A Soulpepper Production at the Young Centre for the Arts
January 22-February 27, 2010

   This two-person show—essentially an extended monologue supported by music and song—has become a Canadian classic, though now a very self-congratulatory one that revels in sentimentality and nostalgia. It has had numerous reincarnations since its debut in 1978, and I can’t think of a major Canadian city that has not seen it in some form or other. It has also been preserved on disc (and on television as well, I believe), and it has played New York, London, and Edinburgh. The present reincarnation is still full of vim and vigor, but it doesn’t erase the question whether this is an altogether Canadian, therefore, ultra-nationalistic piece and somewhat dreary to non-Canadians or to those who don’t warm to its faux-naïve or faux-folk lyrics. Ted Dykstra’s staging allows the reveling to continue, what with Camellia Koo’s props (trunks, toy planes, Union Jack, framed portraits, an air-force uniform) that are a self-referential conceit for what is already a conceit in form. Eric Peterson, closer now in age to the great air ace Bishop who died at 62 in 1956, plays him as an aging dreamer slowly awakened by the sounds of Gray’s piano and singing of battling the Hun. Dressed in pyjamas, purple housecoat, and slippers, instead of his spic and span air-force uniform, Bishop takes us on a trip down memory lane, resorting to mimicry, mime, and multiple recitations (including the spoken-song kind) as he recounts his career from his youth in Owen Sound, his less than stellar career at RMC (where he was on record as the worst student ever), and his early misadventures in the armed forces to his dazzling career as a First World War flying ace, ranking just below the Red Baron and Britain’s Albert Ball. Essentially anecdotal, the show depends on Peterson’s stamina and versatility. And Peterson does not disappoint, morphing from a naïve kid to a flying Observer on a sputtering aircraft, from love-struck epistolary wooer of Margaret to Empire hero, celebrated but treated as a colonial by the Brits. Peterson also plays other characters (male and female) in a variety of accents—the most charming being his French chanteuse in a boa—and scores satiric points in these segments as he does when he sings Gray’s ballads. There is a nice, warm symbiotic relationship with his collaborator on stage, and the whole two-hour performance has allure, but there isn’t enough irony to warrant so much self-congratulation. One of the numbers celebrates Canada’s saneness with “Nobody shoots no one in Canada, at least no one they know” which stands out as an admirable quality, of course, when one considers the U.S. but this has not much to do with killing the Hun, and it certainly seems out of place in the context of someone who thinks that the war never seemed like war. Bishop was a pawn to colonial Headquarters, and though he enjoyed rare celebrity as a Canadian, did he not realize how he was toyed with and used?

photo: Cylla von Tiedemann


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