Author Tags: Fiction Law Theatre War


Articles: 4 Articles for this author

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John Gray was interviewed in Vancouver in 1979 at the rehearsal space for Tamahnous Theatre.

T: Billy Bishop Goes to War is one of Canada's longest-touring plays. Has its success surprised you?
GRAY: Yes, it has. Originally our attitude was if the Canadians and Americans like it, that's great. If the Canadians like it and the Americans don't like it, that's okay. If the Canadians don't like it and the Americans don't like it, that's a drag. If the Canadians don't like it and the Americans do like it, we're in deep trouble. We had no idea it would go so far.

T: It looks as if success has come rather easily.
GRAY: I know. I've only written two damn shows. Now I'm starting to worry that I'm going to have to start thinking of myself as a writer. When you do that, there's always a danger you'll start thinking that you have to write, whether you have anything to say or not. I think that's an awful thing.

T: So if a stranger walked up to you and asked your profession
GRAY: I'd say I work in the theatre.

T: But without having written 18 Wheels and Billy Bishop, you couldn't pay your bills.
GRAY: I know. But admitting you're a writer is kinda like quitting smoking. The worst thing you can do is start proclaiming you're quitting smoking. You'll fail for sure. Hemingway once said don't put your mouth on anything that looks like it might happen, it'll turn to dust every time. In a way, I guess that has something to do with how I write. The worst stuff I do is always written when I have a good idea what it's about. I do much better if I concentrate on the characters and let the play emerge by itself. Then on the third draft I finally start to observe what it's about.

T: It seems Billy Bishop is only half about Billy Bishop's life. The other half is about how our generation is linked to Canada's military past. Was that intentional?
GRAY: Yes. Those World Wars explain so much about ourselves, about our attitudes as Canadians. The innocence Canada took into that first war was just appalling. When the figures started coming back twenty five thousand men lost at the Somme, for example-people weren't too keen on going, right? That's when conscription started. Then all the French-Canadian resentment against English Canada got started. Then the whole cynicism about government started. All that stuff affects us today. I think the heaviest years of life are around nineteen to twenty-five. Those are really long, big years. They form you. We didn't fight in a war at that age; some of our parents did. They went through an experience that we don't have a clue about. So there's a monstrous gap between generations.

T: What awareness of war did you get growing up in the fifties?
GRAY: I always knew that my father and his best friend had enlisted together. My father got involved in radar and his best friend became a spitfire pilot. This guy's name was John West. When he was shot down during the Battle of Britain, that's when my father vowed he would name his first-born son after his dead friend. I was always aware of that. I always wondered who this guy was that I was named after. I wondered about this heavy experience my father must have gone through to do that. Now he's an insurance executive. A middle-class person with bourgeois values and fundamentalist religious beliefs.

T: A Canadian.
GRAY: Right. So what happened to him to make him do this almost poetic gesture?
T: This is why you wrote Billy Bishop then. To answer that question. GRAY: Yes. And that's why I'm content to perform Billy Bishop for a long time. Because it's about me. I don't know if I can tell you exactly how it's about me...but somehow it is. It's my relationship to the events in Billy Bishop. You can't really say the play is really telling you that much about Billy Bishop himself. I don't know what he was like. I really don't. And 18 Wheels doesn't really tell you much about truckers either. So what is Billy Bishop about anyway?

T: It's about your perceptions of Billy Bishop's relationship to war.
GRAY: Definitely. It's not really about war at all. It uses war to show that old countries use young countries. Old people use young people to fight their wars. In the process of this, youth is lost. Youth is lost in the sense of a country and also for individuals. Britain lost a whole generation. Billy Bishop is about youth and old age.

T: And it refuses to preach about war, right?
GRAY: Right.

T: Many people would regard that as a failing.
GRAY: Yes, I get a lot of that. A certain number of people go to the show with a checklist of things they want said. When they don't get to check off things they came to hear, they feel the show has failed them. They don't appreciate that not preaching allows us to talk to old people, too. Old people are thrilled to see that people of the next generation can recognize that they weren't stupid idiots for going along and fighting. It was so much more complicated than that. Billy Bishop recognizes that their experiences had validity, irrespective of whether the war was good or bad. To say that the play is encouraging war is incomprehensible to me.

T: If Billy Bishop embodies the experiences of a generation then the audience can come and pass judgment by itself.
GRAY: Right. I wanted to give people some conception of what war is like. We have a particular kind of arrogance that comes from the sixties which makes people say not only are wars bad, but people who fought them are stupid. That's unfair. In the First World War those guys were encouraged to fight by their elders. They were victims. Not only did those guys not know what they were fighting for, they didn't even know where they were! Ever! There was no landscape. It was all blown up. There were no trees or hills, nothing. They were simply someplace in France. It was like the moon. You spent three years there until you get wounded or killed. The alienation must have been phenomenal! Surviving in this little vacuum was probably their only real concern. The larger issues of war on an international scale had nothing to do with them.

T: Do you think that's why you audience at Royal Military College even liked the show? Because you didn't overlay history onto Billy Bishop's shoulders?
GRAY: That's partly it. The other reason is simply that those people aren't stupid. You generally think of army guys as being like football players. It really knocked me out to hear the military commandant give this analysis of our show in terms of Canada's history. My jaw was open. It was very perceptive and interesting stuff. To start thinking all those rightwing guys are stupid is naive and destructive to one's own thinking.

T: In the sixties, our generation was so busy formulating some alternate stance of our own that we didn't even try to appreciate what we were defining ourselves against.
GRAY: Yes, that's why Billy Bishop would have been a bomb in the sixties. It would have been a turkey. People would have called it reactionary.

T: How much of your conception of what theatre should be has been formed by associating with Theatre Passe Muraille?
GRAY: Quite a bit. I used to be quite the little elitist. I went to university for seven years. Nothing will hone an elitist like seven years in a university. So I tended to do shows for formalistic reasons. Content really wasn't that important. New theatre forms and staging were just as important to me as what a play said.
Then I saw Passe Muraille do 1837 in Listowel, Ontario. It was very revolutionary, that first Passe Muraille show. All these farmers were yelling and standing up and applauding. And these guys were prosperous right-wing types. It just blew my mind to see how people can relate to content. It made the stuff I was doing seem trivial. Like playing little games. It made me rethink the whole thing.

T: Now there's almost a movement growing out of 1837. Shows like Paper Wheat and The Farm Show.
GRAY: Yeah. In those shows, the event of having a particular audience becomes just as important as what's happening on the stage. It's now like there's a little glass cube around the stage and everybody sits there and admires the work of art on display. T: What specific things did you learn from Passe Muraille?
GRAY: How powerful a monologue can be.

T: Any negative things?
GRAY: Well, I also learned the limitations of having actors play tables and chairs and cows and horses. I've pretty well had it up to here with that stuff. I also reacted against Passe Muraille's tendency to go into a farming community and tell farmers how great they are. I've talked to lots of farmers. They're not dummies. You don't have to flatter them. It's also a bit much when actors go into a community and start telling people what they're like.

T: Yes, it's getting very trendy now for a bunch of middle-class kids to graduate from some university theatre program and suddenly become relevant. So they do some didactic piece on nuclear power.
GRAY: And who's going to come? You just consolidate people's prejudices. I don't think theatre is the place of weighty matters like that mainly because you see a play once. You can reread a novel by Kafka. You can analyze it at your leisure. But theatre's different. Look at Shakespeare, for example. His characters are wonderful I and they mouth human issues very articulately and poetically, but Shakespeare doesn't attempt to change the world.

T: You're saying the function of theatre is to reflect life, not comment on it.
GRAY: I guess so. Accuracy over opinion. The best reaction you get out of theatre is recognition. Maybe with a novel it's different. But in theatre I know I'm never going to be a person who writes of weighty matters. By that I mean I'm not going to write anything just to give the world my opinions.

T: Did you always want to be a playwright?
GRAY: Not at all. I was very, very bored in school. I was so bad they kept testing me for deafness. I was right down there with the special class types. As a result I was a loner most of the time. That's why I was always known for being musical. It helped excuse me for being such a lousy student. I got most of my acceptance from people out of music, out of playing. When I finally joined a rock n' roll band it was great. I had a Hammond organ. It wasn't like playing the organ; it was like driving a car.

T: Unfortunately most of us have a totally commercialized preconception of what a popular song should sound like.
GRAY: And that's a great shame. There's a whole tradition of songwriting where the songs are more complex. Kurt Weill, for example, is my favorite songwriter. And Sondheim is good, too. His songs fit into a show.

T: Your songs definitely aren't written to be covered some day by Frank Sinatra. It seems you're trying hard to fit them into the flow of a play, too.
GRAY: Sure. It's very American to write a scene around a song. I tend to write the other way round. When I get to a point in the script where something needs to be said that a character can't really say, I can say it in a song.

T: One eastern Canadian critic thought your singing detracted from Billy Bishop. For me it was very important that your authenticity on stage could act as a foil to Eric Peterson's exuberance. He plays eighteen characters at once, so it adds a sense of balance if you play yourself.
GRAY: I know. I'm glad you said that. It's the emotions that people go though that are important. If a great singer sang with Eric, he'd have to do things stylistically different than what the scenes require. It would become schizophrenic. God knows I'd never try and become a singer and have people love me for the quality of my voice. But I sing the songs in Billy Bishop because I can sing them in the context as well as anybody can. Again you get people coming to the show with a checklist, for Chrissake. When somebody sings a song, they've already decided what it's supposed to sound like. Well, Jesus Christ, how am I supposed to deal with that?

T: Do you have songwriting ambitions that go beyond the theatre?
GRAY: I used to. I had a brief romance with United Artists. I did a few demos and United Artists wanted to make a single out of one. But it was just ludicrous. I mean, there's nothing quite like being rejected by some fifty-year-old bozo with a Beatle hairdo and a medallion on his chest. It's such a sleazy industry. You get offered a deal that says you sing with us and we get all your songs forever and ever. And if you're really lucky, they'll make a lot of money. It's a very humiliating setup. I just didn't want to be part of it. In Canada it's a branch plant system so you're constantly up against people who can say no but not yes. You're constantly being humiliated just because of the other person's powerlessness. And that person won't admit his powerlessness. There's nothing in it for those labels to promote Canadian artists. Why should they? They've got lots of American artists they can promote up here anyway.

T: What's your new play about?
GRAY: My rock n' roll band.

T: Another totally male world.
GRAY: I know. I don't have any women in my shows at all. I don't know why. I guess I don't really know much about them. I can't get into a woman's head. I only have male visions of women. It's weird.

T: People will invariably compare any new play against the success of Billy Bishop.
GRAY: I know. I'm quite reconciled to a turkey. There will be a turkey on the horizon. Then they'll say, well, he wrote two good shows and that was it.

T: People will want nothing less than a follow-up to Billy Bishop, using the same format with Eric Peterson.
GRAY: We already thought of that. We'll call the sequel Billy Bishop Goes to Seed. Eric and I will sit on stage and drink for two hours.

[STRONG VOICES by Alan Twigg (Harbour 1988)] "Interview"

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With Vancouver hosting the trial of a pig farmer accused for serial-killing more people than anyone else in Canadian history, the spring of 2003 was either the best of times to write a novel about the serial murder of prostitutes--or the worst of times. Using London in 1852 as his setting, John Gray used his range as a dramatist to introduce a spectrum of characters including the tabloid writer Edmund Whitty who, on a rare occasion when he's wasn't drunk, provided London with a name for the serial murderer who was killing prostitutes with a white scarf: Chokee Bill. In the novel, fear paralyses and tantalizes London. A suspect named William Ryan is arrested, but the white scarf killings continue. On his never-ending quest for drinking money and sensational new copy, Whitty turns detective to track down the real Chokee Bill. The Fiend in Human, as the odd title suggests, isn't always an easy read. It's a performance as much as it's a mystery. Gray has given free rein to his cleverness in a style that will doubtless be dubbed neo-Dickensian. There are highly evocative and frequently brilliant descriptions of mid-19th century London. 0-679-31173-4
[Spring 2003 BCBW]

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Easily one of the most successful original plays in Canadian theatre history, John Gray and Eric Peterson's two-hander Billy Bishop Goes To War, about a World War One fighter pilot, premiered at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre in 1978.

Billy Bishop won the 1981 Los Angeles Drama Critics' Award, the 1982 Chalmers Canadian Play Award, the 1983 Governor General's Award for drama and an ACTRA award for best television program with a CBC/BBC co-production.

The play has been produced over 400 times, including a presentation for German TV (West Deutschland Rundfunk) as Billy Bishop Stieg Auf. The play was the most-produced show in America for 4 years in the early 1980s according to the League of Regional Theatres.
With Gray doubling as narrator and on-stage pianist, Soulpepper Theatre of Toronto revived the play in 2009 to sold-out audiences with Eric Peterson once more playing Bishop, as well as 17 other characters ranging from King George V to The Lovely Helene.

Here John Gray explains why he chose to re-think and re-write the musical in 1998, adding a new song and presenting events through the eyes of an older Bishop recalling his wartime experiences.

Two combined versions of the play are newly available as Billy Bishop Goes To War (Talonbooks $17.95).

Like all developments in the thirty-three-year-and-counting evolution of Billy Bishop Goes to War, the opportunity to mount a new production in 2009 came from out of the blue.
Albert Schultz, artistic director of Toronto's Soulpepper Theatre, had a problem: three days before the 2009 season was to be announced (website going up, press releases e-mailed, pamphlets at the printers, technicians signed, buckets of money spent), an actor had abruptly cancelled his contract-and not just any actor, but the star of a one-man show with piano accompaniment.

"Could you and Eric possibly do Billy Bishop?"; came the enquiry from Schultz. "Please say yes."; (I didn't know you could hear a man sweat over the phone.)
Unthinking as always, we said yes, then worried about it later.

The trickiest question we faced was how to make sense of this radical re-casting of the principal role, in which an actor of sixty-two portrays Billy Bishop, who died in Florida (essentially of old age) at the age of, well, sixty-two.

Mind you, the script was never cast in stone. Hundreds of performances in North America and Great Britain, and never did we stop tinkering with the thing, going so far as to replace an entire song in 1998.

Theatre isn't literature, it's performance. Shakespeare's "plays"; are really recordings of specific performances of a script that no doubt changed over time, depending on who was playing the lead and what themes seemed current.

In the case of Billy Bishop, the storyteller defines the story. When we performed the piece in 1998 at age 52, our man was a prosperous businessman about to urge young men to join up in the Second World War.

This time, however, the whole central theme-survival and its ironies-was about to shift. There is a world of difference between a man telling a story of survival at the age of 30, and a man telling his story when he is all too aware that, in the end, nobody survives.

Using the same words, we found we were talking about something quite different. As Eric put it, "Before, when Bishop sang about survival I took it as a romantic thing to do with the war. But now it's become a metaphor for life. The price of survival is that you experience the death of your friends.";
Of course the difference between war and "normal life"; is that war is way faster and more compressed. A young man barely out of his teens experiences in six months what the rest of us, if we're lucky and wise, process and understand by the time we're collecting our pensions-that, whether you're young or old, survival takes courage.

The new Talonbooks edition of the play is therefore two scripts, depending on the age of the storyteller. Differences appear as explanatory notes and stage directions, while the dialogue and the songs are the same (with the usual tweaking and that new song from 1998).
The two endings are entirely different, except for the final line: "All in all I'd have to say, it was a hell of a time.";
978-0-88922-689-0

[BCBW 2012]
John Gray

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The White Angel
by John MacLachlan Gray
Madeira Park: Douglas & McIntyre, 2017. $29.95 / 978-1-77162-146-5
Reviewed by Ginny Ratsoy

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The challenges of writing historical fiction are manifold. Writers must capture both the exterior (surface and sociological details of a time they know only through research) and the interior (characters’ mindsets that appear to be accurate reflections of the time). When that historical fiction is based on actual events, competing, even paradoxical, energies can be at play: writers must be aware of the literal details while sifting through primary sources that may themselves conflict; yet, above all, they must invent -- after all, “fiction” is the operative word here. When an unsolved crime set against the backdrop of a nation, province, and city behaving badly is added to the mix, the territory can get rough.

Fortunately, we are in good hands with John MacLachlan Gray, who, as a musician, essayist, screenwriter, journalist, commentator, actor, director, and, above all, playwright and novelist, has stellar credentials for negotiating complex terrain.

Gray's most outstanding example of stupendous success treating historical events is the 1978 play, Billy Bishop Goes to War. With the practice that comes from numerous subsequent publications, including, between 2000 and 2007, four mystery-thrillers, Gray has fine-tuned his abilities to merge fact and fiction, social critique and character insight, and levity and gravity for his novel, The White Angel.

The historical events on which The White Angel is based began in Shaughnessy Heights in July, 1924, with the death of twenty-two-year-old Scottish maid Janet Smith. When the Point Grey constabulary entered the laundry room of the posh family home of import-export dealer Frederick Baker, they found a gun near the corpse’s hand and a bullet hole in her head.

Indications are that police and other officials were inept. The first official verdict of suicide was met with disdain by the media, the public, and, particularly, the local Scottish community.

Bowing to public pressure, officials had Smith’s body exhumed and held another inquest, which concluded that Smith had been murdered, but could not ascertain by whom. The media and public remained unsatisfied, many pointing fingers at Wong Foon Sing, a houseboy employed by the Bakers, who was arrested and imprisoned, but later released because of insufficient evidence to warrant a trial.

Race, gender, and class all played significant roles in the responses to the investigations, which led to the (ultimately unsuccessful) introduction of a bill in the B.C. legislature designed to prohibit employment of white women and Asian men in the same household.

According to “The Janet Smith Bill of 1924 and the Language of Race and Nation in British Columbia,” a 1999 BC Studies article by Scott Kerwin, the case was “ … a social drama for the young metropolis of Vancouver and White British Columbia” (p. 104).

Gray is as quick to distance himself from the historical case as he is adept at using its drama to reveal society at its seamiest. His Author’s Note states “any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is fragmentary and incidental” and leads readers interested in a “factual account” to the meticulous account by Edward Starkins, Who Killed Janet Smith? (Macmillan 1984; 2nd edition Anvil 2011).

One of Gray’s own character’s description of the reactions to Janet’s death accurately summarizes Gray’s approach in the novel: “like flipping over a flat rock, just to see what crawls out from underneath.” What crawls out from underneath in The White Angel is by turns shocking, insightful, revealing, evocative, entertaining, and even astounding.

Vancouver in 1924 is rife with corruption and inequality, some of which may resonate with Canada in 2017, although, as Gray (perhaps wryly) observes in the Author’s Note, “some progress has been achieved.”

The Old Boy’s Club is alive and well. Men hold virtually all positions of power, off-duty policemen beat up political agitators, news editors are in bed with the political elite, police bow to businessmen, physicians are in the pockets of the police, and politicians make short-sighted decisions in the interests of re-election.

Add overt racism, strict post-prohibition liquor laws that lead to flourishing bootlegging, the presence of the Ku Klux Klan, and the fact that women are largely restricted to the roles of housewife, housemaid, and menial cleric, and Gray, as social critic, has a bounty of material at hand.

Incisive though that critique is, it does not come at the expense of depth of characterization or credibility -- no mean feat, considering the size and social diversity of the cast.

Each major character, whether they served or not, is profoundly coloured by World War One. This collective Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is manifested as an assortment of physical, emotional, and moral disfigurements, and an almost universal tendency toward disguise and performance.

To this reader, the show is stolen, not by the most powerful characters, but by those that are sociologically peripheral, or even outcast. Among the most compelling of these creations is Wong Sin Chi; the houseboy obdurately reveals almost nothing of himself -- a survival tactic for a Chinese immigrant in a culture both alien and hostile, where, he learns early on, “one must deceive for success.”

Wong Sin Chi endures not only verbal slings, but also a brutal abduction by the Ku Klux Klan. The vitriol against the Chinese in Vancouver -- from reporters, members of the public, and government officials alike -- is shocking in its frequency and degree; a constable’s early observation that “Rice-eating animals is how I see them,” recurs in speech and action throughout the novel.

Fear of miscegenation among whites of all classes was widespread. Wong Sin Chi unfolds, gradually, as a character whose adaptation leaves his principles intact.

For complex reasons -- but largely to expose corruption in high places -- an unlikely trio works to solve the crime: Howard Sparrow, undertaker and social agitator, hideously deformed by the war; his girlfriend, Mildred Wickstram, upper-class English import and sporadic transvestite; and Sparrow’s friend, Edward McCurdy, poet manqué, newspaper reporter, and lonely man. They meet in various speakeasies that showcase underground Vancouver, including Hogan’s Alley, known as “the coloured part of town,” which had become an amusement park for affluent young people from other parts of Vancouver. Their sideline positions afford the three ample opportunities to deduce while appearing detached.

Sparrow, an ambulance driver in the war, was wounded while comforting a patient and physically put back together in the Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department at London General Hospital. The reconstruction, presented in considerable detail, exemplifies Gray’s prose at its strongest: no-holds barred, bristly, and lovely in its candour. The new person that emerges is a stutterer who, despite (or perhaps because of) damaged eyesight is a seer with a thirst for justice that takes precedence over friendship and love.

As Sparrow says, women, when forced to relinquish their jobs when men returned from the war, “went underground and became dangerous.” Mildred, a fighter for women’s rights, uses her training in an English girls’ school and the war to assume various guises (including male, to infiltrate a men’s club) and to make the best of a job for which she is overly qualified.

As a switchboard operator at the Hotel Vancouver, Mildred amuses herself by eavesdropping, and reporting, on the exchanges of the political and business elite over the case. Mildred, top brain of a pretty brainy trio, is not atypical of Gray’s female cast members: self assured, wily, under-employed truth seekers. They are a far cry from the dainty-things-in-need-of-protection that societal forces construe them as.

McCurdy, not above masquerading as Sparrow’s assistant undertaker to get story leads, owes his damage, in part, to not having served in the war -- being refused because of extreme shortsightedness, which had earlier caused him to be bullied, and was largely responsible for his embracing poetry: “since then, he has tried to style himself after James Joyce, with limited success” (p. 13).

McCurdy’s wry and insightful accounts of the establishment’s bungling of the case lead to his being manipulated by his editor, and abducted and drugged by others when he gets uncomfortably close to the truth.

With all the hallmarks of a good “true crime” novel -- a plausible, stirring plot, a dreadful death, a complex web of clues, a host of suspects, and a satisfying solution built up to, but not fully revealed, until the final pages -- The White Angel succeeds on the suspense level.

Where John MacLachlan Gray’s latest work shines, though, is in its ability to capture a time and place -- replete with enduring personalities -- with unabashed, life-affirming wit and honesty.

*

Ginny Ratsoy is an Associate Professor of English at Thompson Rivers University specializing in Canadian literature. Recent courses have included British Columbian Literature and The Environment in Canadian Literature. Among her publications are Playing the Pacific Province (Playwrights Canada Press, 2001, co-edited with James Hoffman) and Theatre in British Columbia (Playwrights Canada Press, 2006). She has also co-edited (with W.F. Garrett-Petts and James Hoffman) Whose Culture Is It, Anyway? Community Engagement in Small Cities (New Star Books, 2014), and published articles on alternative pedagogies in university education, and theatre, playwrights, and small cities in British Columbia. She is writing a piece on the effects of the fires of 2017 on the city of Kamloops.

[BCBW 2017] "Ormsby"