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Billy Bishop Goes To War (Talonbooks $17.95)
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]
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]
Submitted on October 30, 2012 in By David.
