The Fighting Days and the Problems of Goodness

With its production of Wendy Lill’s The Fighting Days last March and April, the Prairie Theatre Exchange seems to have found a clear direction and a unique place for itself in the Winnipeg theatre scene. The 1983-84 PTE season got off to a very shaky start with Alun Hibbert’s Playing the Fool, a clumsy, unsatisfying play that should never have been expanded from its original one-act format. Things improved immeasurably early in the new year with Rex Deverell’s Drift, a gentle and moving exploration of the connection between personal memory and artistic creativity.

Still, as successful as Drift was, it couldn’t match the excitement of The Fighting Days, and the elation that comes from being part of something brand new; this, surely, was what artistic director Tim McCaw had in mind when he called for socially active, more home-made theatre in an Arts Manitoba interview a year ago. The production of The Fighting Days was clearly the most important theatrical event in the Winnipeg theatre season just concluded, and the play’s upcoming provincial tour is encouraging recognition that the work deserves a larger audience.

With her new play, Wendy Lill turns away from the contemporary social issues she investigated not very successfully in the previous year’s On the Line, and enters the grand tradition of the Canadian history play. While the issues of gender politics, freedom of speech, and individual conscience are, of course, still relevant, the distance provided by time seems to suit Lill’s style, and decisively tips the balance from animated pamphlet to accomplished dramatic art.

Canadian history has often provided material for the Canadian drama, and it makes sense that an art form trying to define the sensibility of its audience should turn to the community’s past for clues to explain the present, for stories worth retelling, for that Canadian shibboleth, a sense of national identity.

In the last half of this century, Canadian history has been put to much more sophisticated dramatic use. When he started working on Riel as a dramatic character, John Coulter was looking for a tribal hero, a Canadian equivalent to the folk-heroes of Coulter’s native Ulster; Coulter became a passionate advocate of Riel’s cause, and is often credited with giving Riel mythic stature in English-speaking Canada. (The annual presentation of The Trial of Louis Riel in Regina has taken on some of the attributes of seasonal ritual.) Ironically, Cercle Moliere’s Claude Dorge scandalized portions of the Franco-Manitoban community by, in effect, demythologizing Riel in his play, Le Roitelet. Writers of all political stripes still put history to social use, the left usually with the most success. In Colour the Flesh the Colour of Dust and The Gaydon Chronicles, Michael Cook works on a grand scale, trying to find the theatrical means to comment on large historical movements, as does Herschel Hardin in The Great Wave of Civilization.

James Reaney’s treatment of historical material is the most complex of all, and probably the most durable and dramatically valuable. In his Donnelly trilogy, he is not content to simply translate historical fact into stageworthy script, but makes perception and the search for truth aspects of the reality depicted and of the structure doing the depicting. Canadian history has never had such poetic resonance in the Canadian theatre.

Wendy Lill’s accomplishment is of another order, and despite some similarities to the populist historical plays of Passe Muraille, Toronto Workshop Productions, and Rex Deverell, unusually original in its treatment of historical event. The private and the public are traditional polarities of the history play; we are accustomed to the dramatic treatment of historical event which reveals the private life of a great public figure, or, more interestingly, which sets private and public concerns in opposition. The well-known historical personage is the battleground and love and honour are the classic combatants. But Francis Beynon is not a figure previously well-known to the majority of Lill’s audience, although the issues in which the character becomes involved are. This allows the playwright to take an oblique approach to a traditional conflict, and to explore aspects of it which most history plays neglect.

Because we meet a very young Francis at the beginning of the play, and because she has been so insulated (by geography, by her authoritarian father), we begin with a character who not only has not entered public life, but who hasn’t a clear idea of who she is as a private person either. The development of these two lives intertwine as the play unfolds, for Francis becomes a person whose honesty and frankness will not allow her to make a distinction between them. To an unusual, admirable and sometimes painful extent, Francis Beynon’s public attitudes are a direct expression of private integrity. Making a ‘good’ character dramatically interesting is notoriously difficult, but with Beynon, Wendy Lill succeeds in doing just that. The feat is accomplished by showing us the growth of Beynon’s values and personality, and growth is interesting to watch. The sense of release into a larger, brighter world permeates the first act. It initially appears in a concise and amusing opening scene in which Francis and her sister, Lilly, journey to Winnipeg by train after the death of their father, starting to voice, for the first time, doubts about the childhood verities of her home: “Do you believe in your heart that Methodists are the only ones with immortal souls?” The play encourages us to share this sense of release and discovery: Francis’ initial naive questioning is captivating, and the manner in which her personality subsequently forms is fascinating.

The characterization is masterful in the case of three of the four major characters (Lilly, perhaps, remains a shade sketchy), a well-crafted accumulation of telling detail—an interpretive dance initiated by Nellie McClung, McNair’s distrust of adjectives, Francis’ questions. In the PTE premiere, the strong characterization of the script was supported and amplified by equally detailed, sensitive performances from Laurel Paetz, Terri Cherniack, Linda Huffman, and Mo Bock. Sometimes both characters and performers seemed excessively rhetorical, but then, the characters’ professions and the taste of their time do tend to rhetoric.

The play’s second act puts Francis’ private and public selves to the test. With the group’s loyalties divided by the issue of whether the federal vote ought to be given to all women or only to Canadian and Empire-born women who can be counted on to vote for conscription, Francis must make decisions independent of common opinion, and, more to the point, independent of the opinions of her new friends. Having watched her character develop, an audience derives satisfaction from seeing that character’s success in defending its integrity. Despite the pessimism of the time depicted, with all the earlier triumphs overshadowed by the exigencies of war, and despite the pessimism of the playwright’s own time, the play is remarkably sunny and optimistic throughout.

My biggest disappointment is that some of the final optimism is unearned, because one of Francis’ most important conflicts is passed over much too lightly. A good many history plays trivialize their subject by tacking on a sentimental ‘love interest’. That is certainly not the problem with The Fighting Days, the developing relationship between Francis and George McNair, Francis’ boss at The Rural Review and tentative beau, is integral to the personal growth the play depicts. Because the relationship is both professional and romantic, the exploration of her public and private personae is clearly advanced by the relationship with McNair. All the more reason, then, to give due weight to their final confrontation, when he attempts to rescue her from the progressively ugly reaction to her stand on the suffrage issue by offering marriage. She chooses to go to New York where she will be able to continue her work and to say what she believes. The outcome of the confrontation is dramatically satisfying (as well as historically accurate) and true to the characters. But it is also reached much, much too easily. The conflict is complex and the implications of the issues are with us still; this is surely a question which a contemporary audience wants to hear Beynon answer, or at least fight with. The poetic image of the held bird is simply not strong enough or resonant enough to meet those expectations.

That the play’s conclusion is weaker than it ought to be is one of my few reservations for what Wendy Lill and the PTE company have achieved. Another comes in response to the production rather than the script. The letters from readers to Francis, and Francis’ reply through the columns of The Rural Review constitute an important element of the play: they are the primary connection between the private and the public in Beynon’s life, and they give theatrical shape to the community of prairie women, isolated by their situations but united by an opportunity to communicate. There was, however, something condescending and dishonest in the depiction, not in the words themselves, which read like authentic letters to the editor whether they were or not, but in their presentation. Here was a tendency to overly predictable physical types and political attitudes—the sort of pigeon-holing and caricature that the play elsewhere argues so cogently against.

Then there is the question of the limitations which the script and the production have accepted for themselves. I’ve heard The Fighting Days compared to a superior episode of Masterpiece Theatre, and I think that’s a fair and illuminating comparison. The comparison acknowledges the splendid craft, intelligence, and accessibility of the work. It also accepts that the play is modest in its aspirations, abandoning some avenues of exploration in favour of ready communication with a large Manitoba audience: The Fighting Days is populist, with the good and the bad that that implies.

It is true that The Fighting Days doesn’t attempt Reaney’s myth-making, Dorge’s myth-breaking, or the epic sweep of history plays by Michael Cook or Herschel Hardin. Unlike Coulter’s Riel plays, Sharon Pollock’s Walsh, or Carol Bolt’s Buffalo Jump, Lill’s work does not give a human dimension to a significant historical event well known to most Canadian theatre-goers. Nor is it innovative in form, as Reaney’s work is, or particularly controversial. But what The Fighting Days does do, it does extremely well.

In addition to its strengths in characterization, its wit, and unusually insightful investigation of social conscience, The Fighting Days provides a strong sense of period, of the passionate exchange of ideas through print when the newspapers were the centre of western Canadian intellectual life, and of the excitement of the “fighting days” when women’s voices seemed to count for the first time in this part of the country. The play recaptures for the imagination a portion of Manitoba’s past: it may be Masterpiece Theatre, but it’s good Masterpiece Theatre and its ours, and that is truly cause for celebration. ♦

Chris Johnson, the director of The Black Hole Theatre, is the theatre editor of Arts Manitoba.