The current production at the Gladstone Theatre is one that is shot through with an unmistakable streak of Canadian pride.
Eric Peterson and John Gray’s two-man show Billy Bishop Goes to War tells the story of the World War I flying ace from Owen Sound, Ont. through a compelling mix of monologue and music.
The role of Billy Bishop required actor Chris Ralph to not only take on the voice of Bishop himself, but the voices of all those around him – a humorously varied parade of bumbling army officials, pilots, nervous mechanics, aristocratic ladies, and even King George himself.
“They say it’s 18 [characters] but I never counted them,” Ralph laughed.
“It was actually the first Canadian play I ever saw,” Ralph said, who grew up in Collingwood, Ont., very close to Bishop’s home town of Owen Sound.
“It totally blew my mind — the idea that this was a Canadian story about a Canadian hero sung by two Canadian actors with a piano and a chair,” he said.
“The play ran very briefly on Broadway. The reason it didn’t do very well was because Americans couldn’t figure out whether it was an anti-war play or whether it was actually a pro-war play.”
Ralph said that this question was not one that concerned him.
“I don’t think of the hero aspect of it at all,” he said. “All I could really do was play the human side to him, which I really identified with.”
The play follows Bishop’s rise to the status of “colonial figurehead” — from his days as a military college hooligan, his failures as a cavalry man in training, to his fateful first look at “a kite with an engine on it.”
Plot points are narrated through spoken letters sent home to Bishop’s beloved Margaret, through sweeping battle re-enactments performed on a chair, and of course, through song. The narration is done with the help of an unnamed pianist who sits in the corner as both an observer and a participant in the action.
“That person represents the ghosts of all of Billy’s friends and colleagues who never came back,” said James Caswell, who played the pianist. “The songs that are sung by the piano player are reactions by that ghost figure.”
The play is peppered with tragedy, humour and a bit of good-natured nationalistic pride. “Nobody never shoots no one in Canada,” sings the narrator, “at least nobody they don’t already know.”
“It’s exciting and it’s romantic and it’s funny, it’s an adventure, but at the same time, the devastation and the pain is very clear,” director Teri Loretto-Valentik said.
Loretto-Valentik, whose family has a history in aviation, said that the play complexly imagines questions about war and heroism.
“I see Billy as a very Canadian example of how people become heroes, when they’re just humans, in situations that force them to make choices that make them look like heroes,” she said.
Billy Bishop Goes to War will run at the Gladstone Theatre until the end of February.
