By Jen Handley
“He has this vision of leading people towards each other by giving everybody access to low-cost heroin, so they don’t have to dedicate their lives to petty crime, they can go and register for Shakespeare courses, and spend their lives devoting themselves to higher pursuits, instead of robbing people and fraud,” explains Heather Davies, director of The Sad and Cautionary Tale of Smackheaded Peter, which debuts at SummerWorks this week. It’s actually a pretty straightforward premise—young man seeks to better the world with a hopelessly naïve solution—but pumping the would-be messiah’s dream-society full of narcotics both exaggerates the cliché and gives it a stylistic makeover.
“The essential idea is that giving low-cost heroin to people will bring peace on earth. I think it’s meant to be an absurd idea, a fabulous, naïve ideal, but really you could change heroin for any kind of naïve ideal as a way to change the status quo,” says Davies. This goes horribly wrong, it doesn’t work in the end, but at least a young idealistic man had a go, you know, at least he gave it a shot. And he was trying to be creative about it.”
Dealing with a substance that can cause hallucinations seems like it would open up a visual goldmine for Davies and playwright Simon Glass, Smackheaded Peter, styled as “a pantomime in three acts,” includes some sequences under the influence. “The drugs are a catalyst for him having an epiphany, for a transformation in the way he sees the world,” says Davies.
However, as with most hard drugs and political ideals, results may vary. “He becomes this force of goodness after one of his drug experiences, and then he goes back to the people of his local area, and it’s the beginning of a social revolution. Then later in the play, after he’s arrested and put in prison… he has another drug experience and then he turns into basically a force for evil and becomes this murderous tyrant.”
However despite the biblical proportion of the storytelling, Davies suggests that the play is well-anchored in contemporary culture. “There are references to lots of different pop-culture things, things like the movie Aliens, Silence of the Lambs… [Glass] is quite geeky in the way that he throws in little things for you to have a little chuckle at along the way.”
Although Glass and Davies’ work is informed by their experiences of living in England, where the play is set (and where heroin is an even bigger problem than it is here), Davies promises that Smackheaded Peter has a lot to say about life in Canada.
“In England…you really feel that there’s a group of people and they feel trapped, they feel excluded, and they don’t feel that they have a lot of possibilities. Now I know that there are people like that in Canada as well,” she says. “You could probably replace heroin with crystal meth, and that would probably make it feel more Canadian…the idea that a kid from Jane and Finch would think that giving the people from that area of Toronto free crystal meth could be a good thing is absurd.”
However the play’s topicality is partially a means to an end. “I’ve had the same relationship with the play that I hope the audience has,” says Davies, “in that if it’s the seductiveness or danger of heroin that gets people to the door, really the play is about the rise and fall of having these ideals.”
