Eric Peterson as Billy Bishop. (via Soulpepper)
Billy Bishop Goes to War
Written & composed by John Gray with Eric Peterson
January 26 – February 27 @ the Young Centre for Performing Arts
By Kerry Freek
What can you say about the much-lauded Billy Bishop? Returning after a sold-out 2009 run (and many other wildly successful runs over the past 30 years), Soulpepper’s remount opened the company’s 2010 season with a standing ovation.
Surely it’s been said before. These two (Gray, Peterson) are national treasures, still brimming with vigour, even as they age along with the play—and there’s no disputing it.
With no intention of belittling the play’s success (nor its creators’), however, I must say the show seemed slightly sentimental—for both Gray and Peterson, and for a Canada that no longer exists.
That said, the audience thoroughly enjoyed the show, especially Gray’s Randy Newman-esque piano and vocal stylings, and Peterson’s comic mastery of 15 some-odd characters. He’s riveting up there on top of the piano, swinging a toy plane in the air, at once evoking the enthusiasm of a little boy and the chilling focus of a war hero addicted to making kills.
Over the years, the interpretation of Billy Bishop’s messages may have changed with the context (date, audience, location) in which it has been performed, but the content, I’m happy to say, still challenges.
One reason Billy Bishop has endured is its lasting nostalgia for a Canada long gone. But how much longer can audiences “remember” our country pre- and during WWI? Historians and CBC devotees may note the nostalgic references, but for first-time audiences, it’s hard to make the connection between now and a time when Canada seemed more like one big quaint, sleepy neighbourhood. To what are we relating?
Pitting the WWI generation, or even audiences of the late 1970s, against current audiences makes for an interesting study. How do we understand war today versus the generations of our parents, their parents, and our great-grandparents? People living during WWI waited weeks for letters from loved ones, poring over every word. Today, we’re surrounded by so much information that we start to ignore it. It’s available on a whim—not to put it lightly, but we can see something like Saddam’s beheading on YouTube any old time.
So, was war more horrible back then or now? Did slow communication and fewer details actually make it better, or worse, for families to endure? Is Billy Bishop’s role now to make us see that we are blind to the horror of war? Potentially. Like Bishop himself, who Peterson portrays as a carefree cog in the wheel, are we happy to exist with ourselves while the world rages against itself?
Billy Bishop is about more than patriotism and victory, and an old man left behind after making it to the very top. As the show ended and the duo took their well-deserved bows, two things hit me. We’d just chuckled our way through one of the world’s most famous massacres, and the show is about what it avoids.
