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Billy Bishop Goes to War 2nd Edition
Billy Bishop Goes to War 2nd Edition
Billy Bishop Goes to War 2nd Edition
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Billy Bishop Goes to War 2nd Edition

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One of Canada’s most successful and enduring musical plays, Billy Bishop Goes to War was first published in 1982 and went on to win the Los Angeles Drama Critics’ Award and the Governor General’s Award for Drama. In 2010, the celebrated story of the World War One flying ace – credited with seventy-two victories and billed as the top pilot in the British Empire – was revised to frame the original play as a retrospective. It is the same play it always was – the difference is in the telling. Billy Bishop now appears in his later years, reflecting on his wartime exploits, and on the business of war and hero making. Bishop’s reminiscence is not so much about the horror and death of war as it is about being young and intensely alive. “The prime of life / The best of men,” Bishop sings, “It will never be / Like this again.”

A memory play about war, Billy Bishop has been going into battle onstage for more than thirty years. The Canadian classic is revisited in this second edition, where war is still a terrible thing, but some men say it was the greatest time of their lives. It’s about the ironies and the price of survival.

The play format is deceptively simple with a solo narrator who assumes multiple roles while his piano-playing sidekick offers sardonic musical comments.

Cast of 2 men.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherTalonbooks
Release dateSep 15, 2012
ISBN9780889227163
Billy Bishop Goes to War 2nd Edition
Author

John MacLachlan Gray

John MacLachlan Gray is the author of a novel, many magazine articles, and several stage musicals. Among his publications are Lost in North America: The Imaginary Canadian in the American Dream (1994), Local Boy Makes Good, and the internationally acclaimed Billy Bishop Goes to War (1982), which he co-wrote with Eric Peterson. MacLachlan has contributed sixty-five satirical pieces for The Journal on CBC Television and is a frequent speaker on cultural issues. Among his many awards are the Governor General’s Award, the Canadian Authors Association Award, and the National Magazine Award. He lives in Vancouver.

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    Billy Bishop Goes to War by John MacLachlan Gray is the March 2015 bonus title for the Canadian Reads Challenge. Plays are funny things to read in that they are really and truly meant to be seen as performances. Actors read plays to learn their lines and become their characters — but reading one as written literature is something else entirely.My father who did a bunch of acting in college owns a collection of the best contemporary plays (plays that were popular in the first half the 20th century). There was a time when we'd go camping at Green Valley Falls as a family and somehow one of those volumes of plays would end up in the reading material pile for that weekend. One night out of desperation (called teenage boredom) I cracked open the volume and read Arsenic and Old Lace (1943) by Joseph Kesselring. It was magnificent.Now Billy Bishop Goes to War is a very different beast, in that it's written for a very limited cast (as in two people playing multiple roles). The person cast as Billy Bishop must be versatile enough to play the bulk of the cast, as it's Billy's recounting of his time in WWI. Rather than just telling the audience who he met and what they told him, Billy becomes those people.If I were to compare Billy Bishop Goes to War to another stage production, I'd say it's most like Swimming to Cambodia by Spalding Gray (which is both a memoir and a monologue). Except with the WWI setting and the poking fun at the British aristocracy and their disdain for colonials (Canadians and anyone else from the Commonwealth), there's also a heavy helping of Blackadder Goes Forth.As the introduction states, Billy Bishop is really two plays. Which play that is performed depends on the age of the actor playing Billy. If he's a young man, the play is done one way (and is longer, by the way). If he's an old man, the play is shorted to jump him right to the point of being a Canadian pilot hero. If you take in the large amount of wiggle room given to the piano player / narrator role, namely in how the songs (or in some cases, what music) are performed, then it can be any number of plays, following one of two branches.That's not to say this sort of variation is unique to Billy Bishop Goes to War. It's not. Think of Shakespeare. His plays are done in modern settings, or gender swapped, or as musicals. But a lot of this interpretation is left to director or to the version being performed (Kiss Me Kate instead of Taming of the Shrew for instance). For Billy Bishop Goes to War, all the variations are left on the page and are left to the performers to pick and chose from.

Book preview

Billy Bishop Goes to War 2nd Edition - John MacLachlan Gray

9780889226890_cvi_fmt.jpgBilly-Bishop-Goes-To-War_PRESS-V2.pdf

For William Avery Bishop, whoever he was

Remember that what you are told is really threefold: shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale.

— Vladimir Nabokov

INTRODUCTION

A PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY

PRODUCTION HISTORY

CAST LIST

CHARACTERS

BILLY BISHOP GOES TO WAR

ACT ONE

ACT TWO

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

JOHN MACLACHLAN GRAY

ERIC PETERSON

INTRODUCTION

Like all major developments in the thirty-four-year-and-counting evolution of the Canadian musical play Billy Bishop Goes to War, the opportunity came from out of the blue, and under singular circumstances.

Albert Schultz, artistic director of Soulpepper Theatre, arguably Toronto’s premier theatre company, had a crisis on his hands: three days before the 2009 season was to be announced (website going up, press releases emailed, pamphlets sent to the printers, technicians signed, buckets of money spent), an actor had abruptly cancelled his contract − not just any actor, but the star of a one-man show with piano accompaniment.

Such emergencies occur in any undertaking that involves multiple human components, and the theatre is no exception. Planning a season is an enterprise of enormous complexity, in which a sort of ecological balance must be achieved among dozens of variables – personal, technical, financial, cosmetic; losing one show doesn’t just create a hole in the season, it throws the whole ecology out of whack, like what happens to the balance of nature when a particular species goes extinct.

If Schultz failed to find a replacement with a roughly similar cast, technical requirements, and cost, he would have to redesign his entire lineup, and there wasn’t time for that. It was a theatrical emergency analogous to the plot reversal in the musical 42nd Street, in which the lead literally breaks a leg, just before opening night.

"Could you and Eric possibly do Billy Bishop? came the inquiry from Schultz. Please say yes."

(I didn’t know you could hear a man sweat over the phone.)

Eric was hesitant and so was I – if only because, over the years since we’d last performed the play, we had detected no upsurge of public demand for these two superannuated hoofers to perform their tale yet again. Meanwhile, our child had left the house, found a paying job, and was sending money home. For decades, the play had served as a reliable, popular, well-reviewed, cheap addition to a season; accordingly, actors all over North America had kept the play in their back pockets as their party piece – which sounds cynical but isn’t really. Every actor who plays the role ends up feeling that in some way he is Billy Bishop, and when called upon can get into the part like a bespoke suit, made just for him.

Bishop is a terrific part for an actor, but there is nothing magical about how it got that way. Never in the history of theatre has a script received more audience-inspired revisions by its creators; hundreds of performances in North America and Great Britain, and never once did we stop tinkering with the thing.

Director Mike Nichols described how it is relatively easy to edit the parts of a performance that bore the audience witless; the big challenge comes when you start dealing with moments – a gesture, a line, a word or two – during which the audience becomes almost bored. Such lapses accrue, and their cumulative effect is to bring on a sort of metal fatigue, weakening the entire experience.

If you have the stomach to observe and admit to these weak moments, the best and most effective place from which to do this is while performing onstage, where you can sense that slight withdrawal of collective attention, a variance in intensity that says you haven’t quite nailed the moment yet. If it happens once or twice, you can blame it on the vagaries of live performance, the stupidity of the audience, the acoustics, the seating, the weather; but when you feel that flat spot over several performances, with audiences in different cities, eventually you have nothing to blame but your script. And it is always truly amazing how the elimination of an extraneous word or phrase, a few seconds really, can suddenly make a scene feel five minutes shorter.

But in 2009, after more than thirty years, the play was unlikely to benefit from any more tinkering.

As well, in the practical terms of our careers in showbiz, neither Eric nor I really needed another go at it. Throughout the 1980s and ‘90s we had been practising our trades with varying degrees of success – Eric played numerous roles onstage and TV, while I churned out novels, reviews, TV and radio punditry, non-fiction books, newspaper columns, satirical videos, screenplays, and musicals for the stage. There was no reason to think that performing Billy Bishop Goes to War yet again would do us any further good; and, as Lady St. Helier would put it, by taking the play on at this late date we could make a real balls-up of it. After all, at sixty-two we were well into life’s Act III, and nobody wants to exit with a whimper.

And another thing: if we accepted, unless I proposed to inhabit Eric’s Toronto basement like a rodent sleeping on a futon, I would be spending major time in that most dreaded of accommodations, the Furnished Suite: the IKEA coffee table. The inexplicable prints on the wall. The instructions on the fridge.

On the other hand, our calendars had become relatively clear up to the end of the twenty-first century. Moreover, this was an opportunity for two old comrades (known privately as the Hardly Boys) to reconnect, by collaborating on the project that had brought us together in the first place.

As friends and colleagues, Eric and I go way back. Our intermittent association began around 1970, when the University of British Columbia theatre department had become a magnet for young actors and directors who either couldn’t get into the National Theatre School of Canada, or didn’t want to – students who didn’t see why an acting program spent so much

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