Drama

Most of the plays published in English in 2013 feature casts of five or fewer actors, with close to a third of the plays considered in this review written for a solo performer. Plays with relatively small casts are not a new feature of theatre in English Canada, but the preponderance of plays for solo performers is a reminder that theatre is expensive to produce and is operating in a time when finding sources of funding is difficult. Against the difficulty in funding theatre and, more broadly, the arts, the government of Stephen Harper has neglected the cultural sector. Jamie Portman, in an article dealing with Harper’s relation to the arts, reminds readers that in 2008, Harper suggested that “‘ordinary people’ don’t care about arts funding, and his innuendo about rich artists who attended galas to whine about their grants.”¹ It is hardly surprising that Harper and his government’s policies are ridiculed by Michael Healey in Proud and by Camyar Chai, Guillermo Verdecchia, and Marcus Youssef in Ali and Ali: The Deportation Hearings.

Proud is a political satire by Michael Healey, who in 1999 won the Governor General’s Literary Award for drama in English for his play The Drawer Boy. Proud is set shortly after the general election of 2011, when Harper won the majority of seats in Parliament. The storyline of the play is simple: the prime minister is a figure who demands complete control of his caucus, which now features a working-class woman, Jisbella Lyth, who has little formal education, a history of work in which her greatest success was as a manager of a restaurant which was part of the St. Hubert’s chain, and no experience in politics. Blind obedience to anyone, including the leader of her political party, is not one of Ms. Lyth’s strengths. The prime minister, a canny operator, decides that he will use Lyth to his own ends by having her introduce a private member’s bill limiting access to abortion. He anticipates that this bill will be a big story in the news reports, thereby drawing attention away from flawed and unpopular bills so they can pass in the House of Commons. Lyth is willing to be used by the prime minister because she has an intuitive sense of the workings of power and realizes that allowing herself to be used by the prime minister could further her career.

Healey is a skilled playwright. Proud is briskly paced, with engaging, often funny dialogue. Healey’s technical capabilities mask some fundamental problems with the play. There is nothing particularly insightful about Healey’s suggestion that Harper likes to keep a tight control over and manage all aspects of the caucus. The question is: what is the point of the play if it is staging a well-reported aspect of Harper’s style of governing? Given that relatively few Canadians go to the theatre to see productions of new Canadian plays, and those who do are likely not fans of Harper, Proud is a play which appeals to those who already share its political perspective. The play offers little insight into Harper, save for a suggestive speech in which the prime minister atomizes what he cares about, politically. He doesn’t care about issues. He cares only about tightening things “a little” to reduce the debt from 30 per cent of the gross national product to 22 per cent, to allow for more choices. Healey may well be offering an interesting, if speculative, perspective on Harper’s priorities as prime minister.

Proud has a marked and uneasy ambivalence toward Harper, representing his personal aspirations as being modest but with some merit. Healey’s Harper is a relatively complex character. For example, Lyth has a young son, Jake, whom she leaves alone so she can attend an early morning meeting with the prime minister. Jake calls his mother for a recipe because he wants to make latkes for his breakfast. Lyth, in giving the recipe, forgets to include eggs to bind the potatoes. Jake is upset that the latkes are a culinary disaster and calls his mother in tears. When Lyth...