Preview
THE FIGHTING DAYS
University of Calgary
Starring Andrea Richelhoff, Allison Duthie, Meg Wilkie and Mat Mailandt
Written by Wendy Lill
Directed by James Dugan
Runs until April 3
Reeve Theatre (U of C)
Canadians have always had trouble with heroes. We no sooner erect a statue to a famous Canadian, than we want to take a sledgehammer to it.
In 1999, when Calgary finally undraped its monument to the Famous Five – the pioneering ladies who helped lead the fight for Canadian women’s rights – the iconoclasts were quick to point out the quintet’s faults, including racism. But playwright-politician Wendy Lill had already highlighted both their bravery and their clay feet years before in her well-crafted play The Fighting Days.
Lill’s 1984 drama, now getting a revival from the University of Calgary, tells the tale of the struggle to give Canadian women the vote in the years leading up to the First World War. Its setting is Winnipeg, the seedbed for the national suffrage movement, and its characters include Francis Marion Beynon, the young journalist who crusaded for rural women’s rights through her influential newspaper column, and writer Nellie McClung, the witty spokeswoman for Manitoba’s suffragists. A decade later, in Alberta, McClung would become one of the Famous Five, who succeeded in changing the patriarchal British North America Act to include women as "persons."
U of C professor James Dugan, the show’s director, has been a fan of Lill’s play since he began teaching Canadian drama in the mid-1990s. "I really like it," he says. "It depicts these large-scale historical events in a very intimate style. It’s about the personal toll the conflict took on the individuals – on their friendships and love lives."
Lill directs her focus on the lesser-known Beynon, who began as McClung’s protegé but eventually clashed with her and the movement’s other white, middle-class leaders over their wish to deny the vote to immigrant women – a racist sentiment exacerbated by the onset of the war and the move to exclude "enemy aliens" from the electorate. Their falling-out is depicted in the play and, even though Lill sympathizes with Beynon’s lone stance for tolerance and pacifism, she also gives McClung her due.
"She shows Nellie McClung as a human," says Dugan. "McClung was also the mother of a son who was overseas (as a soldier) at the time. She says, in a crucial scene in the play, that (excluding immigrant women) was a temporary measure and that it wouldn’t be long before they got full votes for all women. And she was right. So maybe she saw the compromise as a way of getting a foot in the door. She was a more political creature than Francis was."
Directing the play has made Dugan curious about the idealistic Beynon, whose later life is something of a mystery.
"I’ve had some correspondence with Lill to try and find out more about her," he says. "Beynon went to New York and wrote an autobiographical novel (Aleta Dey) which is a rich source of information about her, but otherwise there’s not much known about her after she left Canada."
Lill herself is a remarkable woman. In addition to her successful theatrical career (her other plays include the popular Glace Bay Miners’ Museum and the hard-hitting All Fall Down, which premièred at playRites in 1993), the Nova Scotia-based playwright is also the NDP member of Parliament for Dartmouth. "She’s a doggedly hard-working MP; she is so conscientious," says Dugan admiringly. "I don’t know how she gets any writing done, but she manages to keep doing it." |
Copyright ©2004 FFWD. All rights reserved.