Posted: Friday June 11, 2010

The Many Lives of Billy Bishop

by John MacLachlan Gray


In the mid 1970s, anyone working with Theatre Passe Muraille thinking that theatre is literature soon got over it.

“Canadian playwright” was, in popular terms, an oxymoron. If a company wanted to perform a new show, the actors were going to have to make it up themselves. This they did, by finding and researching stories and characters, whom they imitated, often with uncanny precision.

I remember seeing frightened actors, in performance, consulting scene lists backstage to find out what happened next, with no idea what, precisely, they would say.

But the main problem was that improvised dialogue tends to be single-entendre; it is a tall order for a “group creation” to organize metaphors in a coherent way.

So while the idea to do a show about Billy Bishop came from Eric Peterson, the actor-researcher, I wrote the first draft. I was the songwriter, and Bishop’s story quickly moved into metaphorical territory – as in “to rise above” and “the dance of death”. Then we edited the show together, as a play, as history, and as a vehicle for the skills of a specific actor.

Throughout the four years of our first “tour of duty,” we never stopped editing. On any given night, one of us would come into the dressing-room, in triumph, with a cut of maybe half a sentence, or a swatch of lyric.

Along the way, we made a record, a TV feature, and published the original Talonbooks script, but we never stopped making changes onstage. Songs and lines came and went, until 1982, when we finally called it a day.

For the next 16 years, productions of Billy Bishop Goes to War sprouted all over North America and beyond, based on the freeze-dried version of what we happened to be doing in 1981.

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In 1998, Canadian Stage in Toronto proposed a new production and tour, touted as the “20th Anniversary Tour,” with the “original cast.” At 53, the original cast were now middle-aged, which would have to be taken into account, otherwise we could end up with Elmer Fudd Goes to War.

Our solution rested on the fact that, when Bishop was our age, he was recruiting fresh blood to fight World War II. So we approached the story from the perspective of a recruitment drive. Bishop, now a successful middle-aged businessman, enters an empty Legion Hall where he is to give a speech; in the course of telling his story, he dons the uniform of a WWII Vice-Air Marshal, then gives his speech to new recruits.

It was a more “realistic” version in that it played from a specific standpoint, making the chameleon, “show-off” aspect of the performance less important. As well, we had a new theme – that war is just like life, only faster; if you survive, you get to experience the death of your friends.

The changes may have been more noticeable, but in line with what we had been doing all along.

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In 2009 we found ourselves agreeing to perform Billy Bishop Goes to War yet again, an act of audacious programming by Albert Schultz of Soulpepper Theatre in Toronto.

We were both 63: when Billy Bishop was our age, he died of heart failure in Florida. This called for another bit of radical re-casting, in which two old men perform a play they once performed as young men.

Suddenly the play and the players seemed intertwined.

With director Ted Dykstra we crafted a performance that could be uncharitably entitled, Billy Bishop Goes to Bed: Bishop, in pyjamas and dressing-gown, on possibly the last day of his life, remembers his story – spurred on by the other guy from Billy Bishop Goes to War, still at the piano after all these years.

We had more fun than ever, though the theme hit us harder than ever: well into the third act of our own lives, for the first time we found ourselves performing the show at a time when Canada was actually at war.

My grandmother lived to the age of 109. At one of her birthdays she told me she thought she’d lived too long. I asked her why. “Too many funerals,” she replied.