Myth and History: Representations of War on the Canadian Stage from 1960-2011.

摘要

In a 1975 interview, director-playwright Ken Gass, founder of one of Canada's most influential theatres (the Factory Theatre Lab in Toronto), said that for him history "needs to be transcended." Verifiable truth is not the goal. In fact, he went on, "we should lie about our history or make one up if we don't like the one we have." This is the approach that many playwrights have taken when using history as a dramatic subject, although they interweave historical documentation with fiction in order to achieve different end goals: constructing, challenging, or intervening in Canada's national myths; culturally significant stories that are told at varying points in history because they speak to identity in a certain time and place. Such different interactions with history are addressed throughout this dissertation by looking at how war and war related issues have been represented in the Canadian theatre from 1960-2011.;One of the central contributions of this dissertation is to show how war has been dramatized differently in response to shifting national identities and preoccupations. These patterns are illustrated through an analysis of groups of plays written at similar points in history, and which represent war in similar ways based on their plots, characters, them es, structures, and production styles. Borrowing greatly from the theories of new historiography, 1 argue that such patterns are not only connected to trends in the theatre industry, but can also be historicized alongside the broader cultural and socio-political changes in each decade or so. 1 suggest that such change shows that myths must be valuable to their culture or serve a cultural purpose, otherwise they will be demythologized and replaced by a new set of stories.