The Last Dog of War at Theatre Projects Manitoba
By Joff Schmidt for CBC Manitoba
Theatre Projects Manitoba kicks off its 20th season with a winner from Linda Griffiths… and it should be as big a hit for TPM as last season’s production of Griffiths’ Age of Arousal was. Read Joff’s CBC theatre blogspot on The Last Dog of War…
By: Kevin Prokosh for Winnipeg Free Press
4 stars out of 5
THE mission for actress Linda Griffiths in her new dramatic monologue was to reconnect with her Second World War veteran father and get him to his squadron’s last RAF reunion in England without starting a Third World War.
The Last Dog of War, which opened the 20th season of Theatre Projects Manitoba Thursday night, is a compelling, deceptively simple telling of the Griffiths’ 2005 overseas journey that was almost as risky and flak-filled as his 1940s bombing sorties to Berlin. The dark-haired Toronto actress, best known for writing and performing the national hit Maggie & Pierre, ascended the stage pulling her wheeled suitcase and off into the wild blue wonder she piloted her audience/passengers on an entertaining 75-minute flight of fancy.
November 4th 2009
by Amanda Lefley (Volunteer)
Performer Linda Griffiths brings a personal story with her Last Dog of War.
The Last Dog of War, a one-woman show written and performed by Montreal-born playwright Linda Griffiths, will be running Nov. 5-14 at the Costume Museum of Canada on Pacific Avenue, courtesy of the Theatre Projects of Manitoba. Read more…
This preview article appeared in Volume 64, Number 10 of The Uniter, published November 5th 2009.
There are many reasons why plays have been written for Theatre Projects Manitoba over its 20 years, and a threat of physical violence is one of them.
Rick Chafe was a fledgling fringe festival playwright in the mid-’90s when TPM artistic director Bruce McManus strong-armed him with a demand for a script, or else. The result was his first full-length work, The Last Man and Woman on Earth (1998), a dark comedy in which Chafe explored large questions in his personal life. That play gave him the confidence to adapt Homer’s Odyssey and to pen his most successful work Shakespeare’s Dog, which debuted in 2008 at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre and subsequently at the Manitoba Theatre Centre and earlier this fall in Calgary.
“I don’t know if I would have even wandered down that path if it wasn’t for Bruce telling me he’d beat me up if I didn’t give him a play,” Chafe says.
Michael Nathanson did not encounter such coercion when TPM founding artistic director Harry Rintoul came to him in 1990 and promised the theatre would produce his next play. That turned out to be To Kill the Weatherman (1991), an important stepping stone for Nathanson, who was recently nominated for a 2009 Governor General’s Award for drama. After Weatherman, Nathanson directed The Resurrection of John Frum by Vern Theissen, another local playwright wannabe who won a GG in 2003.
“It was the great luxury of knowing our work would be done, that there was a theatre in Winnipeg that absolutely believed in us as playwrights and gave us early opportunities,” says Nathanson, WJT’s current artistic director.
As TPM begins its 20th season tonight with Linda Griffiths performing her solo work The Last Dog of War, its production history reads like a who’s who of Winnipeg theatre. Most were unknown quantities when TPM first focused the spotlight on them. There’s a lot more independent made-in-Manitoba work currently on the boards but that was not always the case.
“For a long time, Theatre Projects was the only company consistently commissioning and producing new Manitoba work every season,” Chafe says. “So it was putting a lot of playwrights’ work up in front of a non-fringe audience for the first time and doing the same for a lot of actors and directors and designers and technicians.”
TPM was born in 1990, the dream of playwright Harry Rintoul, who saw the deep need for a company dedicated to staging plays written and performed by Manitobans. The last troupe to try it, Agassiz Theatre, had closed in 1989. This time the theatre community fell in behind Rintoul, who died suddenly in 2002.
“There needed to be a place for Manitoba artists to get their feet wet,” says TPM’s fifth and present artistic director Ardith Boxall. “It was necessary then and still is.
“The problem with doing developmental work is that it’s not sexy. No one is throwing corporate sponsorships at you.”
Last season TPM played to 1,734 people, with the most popular production being Age of Arousal by Griffiths. Its 2009-10 budget is $210,000, a total that includes a new creations grant received to support next spring’s première of North Main Gothic by Winnipeg’s Carolyn Gray (The Elmwood Visitation).
“If Harry was alive today he would be excited,” says Boxall. “I think he would say we’re kicking ass.”
Getting such a prominent Canadian theatre figure as Griffiths (Maggie & Pierre) back here twice in one year is a coup for TPM. Last March she was here for a public reading of The Last Dog of War, a true story of a trip the Toronto actress/playwright made with her father to England for the last reunion of his Royal Air Force squadron. When she offered to take questions from the audience the first one was, ‘Can you read some more?’
“We had to find out how the mission ended,” says Boxall, who is staging Last Dog cabaret style at the Costume Museum of Canada, 109 Pacific Ave. “We thought it would be appropriate around Remembrance Day.”
kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca
The Second World War serves as a backdrop for the conflict between a father and daughter in Linda Griffiths’ The Last Dog of War
Jared Story
Familiar battles take the stageWith Remembrance Day approaching, it’s fitting that Theatre Projects Manitoba’s first production of the season is The Last Dog of War, running Nov. 5 to 14 at the Costume Museum of Canada.
Written and performed by Linda Griffiths, the play tells the true story of a trip to the U.K. she took with her father, a Second World War veteran, for the last reunion of his Royal Air Force comrades, the 49th Squadron, Bomber Command. Set against the battle between Allied and Axis powers, there is another conflict in this tale - that between father and daughter. But don’t expect some clichéd coming-together type tale.
“I was determined it wasn’t going to be a sentimental story and yet, of course, there is an emotional level there, but there was no attempt at the beginning (of the trip) for it to be any kind of working out,” Griffiths says. “I went for my own reasons and then things happened by accident, as opposed to this tearful joining together of father and daughter. It’s not a sentimental story but it doesn’t mean there isn’t emotion in it.”
Griffiths, under the direction of Daniel McIvor, has been honing The Last Dog of War for four years now. The Montreal-born, Toronto-based playwright, whose Age of Arousal played at Theatre Projects Manitoba last season, says she developed the play “on its feet,” meaning she’s taken an improvisational approach. In fact, when she first performed it she had no script, rehearsal, no preparation whatsoever beyond a few ideas, a time frame and a few cues. The idea was to keep the emphasis on storytelling, something Griffiths says audiences have related too.
“What I’ve been really interested in is the range of ages that respond to the play,” Griffiths says. “For instance, I did a show for the Performing Arts Lodge in Toronto and that audience was mostly above 65. They relate to the Second World War stuff. I actually talked to a woman who told me she was one of the people in the basement when my father was bombing Berlin! I thought, ‘This is my optimum audience for it.’ But then when I played it for students, they’ve reacted at least as well or better to the show. I think it may be because part of the story is about very young people who went to war, and they are imagining what that may be like.
“How I know that the audiences are responding across age lines is there is a lot of laughter in the show. There are a lot of laughs, even if I don’t necessarily go for them. Relationships between parents and children are funny; the personalities, the classic clashes. That’s part of it, and part of it’s the characters that emerge, myself and my father, a couple of very stubborn people.”
THE LAST DOG OF WAR
Theatre Projects Manitoba
Until Nov. 14, Costume Museum of Canada
