Canada Split: 2 Plays

David E. Kemp is head of the Drama Department at Queen’s University.

Stratton is the author of more than a dozen plays. He has won the Dora
Mavor Moore Award, the Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award, and the
Canadian Authors Association Award—all for Rexy—and a further
Chalmers Award for Papers.

The two plays in this volume share the same mood: comic political
satire. In “A Flush of Tories,” Stratton manages to reflect on
current Canadian attitudes, even though the events he depicts occur in
the last decade of the nineteenth century. The play wonderfully deals
with a collection of knaves, opportunists, blackguards, blowhards, and
burglars who have just one thing in common—they are all politicians.
No matter what shade of political opinion they represent, they are all
totally lacking in sympathy: a real rogues’ gallery.

In “Rexy,” Stratton turns his attention to the life and times of
one of Canada’s most flamboyant politicians, William Lyon Mackenzie
King. Grandson of a rebel, King was a cunning and indeed a superb
politician. He was also a spiritualist, a lifelong bachelor who bought
favors from “women of the night,” and as vain as a peacock. It says
much of Stratton’s skill as a writer that, although he has his tongue
firmly in his cheek, he never once demeans King nor makes him anything
but totally fascinating.

Both these plays are excellent examples of comic political satire. As
Ann Saddlemyer says in her witty and perceptive introduction, “through
the laughter, the parody, the brisk dialogue and swift shifts of mood
and tempo runs their creator’s commitment to equality, inclusiveness
and individual responsibility. We would do well to take it all in.”