Fortune, My Foe and Eros at Breakfast

Ian C. Nelson is assistant director of libraries at the University of
Saskatchewan and président, La Troupe du Jour, Regina Summer Stage.

These comedies are both award winners, dating from 1948-49, and have
subsequently had many productions. Fortune, My Foe was a refreshingly
Canadian piece at a time when there was precious little professional
theatre in the country. It strikes a still-resonating Canadian chord of
self-deprecation while exploring other themes that revisit us in more
subtle changes of guise: Canadian identity, the brain drain, the tension
between traditional and contemporary values, the place of the arts, the
decline of education. The play’s humor derives from the social satire
of an in-between culture that is being led by foolish denizens. The play
is well written (using a fairly rich World War II vocabulary), and full
of metaphors and symbols. It is perhaps most dated in its depiction of
women. (It is significant that in the script, male characters are listed
by surname, female by given name!) With a proper regard for the period,
the text would make a very

useful vehicle for a study of plus зa change.

Eros for Breakfast is about love: “What would love do to the solar
plexus of a young man newly in love? ... [I]t was easy to conceive of
the solar plexus as a government office, filled with civil servants.”
Davies correctly remarks that this play requires delicate comedic
acting. The need is even greater nowadays: a young cast—already
seriously challenged by Davies’s vocabulary and sentence
structure—would doubtless find the innocence and chastity of the piece
hard to convey.