Running Dog, Paper Tiger

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

Simon Johnston has over 20 years of experience as a playwright,
director, and theatre educator in Canada. His latest play, which is set
in Hong Kong at the time of the Communist Chinese riots in 1967,
dramatizes the tensions among members of an ambitious mixed-race family
as they become virtually strangers in their own land while facing the
disillusion of British abandonment. It is a carefully crafted personal
story set against an incendiary political background not unlike that
depicted in John van Druten’s I Am a Camera, based on Isherwood’s
Berlin stories.

The issues of “sacrifice” to oppressors and messages of
internalized self-hatred apply to a wide range of cultural settings.
Johnston has the savvy to centre his play on parallel political and
personal crises and uses a fast-paced cinematic technique to take his
characters from location to location for linear action and interleaved
events. He creates powerful theatrical moments at the end of each of the
two acts and uses a framing flashback device that encapsulates the
family dilemma with a punch that is as personal as it is profound.
Running Dog, Paper Tiger was the 1995 winner of Theatre BC’s National
Playwriting Competition.