Dancing in Poppies

Ian C. Nelson is librarian emeritus and former assistant director of
libraries at the University of Saskatchewan Library. He is also
dramaturge for the Festival de la Dramaturgie des Prairies.

Gail Bowen is the author of the Joanne Kilbourn detective novels. Ron
Marken is a specialist in modern Irish literature and an award-winning
teacher. The two previously collaborated on the novella 1919: The Love
Letters of George and Adelaide (1987), on which this play is based.
Dramaturge Mary Blackstone contributes a useful introduction to the
play’s development and revision at the Globe Theatre.

Act I, virtually a play in itself, draws intensity from words rather
than action: war rhetoric is mercilessly skewered as two prairie
soldiers (Roger and George) recount the horrors of World War I combat to
Adelaide, a Toronto society volunteer in a convalescent home. Both
inevitably fall in love with her but relationships are kept at bay by
comradeship and the relentless push toward Roger’s suicide. Act
II—wonderful, wrenching, and problematic—is all action as Adelaide
and George fight the injustices of war’s aftermath. They conclude that
war must create positive opportunity and a decent life afterward. They
also struggle to reassess the significance of Roger’s suicide to them
(“we shouldn’t make him out to be something he wasn’t [i.e., a
hero]”), for he continues, as a ghost, to prod them into new dramatic
journeys.

The problem is that they now dart in startling, unexpected directions
only to revisit a reiterated theme—accumulated wisdom held in
books—albeit now experienced at a personal level. Almost every scene
in Act II could serve as a reasonably satisfying ending for the play.
But no, the play picks up again and continues. Having posited that the
thread of any story may be picked up anywhere (“where we begin is
arbitrary, perhaps even whimsical”), the authors cleverly reapply that
principle to the last third of the play. The danger is that an audience
may feel either confused or manipulated as it is pulled through a series
of emotional wringers while the authors almost appear to be dodging the
bullets of lurking clichés.

The text includes black-and-white production photos and, curiously, the
same photos reproduced as colored plates.