Mary Jane Miller
This article has a double focus: a comparison of two highly theatrical one-actor plays, written and performed in the same period, which both address the same subject: the relationship of the public myth to the private personae of the protagonists; and how the adaptation of each to the medium of television intensifies, often ironically, the dramas' deconstruction of those myths.
Dans cet article l'auteur se propose deux objectifs: d'abord, une comparaison entre deux monodrames reconnus pour leur théâtralité, tous deux créés vers la même époque et qui exploitent chacun le même thème: les rapports entre le mythe public et la personnalité «réelle» du protagoniste; ensuite, une analyse de la façon don't l'adaptation télévisuelle de ces monodrames souligne, souvent de façon ironique, leur côté «déconstructif» par rapport au mythe public.
Maggie and Pierre: A Fantasy of Love, Politics and the Media 1 was written by actress Linda Griffiths with director Paul Thompson during the 1979-80 season. Billy Bishop Goes to War, 2 written by writer/composer/performer John Gray, with actor Eric Peterson, was first performed in 1978. Both were very successful, long-running and widely circulated plays which used analogies from another era to throw light on the self-absorption of the 1970s. Both were adapted for television by independent producers in the early 1980s. Both were structured to counterpoint stage metaphors of well-known public images with dialogue (and in the case of Billy Bishop some songs) which bared the innermost feelings of three protagonists - Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, his wife, ex-flower child Maggie Trudeau, and World War I flying 'ace' Billy Bishop: three icons of their times.
Like other well-known plays of the 1970s, such as Rick Salutin's Les Canadiens or James Reaney's Donnelly trilogy, these plays, as I have argued elsewhere,3 are about the need for/search for/fear of heroes. They are also about what kind of heroes we want or need and how our needs change those people selected for hero worship. The plays focus on the response of the persons so chosen for those 'roles,' the question of how much the individuals themselves shape the specific details of the images required, the discrepancies between the image and the person, and finally how, as people, they either become subsumed in the myth or try to destroy it.
What kind of heroes do we want? These plays suggest that we want fantasies shaped into prototypes by the needs of the historical moment. In Billy Bishop the dream is defined as a new sense of separate nationhood which arose during the bloody participation of Canada in World War I. This sensibility is then recaptured and relived by the generation of the cynical 1970s, reacting against the 'peace and love' slogans of its youth yet yearning for a lost sense of simpler days. When the truth beneath the stereotype is uncovered, the revulsion is magnified by those earlier expectations. Putting this play on television, the foremost modern image-making apparatus, simply underlines the rise and fall, the accelerated but inevitable curve of mythmaking/demythologising in our time.
In Maggie and Pierre, the lost golden age of Canada's growing self-confidence in the 1960s is also recollected from the perspective of the self-centred 1970s. However, in the television version the changes are not only in the look of the play but in the major rewrites. The ending, in particular, is rewritten to reflect the political reality of Trudeau's unexpected political resurrection. The emphasis shifts to Henry in some scenes and the whole image-making process of television is itself revealed by self-reflexive conventions.
Maggie and Pierre shows us how and why the media, which both serve and lead public perceptions, required that these two people play out an archetypal story of 'love, politics and media.' Using speeches by the reporter Henry and then by Maggie herself, Griffiths suggests that we needed these magical media figures to find out who we were, to make us feel much bigger, brighter, braver-more liberated but not too liberated. The media satisfy that demand, either by conducting our search for heroes for us or by reflecting them back to us when we select them, in the best-or worst-light. In Maggie and Pierre Henry, the journalist, is observer, interpreter, commentator, and occasional ally of the protagonists.
In 1917, with the volunteer armies and rapid communications systems of modern warfare, politicians and generals also needed heroes to motivate the men at the front and more importantly, the people back home. Billy Bishop Goes to War shows us how such a hero was created. However, as the play progresses Bishop intermittently sees through the lionizing. He even begins to resent the use made of his kill ratio and his rating as a colonial Ace - but not enough to step out of the game. First he discovers that he loves flying, though he is not a natural pilot. Then he discovers that he loves killing. He has become the war hero required for the times.
We see what happens when Bishop is co-opted by the needs of the war, the propaganda machine that drives it and the social structure that directs it. Yet Bishop's sense of irony and self-awareness develops as the play progresses. He even expresses doubts about the killing, just before he is compelled to come home. We see him as an average 'kid' finding his talent as a sharpshooter in aerial warfare, being seduced by, then changed by, the fame it brings. But the process through which he discovers that he loves killing, that he has the capacity to be a courageous, coolly efficient air ace is independent of the propaganda, the pressures of the social structure and issues of colonialism. In 'Unhappy is the land that needs a hero,' a survey of heroes and antiheroes in contemporary Canadian drama, Malcolm Page argues 'that the term is ultimately playful, with no new insights into Bishop the man or into the return of war heroes.'4
At the end of the second play Maggie, child of a media age which adopts whatever image is current on the tube or in the magazines, and Pierre, who rejects media influences yet plays the image game superbly, both say 'no,' independently of each other, to the co-option of their personas. However, the penalty is high. In one of the play's climactic scenes, Trudeau's frozen anguish comes from his inability to be alive like Maggie even though the voters expect him to be the all-seeing guru of a new Aquarian age. 'You fall in love with Trudeau; you fall in love with Canada,' says Linda Griffiths in her introduction (p 9). At the end of the play, Maggie is condemned to dance in the box in the corner of our living room, because she points to a truth we do not want to face, and which her myth was expected to hide. Why and how she has to try to destroy the MAGGIE AND PIERRE myth is the heart of that play.
The National Film Board found out just how potent Bishop's myth was even in the 1980s in the justifiable uproar which greeted their 'docudrama,' The Kid Who Couldn't Miss.5 Because Bishop said yes to the social values he is selected to embody, the myth is still intact. John Gray understands the implications of this, as he demonstrates in the last scene of the play where Bishop is condemned to repeat our bloody history in his speech to the airmen in World War II. That World War I was not 'the war to end all wars' was another truth the myth had been fashioned to hide. Why and how Billy becomes BILLY BISHOP V.C. is the heart of this play.
The two plays make clear to the audience from the beginning that one is watching fiction, presented by playwrights commenting on and speculating about known historical events. The original dramatic conventions of both plays drew attention to their 'theatricality' - single set, minimal props, bits of costumes, frankly theatrical devices like the hand-in-glove on Maggie's back which helps the actress recreate for us what it was like to dance with Pierre Trudeau, or the toy aeroplane which Bishop uses to illustrate some of his battles.
Most important for their presentational emphasis on fictional elements, both shows have only one actor playing all the speaking roles. John Gray as musician/observer is only occasionally 'present' when given focus by the blocking. 'Henry,' the observer, like Maggie and Pierre is played by Linda Griffiths.
In live theatre, such demanding scripts create tours de force which no television version can hope to duplicate. Both Maggie and Pierre and Billy Bishop use this primary convention differently. In Billy Bishop we see the characters through Bishop's eyes; the General, the upperclass Lady St. Helier, the chanteuse 'Lovely Helene' are presented by Bishop in narrative, songs and flashbacks whose tone is clearly ironic because Bishop is telling us, his mess-mates, the story at some undefined later time. The commentary on the other characters is built into Bishop's presentation of them. On the other hand, the changes in his own character, revealed primarily through his letters to 'dearest Margaret,' are for the most part perceived by the audience and not by the protagonist.
Maggie Sinclair Trudeau is a strange mix of instinctive, non-reflective flower child and chorus to her own life:
Voice: Margaret. You're trying just a bit too hard.
Maggie: No, it's what they want. ... Hello, Daddy. I've got your pipe and slippers. (p 25)
The television version of Billy Bishop intentionally undercuts
the effect of having one actor play many parts by introducing full-scale
costume changes. The costume changes take the play out of 'real' playing
time into the manipulated time and space of careful editing.
In the production of Billy Bishop which I saw on tour, Eric Peterson used a model plane hurtling through the air with home-made sound effects for the reenactment of Bishop's first battles. For the climactic raid on the German aerodrome the plane was a cardboard cutout. In both instances, the high-tech symbol of a plane had been mediated by theatrical conventions of self-evidently stylized props which, with the aid of other presentational conventions such as monologues, direct address and narration, had become stage metaphors. These worked to stimulate the imagination, sometimes taking us into the skies, sometimes refracting the experience into ironic double perspective as we watched Bishop recreate his experience.
The television producer Norman McCandlish used exactly the same devices,6 knowing that the expectations of a modern television audience, which is conditioned by almost unremitting naturalism in television fictions, would be jolted by the simplicity of these devices. Inside the frame of the high-tech television screen he had the nerve to show us an image of a man in a pilot's uniform zooming around a largely undifferentiated space with a model airplane. In calling our attention to the dramatic conventions he thus violated the implicit contract of most contemporary television viewing: an implicit fourth wall, realistic sets and costumes for historical pieces, understated acting, location shooting. When the producer set one scene naturalistically in a trench with Bishop's carefully reconstructed downed plane in the background, it was a mistake because it destroyed the tension between the usual conventions of television and those built up by this production.7
It will be clear from this analysis that, except for this one scene, I take issue with Jean MacIntyre when she expresses considerable dissatisfaction (albeit in a footnote) with the television version because of its 'visual realism which weakened and spoiled the production . . . and seemed unwilling to trust the imagination of the television audience.'8 Stylized watercolours which formed many of the 'sets' created by chroma-key and the use of area lighting to create a 'nowhere' sort of space do not correspond to her description of the production as having a realistic set for each scene. In fact many scenes having 'sets' were shot using chroma-key. The actor is photographed against or within a blue background. A complex pictorial effect is shot separately. In the processing of the tape or film, the actor appears to be framed against or moving with the 'scenery' created in this way. Here very stylized watercolours were used for Lady St. Helier's study, for Lovely Helene's bar and for Bishop's investiture at the palace.
Chroma-key art work permits the seamless imposition of a character's image onto an elaborately painted, colour-saturated backdrop, on any scale and in any perspective; for example, 'The Dying of Albert Ball' sequence begins against a painted backdrop of a Great House in front of a real fire, is spoken not sung with detached sympathy and ends with Bishop in flying gear delivering the last two verses with sharp bitterness. This image cross-fades to the names, then to pictures of squadron pilots.
The tension between the television audiences' expectations of naturalism and the highly stylized conventions of this production mirror the tensions between the image-building process Bishop endures/enjoys to satisfy the expectations of the media and the other Bishop who tells us about his faults and his failings. Artifice and naturalism battle it out both on screen and in the gap between audience expectation and presentation. The way McCandlish uses television in this adaptation mirrors the tension between the image of heroic protagonist and the older Bishop as ironic spectator, with the gap between the two first widening and then narrowing as the play progresses - but never closed.
Chroma-key effects, such as Bishop's tiny figure growing larger as he walks down the centre of a two-dimensional drawing of the ornate palace room where he is given the VC, emphasise the fact that this is electronic drama, not live theatre. In this case, the artifice is so evident, the entrance so 'staged' and framed by another image maker, television itself, that it also makes a self-reflexive statement about one of the play's central concerns: image-making.
Both television dramas use the camera's option of Extreme Closeup at key moments, which emphasises in a different way that one actor is playing many roles. In the case of television, however, the ECU is the language of news as well as drama as the camera peers at the defeated politician, the victorious athlete, the grieving sister, the soldier in the heat and fear of battle. The zoom lens makes private agony public drama.
Like Bishop, Trudeau narrates and comments on his life, self-conscious to the end. Yet in his climactic scene, his agonised prayer after he finds out that Margaret has humiliated him by spending the weekend with the Rolling Stones (even though it is acted out at Henry's prompting), he effectively shuts us out as voyeurs. The overtone of complicity with Henry, of 'it's indecent to look at this,' also intensifies the irony of Trudeau's own self-awareness:
[to Henry] What's the matter. I could show you more. Would you like me to beat my breast, scream or shout that I still love her? What's the matter? no stomach for it? That's the trouble. You never know what to ask me. But it's all right. I forgive you.9
Henry the confessor is turned into Henry the penitent/voyeur, into
one of us. The impact of the television version is stronger here because
the intimacy of television closeup adds to our sense of the intensity of
Trudeau's suffering.
Henry is the character charged with articulating and agonized our responses to the tale and like a Greek Chorus he is being drawn into the action against his will. The tone and look of both the play - and even more so the television version - allude to the forties' film noir as narrated by a hard-boiled reporter. But Henry is as involved as the rest of us. In the television version, his asides are no longer theatrical, bridging the gap between situation and audience. Instead, his direct address to the camera is as involving as a Peter Mansbridge whose direct eye contact with the audience breaches television's fourth wall as only news anchors and reporters are permitted to do.
However, I do not go as far as Rick Salutin who has argued that the television version is 'something entirely new' 'because everything is happening within the warped consciousness of one individual.' But I do agree that this television adaptation, even more than the play itself, may be 'the revenge of drama on documentary and perhaps the revenge of the emotions on the facts.... the real task may be to tell not what it is like to be here, but what it feels like to be here. (Which, dialectically speaking, is only a momentary contradiction, since what it feels like, is what it is like, on a different level)'.10
In the theatre we validate our collective social values or have them challenged in the company of others. In our living room we tune in or out the public or private lives of the nation and the neighbourhood. The whole process is intimate, creating the illusion that we know these people well - and that is what much of Maggie and Pierre: A Fantasy of Love and Politics and the Media is about. That sense of intimacy and immediacy is reflected even in the fairly extensive rewrites of Maggie and Pierre which Griffiths and director Paul Thompson undertook for the television version.
Television refracts the already self-reflexive form of these plays one phase further - by drawing attention to both the theatricality and the televisual artifices, and by emphasising the tensions between them; for example, in the October Crisis scene in Maggie and Pierre several levels of perception interact. All of us remember the clip (played over and over on television then and since) of the reporter confronting Trudeau about how far the Prime Minister was prepared to go with tanks and troops. We also remember his reply: 'Just watch me!' When this is reenacted in the theatre with one actress playing both parts, there is no 'we' and 'they.' Trudeau is Henry is us in that scene. However, television makes us even more aware of the irony because we are watching the scene on television just as we did years before.
Griffiths added a new speech at the end of this scene, which expands on that theme:
Henry: [blues behind and a cold wind growing]. There's nothing like being faced with a tank on your way to the Mac's Milk. He called out the army on me, on us. I don't care what anybody says. All right all right maybe he had to do it and maybe he didn't. So-called revolutionaries . . . who knows, who cares. I'm not talking about what makes sense or what's fair. I'm talking about martial law. You see we thought that we were innocent. We thought that this country (which doesn't have much to say for itself) but that of all the countries it wasn't backed by guns. By snow, by civility but not by guns. He rubbed our noses in the fact. Just because we took in draft dodgers didn't mean that we were free from all that nasty stuff. We had an army and that army had power and they would use it ... The populace applauded but even while they applauded they hated him for it too. We sharpened our knives for him and I led the pack. There was a shadow on the land. It fell across Margaret trapped in that mausoleum ....11
Margaret's relationship to the newspapers and television is another
motif, and television is the perfect medium for this aspect of the script.
Particularly in news programmes, television focuses on the personal, on
the action and reaction shot, on images rather than ideas, on creating
the appearance of consensus about what is actually important to the viewer.
It creates figures whose authority is in part predicated on their likeability
(the play is pre-Ronald Reagan; the television version was rewritten after
ex-actor Reagan's election as American President). Television news organizes
experience into digestible bits. Television formula drama locates disruption
of the social norms in the outsider (for example, the charismatic, the
foreign or the betraying woman), and insists that the conflicts be resolved
within the community shown in the episode. This version of society is presumed
to reflect the social norms of the viewer's community. Maggie and Pierre
as a television play makes us aware of these conventions by both using
them and drawing attention to them.
By the final sequence of the television version, we have arrived at a quintessentially post-modernist image, a 'what you see is what you get' (and what-you-the-viewer-made image), striving toward displacement and thus self-sufficiency. Maggie's sense of self has been displaced in a process revealed by the play. Yet in the end she displaces the viewer's sense of who she is and what he or she has actually seen. Indeed, in this sequence it is particularly likely that men and women watching will perceive very different things.
As Maggie lists all the expectations which surround the modern woman the camera very slowly closes in on her, moving from closeup to extreme closeup. Then the speech reaches its neatly self-reflexive twist:
Maggie: And in the midst of all this mastery of the Modern Age, along comes little Maggie Trudeau, doodle-doodle doo ... and she falls apart right in the middle of your television set. She says, 'I can't cope ... I don't know if I'm a wife or a mother or a career ... or which career. I'm silly and narcissistic ... I don't ... I ... A husband? ... I don't know ... too much ... I can't cope!' And we don't like that do we, ladies? Noooooo. And we don't like that do we gentlemen? Noooo. Because if Maggie Trudeau with all her advantages falls apart where does that leave us? in the same boat ... Welcome aboard. I'm the woman who gave freedom a bad name. Go on, take a look. I'm not afraid. [Twirls] And I have only one question to ask you ... [Camera switches to a shot which travels slowly, voyeuristically from feet to rump] Which do you think is my best feature, my legs ... or my bum? [slaps bum].12
In the second half of the sequence, the camera crossfades to the
familiar sunny landscapes which characterise the film that traditionally
ends our television day - the standard cross-country panorama which accompanies
'0 Canada.' But we see them through a rainy lens. The camera then pulls
back to show the frame of the tv set, then the shop window and then picks
up Henry for the play's new closing speech which ends: 'Amnesia's setting
in. But don't worry. I've got it all. It's something in the centre of the
story. But if you're going to hang around, you'd better sit tight' - and
the camera pulls back again, this time to show Henry talking to the camera
on the studio set. We are watching Henry deliver the opening lines of the
script all over again. In the end the image and the image maker are not
only self-reflexive but self-enclosed. Maggie and Pierre may have lives
to live, constitutions to repatriate. Like Billy Bishop this play
is not about history: it is about the deconstruction of the processes of
myth-making.
Billy Bishop was made a hero by the mass media of his day - which perpetuated and enlarged the idea of 'ace,' numbers of kills, and above all the dramatis personae of the heroic dead like Ball and the 'Red Baron.' Maggie Trudeau became a different kind of icon after her initial wish to become someone else was achieved by marrying someone famous. Like Bishop she falls into her situation on impulse, then seems powerless to shape her own destiny. However, in the end the character Linda Griffiths creates insists on knowing herself and being that self. Bishop's last speech is very different, ending in a superbly ambivalent phrase: 'We didn't think there was going to be another [war] back in 1918. Makes you wonder what it was all for? But then, we're not in control of any of these things, are we? And all in all, I would have to say, it was a hell of a time!' (p 101).
Both plays address the question of what kind of heroes Canada sought
in two different periods in her history; why these particular prototypes
answered the specific needs of an era; and the dramatic tensions both between
the 'role' and the 'character' who is forced to play that role, and between
that character and the audience. The fact that both productions depend
on one actor playing all of the parts enhances the narcissism as well as
the isolated rebellion which characterise the protagonists. As well as
making it possible for people who never saw the exciting original productions
to see different but equally interesting versions of them, television adaptations
intensify some of the deconstructive strategies of the original plays.
Notes
BILLY BISHOP GOES TO WAR AND MAGGIE AND PIERRE: A MATCHED SET
Mary Jane Miller
1 Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1980. Television adaptation
by Tapestry Productions in Association with First Choice and the Canadian
Film Development Corporation, 1983: Director Martin Lavut; Producer Rick
Butler
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2 Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1981. Television adaptation
by Primedia, in association with BBC Scotland and CBC, 1982: Producer Pat
Ferns; Producer/Director Norman McCandlish
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3 'The use of stage metaphor in The Donnellys,' Canadian
Drama/L'Art dramatique canadien vol 8 no 1, 1982 pp 34-41; and 'They
shoot! They score!?' ibid, vol 4 no 2, 1978 pp 140-149
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4 In Autobiographical and Biographical Writing in
the Commonwealth, ed Doireann MacDermott, Barcelona: Editorial AUSA
Sabadell 1984, p 181-184
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5 The film used a lot of WW I footage. It also used Eric Peterson to play both Bishop and the doubting mechanic who questions the truth of his claim to have raided the German airfield. The disclaimer that now accompanies the film stating that it does use fictional elements has not appeased the thousands of outraged Canadians who demanded that it be withdrawn:
The whole film weaves in fiction, fantasy, actual film footage, clips from Hollywood films, actors portraying parts and actual persons being interviewed. It is virtually impossible, in watching the film to know which is which.
To label the film a docu-drama is a joke. To the public the term implies that the events actually took place, although in order to tell the story, some dramatization has been used. In the final analysis however, it is the narrative that tells the big lie. (Hanging a Legend: The NFBs Shameful Attempt to Discredit Billy Bishop, V. C., by H. Clifford Chadderton, OC, CAE, Ottawa: The War Amputations of Canada [1986], p 49)
6 BBC Scotland's co-production with Primedia, first
shown in Canada on the CBC
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7 Don S. Williams' imaginative and self-reflexive CBC
television production of Morris Panych's post-nuclear holocaust cabaret
Last Call (1983) also demonstrates how compelling non-naturalistic
television can be. See Miller, Turn Up the Contrast: CBC Television
Drama since 1952, Vancouver: Co-published by the CBC and UBC Press
1987, pp 340-342
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8 'Language and Structure in Billy Bishop Goes to
War,' Canadian Drama/L'Art dramatique canadien, vol 13 no 1 1987, pp
50-59, note 2. Note that the sets of the television version of Maggie
and Pierre were equally stylized. Maggie's bedroom was overstuffed
with appropriate objects which director Martin Lavut explored at length.
The rainy-day street where Henry begins and ends the play was clearly a
studio set where, as the last lines were spoken, the camera pulled back
to show camera crew, lights, microphone boom, etc. In this case the effect
is to show the image-maker making images - and trapped inside them.
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9 Transcribed from my study tape of the play; inserted
after 'Well, Henry, is that what you wanted to see?' p 90
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10 This Magazine, vol 18 no 3 August 1984, p
22 He also quotes director Martin Lavut who gets the pay channel wrong.
It was shown on First Choice's short-lived C-[for Culture]-Channel. Still
the heart-felt cry is the same. When Salutin asked him what his viewers
thought of the video, "'Viewers!" cried Lavut, tearing his hair. "What
viewers? It was shown on First-Choice Pay-TV! This is not Germany - I am
not Fassbinder! Where do you think we are?" ' (p 23)
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11 Added after Trudeau's line, 'Just watch me!' p 61
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12 Text of the play conflated with the speech from
the television version. The reader may wish to compare what I record here
with the published text (pp 93,94). Both stage directions and camera movements
record observations of the television production. Note that the original
script has been changed from 'just getting by, just hanging on' to 'handling
everything, we're in control'
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