Photo courtesy of Geekgirly on Flickr.
Take your familiar theatre review column, sprinkle in some academic insights and a good dose of industry knowledge, and you’ve got So Much Theatre: a semi-regular feature by Apartment613′s Andrew Snowdon. Follow Andrew on twitter: he’s @snobiwan.
People still talk about Blood on the Moon nearly thirteen years after its inaugural run as a Fringe show (and its subsequent three summers at the National Arts Centre, stint in Ireland, and TV movie). Once you’ve seen it live, as this remount at the Great Canadian Theatre Company permits us to do, you understand exactly why.
In the spring of 1868, the nascent Dominion of Canada was rocked by a brutal murder: the apparent assassination of prominent politician Thomas D’Arcy McGee. James Patrick Whelan, a fellow Irishman from Montréal, was quickly tried, convicted, and publicly hanged—the last public execution in Canada, in fact—for the crime. That’s all most people know of the story, if indeed they know anything at all (I imagine there’s a segment of the population that is only aware of D’Arcy McGee insofar as there is a local chain of Irish-style pubs that bear his name.).
In Blood on the Moon, Pierre Brault offers a different, much deeper, examination of the circumstances surrounding the only federal political assassination in Canada’s past. Taking on the persona of Whelan himself, Brault not only presents the events of the trial but delves into Whelan’s own experiences and emotions. Although Whelan maintains his own innocence to the bitter end, by telling the story from his perspective Brault manages to highlight the uncertainty surrounding his guilt.
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