BILLY BISHOP GOES TO WAR

Background Notes

by Soulpepper Associate Artist Paula Wing

Billy Bishop Goes to War first premiered in November 1978 at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre. It was a huge success,  touring across Canada and internationally, and incidentally, returning Billy Bishop to the national consciousness. In his heyday, there was no one more famous in this country than the pugnacious young man from Owen Sound who was the terror of the skies at the height of the First World War. 

It's hard to imagine that time now. The pilots were its heroes, great warriors who were dubbed "knights of the sky" by the press. To their adoring, war-weary public, they embodied skill, courage, perseverance, prevailing against all odds. Flyers had a chivalric code, they respected certain rules of engagement, certain principles of fair play, or so the mythology claimed. The bravest, most skilled of the aces provided a breath of heroism and old style honour to a public ground down by years of trench warfare. They proved to be a potent recruting tool as well: the advertisements made the war look like adventure and daring and feats of derring-do to the fresh-faced young men it devoured. What those rah-rah posters neglected to mention is that you would almost certainly die before you reached the age of twenty-one. If, by some fluke, you survived - and statistically survival was a fluke - you'd sustain permanent, debilitating injuries, age rapidly and prematurely, and probably have to cope with some form of shell shock (what we now call post traumatic stress disorder) for the rest of your life.  

Still, there was no shortage of young men who wanted to pioneer aerial warfare, on both sides of the lines. The French coined the term "ace", to designate those who had distinguished themselves in aerial combat. You had to down five enemy aircraft to win the "ace" designation and pilots competed hard for it. The Germans were quick to adopt the French idea of aces but their requirements were stricter. A pilot had to have eight kills at first and later they augmented this to sixteen. Of course, they didn't say "kills" - they spoke of "downing an aircraft." They called them "victories" but in reality more often than not they were kills. An ace was successful if he shot the other plane out of the sky, and the other pilot into eternity. Nominally, each "victory" had to be verified: each kill had to have witnesses, but in practice, this was often difficult to obtain. Pilots were known for taking crazy risks - many young men were attracted to flying because while you had a commander, he wasn't in the air with you: you could make your own decisions, go after your own targets. Pilots had a reputation for exaggeration. Indeed, some units had protocols in place that left the easiest targets to the aces, to pump up their numbers, much to the resentment of the junior pilots seeking to make their names.   

The greatest ace of the war, the one atop the leaderboard, was German: Manfred von Richthofen - The Red Baron, though Rene Fonck (of France) was the highest scoring ace to actually survive the war. Right behind him is Billy Bishop. We don't know the names of the those who went up once and crashed. Or those who were shot down on their second, or third, or fourth missions. Or those whose inexperience as pilots cost them their lives before they even saw a day of combat. 

The other remarkable - and at the time under-publicized - side of this story is that flight technology was in its infancy - remember that the war broke out a scant ten years after the Wright brothers recorded the first flight. Incredibly to us today, the planes were made of canvas and wood. It is said that the Sopwith Camel - a type of biplane - killed more British pilots than the enemy did because of its many handling problems. On the German side, the Fokker DR.V's top wing had a tendency to peel off during flight. Fire was a constant hazard on all the aircraft. None achieved speeds of more than one hundred miles per hour.   

As the war went on, engineers made extraordinary leaps in construction and function of the planes but the improvements always came at the cost of many lives. It wasn't until nearly two years into the war that engineers figured out how to co-ordinate flight technology with the requirements of the guns and until so-called interrupter mechanisms were invented, the bullets from the pilot's own gun often pierced the propellers and caused the plane to crash. Parachutes were not used at all until the Second World War. A few pilots became famous, got prestige and medals and the adoration of their countrymen, but most took the same extraordinary risks, showed the same exceptional bravery, and were anonymously consumed, their names known only to their families and friends. 

Billy Bishop represents so many more of his generation, whose unimaginable sacrifice nearly a hundred years ago, is a timely reminder of the cost of sending our young men (and, these days, our young women) into the line of fire.

Tidbits   

• Roland Garros (after whom the tennis stadium is named) was instrumental - if you will - in developing fighter plane technology, when he added deflector plates to the blades of his propellers. When he was shot down German designer Anthony Fokker stole the idea of the deflector plates and added an interruptor mechanism that would synchronise the machine gun to fire between the propellers.   
• One of the most beloved French aces, Georges Guynemer, in pre-war days an insurance salesman with a delicate constitution, became a national hero. He had fifty-four kills to his credit when he died in 1917. He simply disappeared in the skies - neither his plane nor his remains were ever found.  According to the newspapers he was assumed into the heavens, like a god.   
• Billy Bishop Goes to War premiered in 1978 and went on to tour across Canada, to Washington D.C., on and off Broadway in New York City, to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Los Angeles, and London, England. During the international tour with Petersen and Gray, a second production continued across Canada starring Cedric Smith accompanied by Ross Douglas. 
• The play won the Los Angeles Drama Critics Award in 1981, the Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award in 1982 and the Governor General's Award for English Language Drama in 1983.  Two cast recordings were made: one in 1979 and one in 1999.  

Eric Peterson talks about the staying power of Billy Bishop, balancing television and stage roles, and the future of Canadian theatre.

Q: What talks were had with co-creator John Gray and director Ted Dykstra to re-examine the show and update it to reflect how you and John have grown older with the play? 

ERIC: We've gone through radical recasting! From a 32 year old to a 62 year old as the actor who's going to be narrating the show. In a two man play like this, it has incredibly different resonance depending on who's telling that story. In many cases, we've taken some minor rewriting for the production we did when we were 52 and updated them and changed the ending. Now at 62 we're older than Bishop ever was in the play before and we've changed it to extend up to his 62nd year, which was his last but he doesn't know that at the time. But we didn't re-write it to say, "Oh this is my last day of life" or anything like that. It goes back to that John and I are very different people with 30 more years of living under our belts that we didn't have then. This experience has brought out all kinds of different resonances in the play. We did fool around with different attempts of how to get "into" this again and that's resulted in me being in pajamas through the whole thing, which has never been in any previous production. I feel this is much more of a man "remembering" much more than it has ever been before. A memory always has an effect on a person as opposed to the younger man I used to be who was telling a cracking good yarn about what happened to him in the war. This is more about a man looking back on his life it seems to me. Those kinds of elements seem to be more apparent in it this time around. 

Q: Most people perhaps know you best from your television roles, but you got your start in Canadian theatre and have worked steadily on-stage ever since. You've mostly been involved in new Canadian works, what made you want to tackle a more classical repertoire? 

ERIC: The offer. I wouldn't be at Soulpepper if Albert hadn't asked me. Because Corner Gas was coming to an end and my summers were available. I was really flattered by that and I thought, "it'd be good fun acting with those people at Soulpepper." I don't think there's been a year in my career that's gone by without doing at least one play. Theatre is still my first love and it’s a remarkable art form. And it is enjoying a renaissance right now, given that the world is becoming more virtual and disconnected.  

Q: What do you think is the future of Canadian theatre? 

ERIC: Theatre is so specific to time and place - you have to come to it. In Toronto, I'm amazed that we have an audience here to the extent that we do and not just for commercial theatre where the economics are so different. As far as not-for-profit theatre goes in this country, in this city, I think it's doing great. The thing about theatre is that it's much easier to realize your creation in the sense that you don't have to pull together all the resources you do for tv or film. It's also easier in the sense that the non-profit theatres have that ambition to produce interesting, artistically challenging work on the whole. Whereas in film or television those ambitions may not be quite so acute. They are a business model from beginning to end. Whereas in theatre, if you really want to do something you can get the people together and do it some place - that's how Soulpepper started. it seems to me that the ability to access your own creativity with a minimum of interference it makes theatre a valuable asset and allows for a whole kind of variety and diversity that keeps the art form alive in this country. I don't ever see theatre going away in Canada, it's a human need. 

Q: Are there any roles in the classical canon that you'd love to tackle? 

Writer and composer John Gray talks about revisiting Billy Bishop Goes to War thirty years later, seeing other productions of the show, and the differences between writing for the stage and novels. 

Q: Why do you think Billy Bishop Goes to War first struck a chord with audiences?  

A: It has resonances that extend past that the act of war itself. It has to do with life and the resilience of the human spirit. And on top of that, there is the theatricality of the play. Audiences have always responded to the storytelling aspect of the show. There's a childlike wonder in watching Eric play multiple characters. It's a kind of wondrous feat that you don't see everyday, something about it reminds me of the kind of performers from the Ed Sullivan show. 

Q: Now that you and Eric are the age that Billy Bishop was when he died, how is that reflected in updating the script? 

A: Well, we've re-written the ending and that has taken the script even further away from the documentary aspect it once had. We're getting more and more into the realm of fiction. We've spent a lot of time working with Ted to rediscover the piece as an aging Billy Bishop in his pajamas and what that means.  That has pushed it further in the direction about a life looking back. 

Q: You've written five novels now and this seems to be a trend among Canadian playwrights who are also novelists - Robertson Davies, Michael Redhill, Claudia Dey among them. Do you think there's a correlation between the two mediums? What is the attraction for you?  

A: In a novel you're doing one great, expanded improvisation. It's not a big transition from one to the other, so much of a novel is dialogue that writing for the stage or a novel is really not a huge jump. Writing a book is kind of like writing plays with the most massive sets one can imagine. When you write a script, it is not really a play until it's performed by actors on a stage. It's somehow incomplete until you can find someone who wants to put it on stage. You tend to get into novels because you don't have to rely on other people to exist. When I'm done writing a novel, it's there and finished whether or not anyone reads it, it still exists.  

Q: Your son Zachary is now performing the show in Vancouver. Seeing him perform this show in his twenties and employing devices like the electric guitar, does that change the resonance or the impact for the audience?  

A: It absolutely changes the way the piece feels, but that's a good thing. It evolves depending on who's playing the part at any given time. Whenever we come back to the show it reflects Eric and I being older and adapts to that, it makes sense that it should change depending on the performers no matter who they are. But the energy of rock and roll that they bring to it is so similar to the kinetic energy of an aerial battle. Zachary and Ryan are the actual age of guys who would have been in the first world war. Seeing that youthful energy on stage conveys an urgency about it which, again, changes according to the storyteller.