Play reminds audiences of war’s creeping cost

A university remounting of Kevin Kerr’s award-winning play Unity (1918) accents the drama’s youthful vitality and leaves audiences with a prescient anti-war message.

TRU Actors Workshop Theatre returns to small-town Saskatchewan for this bittersweet tale of war’s insidious human cost. The show opened last week on campus and continues nightly, Thursday through Saturday, at 8 p.m.

Unity juxtaposes the innocence of youth and the sweet innocence of Canadian rural life a century ago with horrors that, even now, are difficult to comprehend. An outbreak of the Spanish flu, eerily foretelling the emergence of modern-day flu pandemics, swept the world and claimed more Canadian lives than the war itself.

An ensemble cast of student players brings the town to life under the direction of Heidi Verwey in her first production as a TRU theatre instructor. Part of the challenge of this play is to build a sense of intimacy, humanity and humour in the context of a tragedy unfolding. That struggle, serving as a testament to Canadian spirit, is ever-present.

With some newly introduced scene details — some of which seem out of place — Verwey attempts to make Kerr’s characters less rigidly post-Victorian, transcending the social constraints of the period.

Strong performances by Katie McKee as Sissy and Lucy Pratt-Johnson as her sister Bea colour in the greyness associated with historic recollection. Other characters in the play, particularly the male ones, can seem at times one-dimensional and wooden.

Original music by Dianna Springford, assisted by Tom Bradford, augments the emotional depth of the drama. Melancholy moments are tenderer still thanks to an offstage fiddle played by Aurora Bilodeau. An ensemble musical number caps the performance while historic and contemporary war footage of conflict is projected on a backdrop.

Unity reminds us less about pandemic risk and paranoia than it does about the full measure of war’s brutal truths as they emerge in the aftermath. The play also offers feminine perspectives on a subject that was exclusively a male domain during the time of its setting.

Canadians would do well to take Kerr’s message to heart as we contemplate what many expect to be the final days of military involvement in Afghanistan. It ain’t over even when it’s over.

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