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Of the Fields, Lately

• Written by David French
• Directed by Ted Dykstra
• Starring Kenneth Welsh, Eric Peterson, Jeff Lillico and Diane D'Aquila
• At the Young Centre in Toronto

Of the Fields, Lately is a sequel to David French's 1972 play Leaving Home and also, in a way, an apology for it. In it, French gives a more compassionate and complete portrait of Jacob Mercer, the stubborn, prideful Newfoundland patriarch at the centre of both plays.

At the end of the first Mercer family play – which director Ted Dykstra also revived at Soulpepper, two years ago – Jacob (Kenneth Welsh) had his belt out and was whipping his eldest son, Ben (Jeff Lillico). Ben had announced he was leaving home and so his drunken, prideful father decided to send him packing instead.

Now two years later – in play time as well as audience time, neatly – Ben has returned to Toronto for his aunt Dot's funeral.

It might have been called The Homecoming, but someone else had already taken that title. Instead, the play gets its title from a line uttered by Wiff, Dot's wistful widower, played by Eric Peterson (of Corner Gas , lately): “Must be our time of life, Mary. Flowers don't smell of the fields, lately. Only of the funeral parlour.”

Indeed, upon his return, Ben discovers that his father may be close to death; Jacob, 52, had a heart attack and is about to go back to work in construction against doctor's orders. His wife, Mary (Diane D'Aquila), believes there's only one thing that might keep him at home and alive: If Ben were to move back in and take a job to support them. But can father and son get past the past?

Soulpepper has done French a great service by remounting these two seventies' plays and also, last season, 1984's Salt-Water Moon , giving a new generation a chance to meet the Mercers. (The company's productions have led Anansi Press to publish a new omnibus edition of those three seminal Canadian plays with a foreword by artistic director Albert Schultz.) It's one thing for theatres mandated to produce Canadian plays to attempt to establish a canon, quite another for a classical company to dedicate as much time to French as they have to Stoppard, Pinter and Chekhov.

Of the Fields, Lately is closest to Chekhov, being a four-act tragicomedy populated with characters who can't speak their feelings aloud. But its conflict is a distinctly Canadian one – the intergenerational tension between working-class immigrants and the assimilated children they've raised to be more upwardly mobile.

The Mercer family came to Toronto in the 1940s when Ben was a child and Newfoundland was still its own country (as French's family did; the plays are semi-autobiographical). Uneducated Jacob retains the accent of his homeland and his life centres around the Newfoundland diaspora. Ben, on the other hand, has graduated high school, has no trace of an accent and is embarrassed by his father's dialect, dirty overalls and “most of all, his lunch pail, that symbol of the working man.”

While Jacob is a barely redeemed tyrant in the first play, here Ben shares the blame for their hot-and-cold war. In fact, he locates “the emotional cornerstone of the wall between us” in a championship little league baseball game his father attended. After 12-year-old Ben scored the winning run, he ignored his uncouth father in the stands.

French frames the play with this (to be honest, a bit clichéd) anecdote making Of the Fields, Lately a memory play, much softer and, alas, more sentimental than Leaving Home . Dykstra's decision with set designer Lorenzo Savoini to cover the back wall of the Mercer home with family photographs only makes the proceedings more maudlin.

And yet, while Jacob has softened from cruel to cranky in this play, he remains a compelling creature – you can see why French centred five plays around him. (The other two were 1949 and Soldier's Heart .) While Welsh is occasionally too sprightly for a man described as “walking in the valley of the shadow,” his self-pitying swagger and self-destruction is spot on; he commands this production.

One of the refreshing things about Welsh is that he does not have that unfortunate North American acting habit of needing to make his characters immediately likeable.

Peterson's Wiff is charming and a marvellous spinner of blarney, but he too quickly endears himself for a character we are told missed his wife's dying moments because he stopped off at the pub for a few fingers of whisky.

Lillico, meanwhile, too frequently shows the vulnerability of a character who is supposed to be an angry young man. (He also often falls back on a clipped, cracking method of delivery that is beginning to turn into a mannerism.)

Of the Fields, Lately is as worthy of revival as Clifford Odets's Awake and Sing! next door, but it would pack a more powerful punch in a less soggy and sepia-toned production.

Of the Fields, Lately runs until July 30.