Hollingsworth’s The Great War is a history lesson strong with farce

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Immediately prior to a preview performance earlier this week of Michael Hollingsworth's The Great War, a stage manager cautioned the audience about the production, advising that the small theatre would be very, very dark during the performance.

The Video Cabaret staging of The Great War, which is being revived at the Tank House Theatre at the Young Centre, is done in "the company's black-box" style – a puppet stage for actors, luminescent, like a television in an otherwise unlit room. One quick scene has Prime Minister Robert Borden despairing over the lack of authentic intelligence being fed to him about the First World War. "If I want to find out what is happening I have to read this," he frets, holding a copy of The Globe, "and the editors of this paper are congenital liars." He continues: "The British War Office will not tell me anything, except that they need more troops. More troops."

People being kept in the dark, it is as old as history.

Telling history in an inimitable way is what Video Cabaret has been doing since 1985, with the premiere of New France, the first of the extensive and expanding The History of the Village of the Small Huts series that began with the Toronto playwright's curiosity and one significant question: "Why is this country the way it is?"

And so Mr. Hollingsworth went on to satirically connect four centuries of dots, with wicked, remarkable plays that combine tragedy, pathos, farce, black comedy and garishly white pancake makeup.

The Great War (from 1992, co-directed by company artistic directors Deanne Taylor and Mr. Hollingsworth) is the ninth instalment of his lesson on Canadian history, a cheeky frolic told by standalone plays involving actors playing multiple parts in sharp, brief scenes. The costuming is bold, props are fanciful and exaggeration all around is the norm.

In particular, The Great War is strong with farce – and why wouldn't it be? Game but ill-prepared, misled and inappropriately outfitted Canadian troops dying for King and Empire on the Western Front in Europe.

As explained in the production playbill, the Small Hut plays resonate with today's headlines because they are "built on Canada's founding fault lines, where a never-ending drama of hideous wrongs, inexcusable cock-ups, noble dreams, tragic failures and hilarious hopes plays out."

Sounds like the Toronto Maple Leafs of the last half-century, really, but that's another story.

And speaking of other stories, in celebration of Canada's sesquicentennial, four plays in the Video Cabaret repertoire will be mounted in 2017: Confederation, The Red River Rebellion, The Canadian Pacific Scandal and The Saskatchewan Rebellion.

With The Great War and the rest of the Small Hut series, a country's history is sardonically told in all its absurdity, flamboyancy and calamity. Mr. Hollingsworth and his team hold weird and valuable torches; anyone left in the dark has only themselves to blame.

The Great War: The History of the Village of the Small Huts, 1914-1918 runs to May 14. $25 to $56. Young Centre, 50 Tank House Lane, 416-866-8666 or soulpepper.ca.