Steven Greenfield and Cathy Derkach, Billy Bishop Goes To War, Edmonton Repertory Theatre. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Frequent flyers might think of the Toronto Island airport before the man. But the much-loved two-hander musical that Edmonton Repertory Theatre has chosen for its inaugural season returns to us another frequent flyer, a medal-bedecked World War I fighter pilot from Owen Sound, Ont., to tell his own story.

That it is the story of an underachiever and self-confessed screw-up — “on record the worst student ever at the Royal Military College,” as our hero says brightly — gives Billy Bishop Goes To War an appealing Canadian-ness.   

The 1978 two-hander musical, by John MacLachlan Gray in collaboration with the actor Eric Peterson (its original stars), is an original fusion of self-deprecating humour and satirical edge, spun from a real-life Canadian memoir. It’s travelled the country, crossed the pond to the West End, played New York on Broadway and off- in its heyday. Now it lands on a hitherto undiscovered theatrical airstrip, the Biederman Theatre on the third floor of a west end “retirement community,” starring Steven Greenfield and Cathy Derkach and directed by Gerry Potter, whose Workshop West production of the early ‘80s starring David LeReaney toured Canada.   

It’s one of those homegrown classics whose edge and sense of humour are honed by the times, and the particular strengths of two actors: one taking on some 17 characters; the other in support, musical and narrative, at the keyboard. Both are excellent.

Billy Bishop is part of an international theatre repertoire that’s not short on either anti-war satires or plays that address the glory of struggle and the high human cost of war. This new production, handsomely set forth (designer Jaimie Cooney, lighting by Nic Juba) on the shallow stage of the intimate low-ceilinged space, arrives at a particular moment when Canada is getting smacked around and bullied as a sovereign country. And given our situation, a land under siege, there’s a particularly cheering feistiness about reviving the story of a renegade colonial misfit who’s a natural subverter of another country’s military authority.

Steven Greenfield in Billy Bishop Goes To War, Edmonton Repertory Theatre. Photo supplied.

Like his countrymen, Billy is co-opted into a war effort a world away. And by an unlikely series of encounters and a random selection of his skills, he ends up in an elite airborne outfit, the suicide squad (average life span 11 days). Eventually, he chalks up a staggering number of “kills,” some 72, to his credit. Which will propel him into the absurd position of getting yanked from official fighter pilot duty because he’s too good (he threatens the record of a Brit war hero).

I haven’t seen it for many years, not I think since James MacDonald’s excellent 2010 Citadel production starring John Ullyatt and Ryan Sigurdson. I do remember seeing Peterson and Gray a couple of times as older characters looking back with a sort of nostalgia and ruefulness on their younger selves.

This new production isn’t like that. The appealing Greenfield is prime Billy, energetic, ebullient, amused and delighted by his own wayward improbability in rising to military stardom. Derkach, a rare example of a female actor in a Billy Bishop production and always a warm, engaging presence onstage, is already at the piano when Billy appears out of the darkness of the theatre without explanation and arrives onstage to sing “We were off to shoot the Hun, it looked like lots of fun….”

It’s a sassy, boisterous performance. And Potter’s production doesn’t bother with the theatrical trappings that would explain why exactly he’s onstage recounting his career arc to us. There they just are, Greenfield and Derkach, both actors with top-drawer musical skills, telling and singing a hero’s tale. It’s Canadian-style music hall with an underdog narrative.

Billy’s story puts you in mind of Groucho Marx’s celebrated declaration that he didn’t want to belong to any organization that would accept him as a member. The Brit military mucky-mucks and the war effort brain trust must be totally hooped, figures Billy, if a soldier like him, “a convicted liar and a cheat,” can rise through the ranks and be, first a cavalry officer, and then a pilot. “They were scraping the bottom of the barrel.” There’s something disarmingly Canadian about a self-deprecating hero. At critical early career junctures, explains Billy, “I get sick, I get injured, or I get into a lot of trouble.” And sure enough….

Steven Greenfield in Billy Bishop Goes To War, Edmonton Repertory Theatre. Photo supplied.

Greenfield presents with considerable  comic zest a gallery of grotesques, his superiors first in the cavalry and then in the airborne squadron. Lady Helier, or rather Billy’s re-creation of Lady Helier, the dragon blue-blood who’s his unexpected benefactor, is a riot. He didn’t have any qualifications to be a pilot, Billy admits. Or maybe he did, who knows?, since the authorities who are interviewing him don’t know what the qualifications are, anyhow.

In Greenfield’s performance, Billy is a great appreciator of the absurdity of the class system (he’s a “colonial dignitary”), and of every military decision, including the one to divest his plane of all guns to lighten the load so his plane could actually take off. “It’s hard to keep your confidence in war without a gun,” he smiles and rolls his eyes. It confirms all his worst suspicions.

There are key moments in Billy’s story, nailed with precision by Potter’s production.  When Billy looks up, from the cold mud of the trenches, and sees salvation and a future in the sky, his fortunes seem to levitate: that’s one. As captured by Greenfield, armed with miniature models of planes in various scales, Billy is giddy with delight in his initial solo departures from terra firma.

There’s a turning point, identified in Greenfield’s impressive performance, when Billy discovers he’s somehow acquired a lust for risk, an appetite for the kill. When he takes on a German aerodrome single-handedly in his pajamas, the dog fight, as acted out solo, is an adrenalin junkie’s hallucination. “I never had so much fun in my life!”

Gradually, in Act II, Billy’s relish for flying darkens into something more ruminative, an awareness of horror and the human price tag on military adventures (the young as cannon fodder for the old). The song In The Sky, beautifully sung by Greenfield and Derkach, memorably captures the strangely lyrical dance macabre of aerial warfare, “one the hunter one the hunted together in the sky.”

It’s an odd musical — the much-abused word “quirky” doesn’t go amiss — that demands heroic virtuosity and stamina from the actor who plays Billy and a dozen and a half other characters through Billy’s eyes. And, as you’ll see from this production, it’s still funny and affecting after nearly half a century. Gray’s score has an assortment of original period pieces: jaunty music hall ditties, military pastiches, G&S-type patter songs, a slinky Kurt Weill-esque number delivered by a French chanteuse as conjured by Greenfield, who drapes himself in a boa and an accent for the number. There’s a song that touches on the Canadian resistance to stardom. There’s an ode to the bright blue Canadian sky, for which Billy eventually longs. There’s even a rhymed spoken-word poem that pits glory against survival.

“The British like their heroes cold and dead,” he tells us. Well, we Canadians like our heroes lively and flawed. This Canuck classic couldn’t come at a better time. Start your engines, people.

REVIEW

Billy Bishop Goes To War

Theatre: Edmonton Repertory Theatre

Created by: John MacLachlan Gray in collaboration with Eric Peterson

Directed by: Gerry Potter

Starring: Steven Greenfield and Cathy Derkach

Where: Biederman Theatre, Lifestyles Options Retirement Community, 17203 99 Ave.

Running: through Nov. 8

Tickets and full schedule of performances: eventbrite.com