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Reprinted with permission from Canadian Theatre Review, Winter 1993, 81-82:

Rebels in Time: 3 Plays by Ken Mitchell
Edited by Don Kerr
NeWest Press, 1991. xiv + 281 pp.

PER K. BRASK

Saskatchewan must have the highest number of produced and published playwrights per capita of any province in Canada. Playwrights such as Connie Gault, Kim Morissey, Barbara Sapergia, Archie Crail, Geoffrey Ursell, (until recently) Rex Deverell, and (until more recently) Greg Nelson, among others, have graced Saskatchewan with their habitation. Many of these playwrights are also accomplished in other genres and now Guy Vanderhaeghe, celebrated for his prose fiction, has joined their number by adding playwriting to his substantial abilities.

Ken Mitchell is probably the best known of Saskatchewan playwrights, his work having been performed across the country and abroad. Rebels in Time, edited by Don Kerr (another Saskatchewan poet and playwright), puts before us three plays by Ken Mitchell, all of which have been published in earlier editions. For this collection, Ken Mitchell has made revisions in all the plays.

Davin: The Politician, which was first produced by the Globe Theatre in 1978 under the direction of Myra Benson, dramatizes, in sweeping yet dramatically detailed strokes, the story of flamboyant poet and journalist Nicholas Flood Davin, elected M.P. for Assiniboia West in 1887, a man described by C.B. Koester as “a partisan of the independent mind”.

Gone the Burning Sun, first produced at the Guelph Spring Festival in 1984, co-produced by Magnus Theatre, under the direction of Brian Richmond with music by David Liang, is Mitchell’s tribute in the form of a monodrama to the “questing but self-destructive rebel”, Dr. Henry Norman Bethune. This play, Mitchell’s best in the opinion of his editor, an opinion shared by this reader, has toured throughout this country as well as in china. It is a tight drama in which Mitchell makes effective use of a difficult theatrical convention which allows for a great many other characters to appear whom the audience never hear nor see, but who are nevertheless clearly audible and visible to Bethune, and with whom he interacts throughout the play.

The Great Cultural Revolution, first produced by the Arts Club Theatre and directed by Brian Richmond with music by David Liang, depicts a fictional rehearsal of Wu Han’s Hai Rui’s Dismissal and its interruption by members of the Red Guards who turn the proceedings into a struggle session as Wu Han is charged with spreading reactionary thought. The play is a fabulously theatrical encounter with a man who dares, that seemingly favourite of Mitchell’s subjects.

All three plays in Rebels in Time are plays of ideas as much as they are historical dramas. Mitchell in no way sacrifices theatricality to conversation or historical “accuracy”; rather, it is his genius to make ideas work through dramatic action, to turn history into metaphor. Though Davin: The Politician may be said to be the least effective of the three plays, it still shows ample evidence of Mitchell’s ability to put his characters in situations where their choices matter deeply. (For one example among many possible, Act III, Scene iii, set as the polls come in election night, 1896, is a magnificently crafted scene.

In publishing this collection, NeWest Press reminds us that Ken Mitchell is one of our very best political playwrights, a playwright committed to challenging us with ideas and with history. . . .
read the article on Mitchell’s induction into the Order of Canada
read Ken Mitchell’s “The Great Electrical Revolution”
read an interview
return to Ken Mitchell
return to Spotlights