In This Corner
We voted him The Greatest Canadian. Now see him do what he did best: fighting for medicare, fighting for our rights and freedoms. And, if you knock him down, he just gets back up again.
June
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7:00 pm In This Corner
See https://theatreinlondon.ca/2017/06/in-this-corner/ for details.
Location: Museum London
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7:00 pm In This Corner
See https://theatreinlondon.ca/2017/06/in-this-corner/ for details.
Location: Museum London
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7:00 pm In This Corner
See https://theatreinlondon.ca/2017/06/in-this-corner/ for details.
Location: Museum London
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7:00 pm In This Corner
See https://theatreinlondon.ca/2017/06/in-this-corner/ for details.
Location: Museum London
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7:00 pm In This Corner
See https://theatreinlondon.ca/2017/06/in-this-corner/ for details.
Location: Museum London
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7:00 pm In This Corner
See https://theatreinlondon.ca/2017/06/in-this-corner/ for details.
Location: Museum London
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Location: Museum London
Excellent show! Entertaining, funny, and incredibly relevant today!
Excellent show! Entertaining! And incredibly relevant today — the fight goes on!
“You know I’m a socialist, don’t you?”
Dan Ebbs’ In This Corner: Eight Rounds with Tommy Douglas takes elements of his recent pieces—a man who’s ahead of his time and seemingly out of step with the world, a plethora of detailed factual information, and audience interaction—and combines them again to create an entertaining, theatrical bioplay. He’s a master of the extended metaphor, this time layering Douglas’ life story onto an impromptu (and pretty credible) boxing lesson at a political shindig. To set the scene, he’s aided by a slightly-long introductory video featuring archival footage and an original song by Margo Does that could have come right from Douglas’ campaign to introduce Medicare in Saskatchewan in the 1950s and 1960s. (At the performance I was at, the audience spontaneously began to sing along with the chorus before Ebbs ever took the stage.)
The writer of a bioplay is always in danger of trying to include too much, making it into a dramatic reading of a Wikipedia page. While Ebbs has packed in everything from Douglas’ father’s occupation as an iron moulder to his grandson Kiefer’s acting aspirations, it rarely feels overwhelming. (As Dan’s director for A Different Drummer in the 2014 Fringe, I can imagine that In This Corner‘ director Diane Vanden Hoven had a big hand in keeping the performance to less than an hour.) He doesn’t shy away from some of his subject’s more controversial beliefs—in this case, Douglas’ thoughts on homosexuality—but he doesn’t dwell on them either.
It’s not difficult to see why Ebbs chose this subject at this time; how to deal with providing health care is still an issue in Canada, and even more in that sleeping elephant to our south, to steal a line from one of Douglas’ political rivals. To those here fighting to keep Douglas’ dream of universal healthcare alive, and those elsewhere who are in the same battle, one can only echo his words that close the play: “Courage, my friends; ’tis not too late to build a better world.”