STRATFORD — In Yvette Nolan’s exceptional new play “The Art of War,” which opened Wednesday at the Stratford Festival’s Studio Theatre, a war artist named Nick is grappling with a conflict. A conflict of self. A conflict over his calling.
He’s one of dozens of Canadian artists sent to the front lines of the Second World War to document scenes of the action. Instead of wielding a rifle, he holds a paintbrush. His artwork offers a glimpse of the harrowing nature of war, and its painful human toll.
But amid all the atrocities and all the suffering, Nick, played with introverted, Hamlet-like intensity by Josue Laboucane, starts to doubt himself and his place on the war front. He feels small and insignificant. What is his purpose there, he asks himself. Will his art ever be able to convey the truth of what he’s seeing?
Nick then meets Eva (Julie Lumsden), a cabaret singer sent to entertain Canadian soldiers at their bases. And almost immediately, his raison d’être snaps into focus.
When Nick shows Eva a sketch he recently drew, a harrowing image of a severed foot still lodged in a boot, she initially mocks him. Who back home in Canada would want to purchase such a painting and place it on their mantle next to portraits of their family? Eva questions whether what he has created is even art. “Shouldn’t art be beautiful?” she asks.
Nick, however, wants to make nothing of that sort. Art is more than beauty and entertainment, he argues. “It needs to make you feel something.”
That encounter with Eva is ultimately a galvanizing moment for Nick. And so too for the audience — in a profound play filled with galvanizing moments.
Nolan’s historical drama is at once many things. It’s an homage to Canada’s war arts programs. More broadly, it’s also a deeply existential meditation on the power — and necessity — of art. Not necessarily the kind that Eva practices; Nolan isn’t concerned with that. But rather, the kind that Nick strives to achieve: art at the end of the world.
The play’s tone is itself almost reminiscent of paintings by members of the renowned Group of Seven, some of whom, as “The Art of War” highlights, were themselves Canadian war artists. Comprised of taut, striking vignettes, Nolan’s work favours expressionism over straight realism. Her dialogue, like a painter’s thick, curving brush strokes on a canvas, are saturated with layers of meaning and emotion. And like A.Y. Jackson or Arthur Lismer, whose names she brings up throughout her play, Nolan manages to elevate the most mundane of sceneries into something magnificent.
In a series of dreamlike scenes, she renders Nick’s inner turmoil with ease. We see how he’s haunted by memories of his close friend and artistic muse Newman (Jordin Hall, comically capricious), a Canadian soldier who’s experienced the most gruesome horrors during the war.
In other scenes, Nolan shifts perspectives, moving from Nick’s inner psyche toward building the tumultuous world surrounding him. In one vignette, Nick encounters a starving woman (played with compassion and dignity by Jenna-Lee Hyde) stuck in the crosshairs of the conflict. He offers her some chocolate, before asking to paint her portrait. She agrees. “If I do not survive this war, then I will survive in this book of a Canadian painter-soldier,” she remarks.
In another scene, Nick comes face to face with a German defector (Rylan Wilkie), an artist fleeing the Nazis after refusing to paint a portrait of Hitler. “I can only paint what I see. Imagine if I painted the inside of this man, put it on the outside, on the canvas for the world to see,” says the German.
In philosophical scenes like this one, Nolan ennobles the role of the artist, and the simple act of bearing witness.
Cynics may argue that for all the good that came out of Canada’s war arts programs, it was merely a means to boost morale and patriotism on the home front. Thankfully, Nolan doesn’t shy away from those complex conversations. As well, this production’s decision to cast Laboucane, who is Métis, and Hall, who is Black, in its leading roles is a silently powerful acknowledgment of the voices historically excluded from the war arts program, both behind the canvas and in it.
Director Keith Barker’s production moves swiftly on Teresa Przybylski’s spare set, flanked by eight real paintings, created by Canadian war artists, that are displayed on two walls of the theatre.
Barker’s staging, however, can at times feel too frantic and melodramatic, particularly in some battle scenes. An awkward framing device that Nolan employs to bookend her play is also overly earnest and too didactic for a work otherwise perfectly subtle in its construction.
But despite these occasional flaws, “The Art of War” remains incredibly moving. It’s a reminder that when all else fails, and in our darkest moments, art — and those who create it — can offer us the clarity that we so desperately seek.
