Dramatising new Canadian histories :a creative practice doctoral thesis

Abstract

This thesis is composed of two primary parts. The first part, which comprises seventy per cent of this doctoral study, is made up of two new history plays, We’re Gonna Make You Whole and The Interrogation. The second part, which makes up the remaining thirty per cent, is a critical analysis that positions my creative writing within the spectrum of Canadian postcolonial drama, alongside other dramatists who employ magical realism and new historicism in their work. I analyse my creative practice and compare and contrast Marie Clements’s Burning Vision with We’re Gonna Make You Whole. In the final chapters I analyse my way of working, looking closely at the construction of The Interrogation. The creation of the two new history plays is my primary contribution to knowledge. Published in 2011 by Oberon Books, the first of my two submission plays, We’re Gonna Make You Whole, is a magical-real new history of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Disaster. This compact, two-act play interrupts and disrupts the mainstream mediatised history of the disaster by deploying an interwoven, alternate perspective of the catastrophe. This interruption aims to make the mainstream history seem uncanny by normalising the alternate, subversive history. Set in the military headquarters of an unidentified military body, The Interrogation, my second play, interrupts the mainstream narrative of the global economic crisis by suggesting a link between the neocolonial attitudes of the UK, US and Germany and the present financial landscape. The play dramatises the brutal interrogation of two soldiers, one junior and the other senior, by a mysterious chameleon interrogator (also a soldier) who assumes the accent, affectations and status of his ‘victims’.