Brendan McLeod's multidisciplinary Ridge revisits mythmaking in Vimy history
Via screening and streaming, show mixes storytelling, verbatim theatre, and live music from Vancouver’s own The Fugitives
Brendan McLeod has been obsessed with the story of Vimy Ridge history for most of his life. Photo by Mike Savage
Ridge streams at 7 p.m. on Wednesday (November 11 via the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts. The film will also receive two screenings at the Cinematheque on Saturday (November 7)
Just hours after we first spoke to Brendan McLeod in March, the multitalented singer, musician, actor, and playwright got the news: Ridge, his interdisciplinary exploration of the First World War battle that supposedly shaped Canada’s national identity, would be cancelled due to COVID.
With no sign yet as to when theatres might safely open, the show—which had been scheduled to debut at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts—may never be seen in its intended format, as musical theatre with a live band. But having spent years in the trenches of the Canadian folk and spoken-word scenes, McLeod is able to do something that none of the First World War generals who sent hundreds of thousands of young men to their death were able to do: improvise.
So we will be able to see Ridge after all, in a new format and from the comfort of our homes. McLeod’s stage show has been repurposed as a film, and will be available to screen, appropriately enough, on Remembrance Day (November 11).
“I’ve got to blame it fully and squarely on my girlfriend,” says McLeod now, interviewed from his home in Niagara on the Lake, Ontario. “She’s an actor at Shaw [Festival], and she’s been there about 10 years. So she has way more [theatrical] experience. When I do theatre I just kind of play the show like I’m in a band and I’m leaving the next day, but she stays in the same theatre for six months. So we were talking about the Chan, and she said ‘You know, your script really talks a lot about being in enclosed spaces a lot, in tough situations.’ So I started looking at the orchestra pit and these underground spaces in the Chan, and the motor room and the attic above it...and the director was really on board with that vision of setting the different monologues in these show in these different rooms.”
The Fugitives. Photo by Marlene Ginader
With director Mike Southworth moving behind the camera, Ridge now gives an even better sense of what it must have been like to have been in a cramped, claustrophobic First World War trench. But McLeod has stuck with the show’s basic premise, which is to look at why the battle of Vimy Ridge, in 1917, has been characterized as marking “Canada’s coming of age”, how the loss of more than 10,000 Canadian soldiers has been mischaracterized as a triumph, and the way in which this militaristic myth-making has resulted in the undervaluing of large sections of the Canadian population—including the troops themselves—for more than a century.
The story has fascinated McLeod for the entirety of his adult life.
“I started getting interested in Vimy Ridge when I was 13, ’cause [Pierre Berton’s 1987 best-seller] Vimy was my favourite book when I was a teenager,” he explained in our initial telephone interview, from Toronto. “So that’s where I originally got interested in the mythology and the history around it, and what’s true and what’s not.”
Remarkably, he added, he has no family connection to the battle, unlike millions of other Canadians. “I don’t have any of the normal personal connection people usually have when they get really interested in World War 1,” he said, noting that although his teenage bedroom was plastered with posters of basketball players and the Barenaked Ladies, he read Vimy four straight times. “I’d be like, ‘Oh, Canadian military history? It’s like my favourite book!’”
Like Berton, who also took a critical view of Canadian military orthodoxy, McLeod feels compelled to tell some of the stories that surround the central story: how Indigenous Canadians fought bravely at Vimy and in other pivotal battles, but were relegated to second-class-citizen status after returning home; how women were bribed with the vote to buy their complicity in the war effort; how wartime paranoia resulted in the internment of thousands of patriotic Ukrainian-Canadians; and how profiteers stranded thousands of Canadian soldiers in Europe following the end of hostilities.
“When you talk about [Canadian] collective identity, I do think it started with that battle,” he explained. “But what’s interesting is who’s included in that collective, and who gets excluded from that collective. That is where we start having problems, because when we say that Vimy was the beginning of our collective identity, I think we’re talking about a very specific collective that has negated a lot of other voices from history.
Photo by Mike Savage
“It’s too easy to claim that this one battle could unite a country,” he added. “I think it’s a little more nuanced than that.”
To give those voices their due, McLeod’s researches have gone far beyond a careful re-reading of Berton’s book. Most impressive is the way that he has revived protest songs from the trenches: although he’s kept the words of the soldiers who were there, he’s given them contemporary musical settings suitable for the bass, guitar, and violin format of his band, the Fugitives.
The result is to strip the dust from these wartime reports—and give us, on Remembrance Day, another chance to consider the folly of war and the sacrifices of those who had no option but to participate in it.
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