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by Yvette Nolan, directed by Keith Barker

Stratford Festival, Studio Theatre, Stratford

August 20-September 27, 2025

Newman: “There are no words to describe war”

Most people attending the Stratford Festival will expect to see a play or a musical. Both involve conflict which in one way or another is resolved. The Art of War by Yvette Nolan, now receiving its world premiere, is basically an illustrated lecture. Despite the title, it has nothing to do with the famous Chinese treatise of the same name by Sun Tzu (5th cent. BC). Rather, the play is plotless and episodic with each episode meant to illustrate an aspect of its central topic – the role of art in depicting war. Though the play is set during World War II, there is no conflict within the play itself and thus nothing to be resolved. The result is a well-intended but tedious 90 minutes which might be better spent reading about the painters that Canada sent into the two World Wars than in watching a play.

The play begins with a lecture about Canadian war painters delivered by a female character behind a screen whom we view only in silhouette. The play ends with the same character, Heather, delivering exactly the same lecture only this time in front of the screen. This frame alone indicates more than anything else that there is no development, much less progress, in the action between the repeated lectures. It becomes clear rather quickly that the function of the episodes between the lectures is to provide semi-allegorical encounters between the Canadian painter, Nick, and individual other characters in order to illustrate the main points of the lecture.

The main points of the lecture are: 1) Canada was prescient in sending painters to cover the two World Wars. Lord Beaverbrook set up the Canadian War Memorials Fund in 1916 since he viewed war art not only as a form of historical documentation, but also an expression of national identity. 2) The art of many of Canada’s most important painters was forged in the crucible of war art. These painters include future Group of Seven members A.Y. Jackson (1882-1974), Arthur Lismer (1885–1969) and Frederick Varley (1881–1969) in World War I and Lawren P. Harris (1910-94) and Alex Colville (1920–2013) in World War II. 3) Sir Edmund Walker created a collection of Canada’s war art, separate from British art, to ensure that the war art programme truly reflected Canada’s role in the conflict. The collection is now housed in the National War Museum.

As Laura Brandon writes in her essay “Canada’s War Art” for the National War Museum website, “The works of war art are a unique legacy for all Canadians. Not only are they vivid depictions of military events inspired by personal experience, but they are also important elements in our nation’s art history. They constitute nothing less than a reflection of our national heritage”. Nolan’s lecturer concludes her talk with exactly the same sentiment.

The episodes bracketed by Heather’s lecture function almost as allegorical dialogues on topics related to art. Nolan gives her characters names, but they represent types much more than individuals. Nick, the main character, is really the Canadian War Painter, a composite figure of several Canadians who served that function. Magda is a starving Polish gypsy but she might as well be called Displaced Civilian on the Run. Eva is a Canadian Forces entertainer. Dennis is the American War Photographer. And Matthaeus is a German War Painter.

The single interesting feature of the play is the character Newman. Nick sees and talks with him four times. Each time Newman is wearing a uniform from a different time and place turning Newman into a kind of Every-Soldier. Each time he dies as Nick looks on. Nick says of Newman, “I cannot paint him enough deaths to give him peace”. From this we gather that Newman is actually a “new man” every time – every soldier Nick, or any future war artist, knew who is later killed.

Since the characters are really allegorical figures rather than characters, the actors can do little to make them seem less generalized than they are. Curiously, Nick, the central character played by Josue Laboucane is the hardest to pin down. Laboucane shows that Nick, though filled with doubt about his own abilities, is oddly certain about how important his function is. Nolan gives Nick stilted remarks fueled by 20-20 hindsight such as “This war will become a part to the national psyche – and we’ll need to talk about it”. This is an odd thing for Nick to say since Nick seems totally unable to speak of the obvious PTSD that the horrors he documents are causing.

Despite the distress that Laboucane so clearly portrays when Nick is in the field, Nolan somehow has all these terrors fade away once Nick is back on good old safe Canadian soil. Laboucane does his best to make sense of this but his character is clearly a figure being manipulated by Nolan’s scene-by-scene plans rather than a coherent character in himself.

Nick’s most frequent visitor is Newman played by Jordin Hall. Hall speaks so naturally and convincingly as Newman that it would seem modern drama is much more his métier than Shakespeare. Newman’s four different appearances are the most interesting aspect of Nolan’s play. Newman dies the first three times when Nick is trying to paint him. We hope for an explanation but get none. Eventually we realize that Newman must represent all the young men that Nick has painted who died in action.

Newman’s repeated deaths cause Nick increasing distress making it all the more incomprehensible that it should suddenly disappear when Nick is back home. Newman’s other function is to bolster Nick’s self-confidence as a painter even though Newman is supposedly just an ordinary soldier. Yet, just as Nolan has Nick come out with statements that don’t suit his character, so she does with Newman. When we first meet Newman, Nolan shows the soldier, untrained in art, searching for the word “pastoral” to describe what Nick is painting.

Jenna-Lee Hyde plays Magda whom Nick encounters three times. Magda is meant to be a starving upper-class Pole who is trying to evade capture by the Nazis. At first Magda is reluctant to have Nick paint her, but then she realizes, “If I do not survive this war, then I will survive in this book of a Canadian painter-soldier”. Hyde puts on a good facsimile of a Polish accent, but she has an impossible task of trying to reconcile Magda’s physical ill health with her calm eloquence.

Julie Lumsden plays both the art historian Heather, whose lecture frames the action, and the CAS entertainer Eva. The point of her role as lecturer is clear since it indicates that the play is essentially didactic. The point of her role as Eva is to debate with Nick the role of art as creating empathy and national identity versus art, as in Eva’s singing, that is purely for entertainment as escape. Nolan tries to generate a bit of flirtation between Eva and Nick but comes to nothing because Nick already has Fran waiting for him back home.

One of the few pleasures of the production is Lumsden’s singing of well-known songs of the 1940s. She rich, full voice sounds best when she is unmiked on stage. It’s too bad, then, that her subsequent appearances are not only miked but have their sound manipulated.

Rylan Wilkie plays both an American war photographer named Dennis and a German war painter named Matthaeus. The didactic function of both of these figures is even more obvious than that of the other characters Nick meets. Matthaeus represents a War Painter from the enemy side who is in completely opposite circumstances from Nick. Matthaeus does paint war as he sees it, but what he sees is not what the government wants him to depict. Matthaeus has cut up a triptych that would have been his magnum opus so that the Nazis will not find it. Because he refused to paint the Führer’s portrait, he is now an enemy of the Reich and a hunted man. Wilkie well captures the fear that animates this character.

The role of Dennis is meant to initiate a debate about painting versus photography. Nick claims that both are important, while Dennis claims that photography has replaced painting as the means of documenting war. Nolan has Dennis claim that photography is not art since its role is simply to capture an event of the moment. I’d like to see Nolan support that claim in discussing the work of Yousuf Karsh or Diane Arbus. The terribly simplistic notions that Nolan has Dennis spout deliberately ignore the great work done by such Canadian war photographers as Ken Bell, Frank Dubervill, Gib Milne, Alex Stirton and Karen Hermiston. Wilkie does portray Dennis as a conceited twit, but if he is a professional photographer as he claims, he must have learned about composition, light, framing and the dramatic moment – all factors that move mere snapshots into the realm of art.

Teresa Przybylski’s set features two trucks with palette-shaped tops that can be arranged to represent various places. In the two lecture scenes, Przybylski has reproductions of eight paintings by famous Canadian war painters placed near the ceiling in the auditorium, four house left and four house right. The problem, of course, is that hardly anyone will be able to see them properly. The solution would be to use the blank central war of the stage to project images of these paintings. Instead, whenever Nick paints, lighting designer Logan Raju Cracknell gives us strange, abstract swathes of light that don’t seem to signify anything. Given the educational emphasis of the play, director Keith barker could have had Cracknell project images by Canadian war artists throughout the performance to illustrate the kind of work that Nick is doing.

The sad fact of The Art of War is that for all its didacticism, the play teaches us nothing. We are meant to see, as per Heather’s lecture, how the experience of war somehow created a distinctly Canadian identity that the war artists expressed once they returned home. The play gives us only an allegorical drama of what Canadian war artists encountered at war, but it does absolutely nothing to show how these experiences informed their later work. Nick’s later work consists of landscapes of Nova Scotia. This seems like an avoidance of his war experiences not an expression of them.

Drama seems always inadequate when it takes nonverbal modes of art for its subject. Boca del Lupo’s Photog (2010) was based on actual interviews with contemporary war photographers. Although it still could not make dramatic sense of its topic, it at least explored the toll that war photography takes on the photographers. One good effect The Art of War can have for those not put off by its dullness, is to make people want to visit the National War Museum in Ottawa and see Canadian war art for themselves.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Josue Laboucane as Nick (foreground) and Jordin Hall as Newman (background); Julie Lumsden as Eva; Rylan Wilkie as Dennis and Josue Laboucane as Nick. © 2025 David Hou.

For tickets visit: www.stratfordfestival.ca.