Except in the Unlikely Event of War is a dark satire on the use of war as a means of societal control, the politicization of art & media, and the instability of truth. Part fact, part fiction, part theatrical adaptation, the play uses as inspiration three points of departure:
- The adaptation of Report from Iron Mountain, a controversial and terrifying book from the mid-1960s;
- The emergence of Canada’s Arctic as the next global focal point for armed conflict;
- The dangerous political ideologies currently threatening cultural freedom Canada.
Written by Sean Devine (author of Re:Union), Except in the Unlikely Event of War is a complex and theatrical weave of three separate storylines: each set in its own time and place, each with a distinct stylistic mode, and each linked conceptually and thematically to the others. And in each story, an unlikely war will break out.
Horseshoes & Hand Grenades Theatre is excited to be developing this project with Pi Theatre, where Sean Devine is the current playwright-in-residence. Under the direction of Richard Wolfe, Pi Theatre recently held a workshop & public reading of the script-in-progress at CBC Studio 700 in December 2011, with actors Vincent Gale, Kathleen Duborg, Todd Thomson and Alex Ferguson.
With funding from the City of Vancouver and the BC Arts Council and a partnership with The Cultch, we’re looking forward to two more workshops in 2012/13, and a likely co-production with Pi Theatre in Fall 2013.
WRITER: And what was the assignment?
MR.DOE: We were commissioned to determine accurately and realistically the nature of the problems that would confront society if and when a condition of ‘permanent peace’ should arrive, and to draft a program for dealing with this contingency.
WRITER: The problem of permanent peace. I wasn’t aware that peace is problematic.
MR.DOE: Neither was I.
WRITER: But it is?