Impolite Companies

What, if anything, comes to mind in response to the words “Canadian political theatre”? Could it be George Luscombe and Toronto Workshop Productions? Or 1837: The Farmers’ Revolt? Paper Wheat? How about the work of Chris Brookes and the Newfoundland Mummers? Or a Vancouver production of Lysistrata in the run-up to the Iraq war? All reasonable suggestions. But did anyone propose Eight Men Speak?

Performed in its entirety only once, on December 4, 1933, for an audience of 1,500 at the Standard Theatre on Spadina Avenue in Toronto (later the Victory Burlesque), Eight Men Speak combined all the ingredients to make it the epitome of political interventionist theatre. It was conceived and mounted as a galvanizing contribution to a campaign with a very specific goal: the release of communist leader Tim Buck and his seven comrades from the Kingston Penitentiary, where, it was alleged, there had been an attempt on Buck’s life by an...