Letters from Flanders

R.H. Thomson brings World War I lives to the stage

The battlefields of Europe do not sleep. Each year the bodies of soldiers re-emerge from the muddy fields of Flanders where they fell in World War I. Each year unexploded bombs claim a few more lives as 600 tonnes a year of live explosives rise from below the ground - a number that has remained constant for the past eight decades.
Immediately following WWI some 5,000 people returned to Ypres on Armistice Day. Now 60,000 people go back to offer remembrance and, presumably, to try to understand the War and their relationship to it.
"It's a spiritual place," says actor R.H. Thomson. "You cannot kill half a million men in a seven-kilometre square and have it mean nothing." Thomson is one of Canada's best-known stage and screen actors, familiar from such stage works as Glenn and Inexpressible Island, and for television roles like his Gemini-winning portrayal of Sir Frederick Banting in Glory Enough for All, or his regular appearances on Road to Avonlea.
Recently Thomson has turned to writing as well, and the dead soldiers of Flanders have been very much on his mind. Beginning from a huge collection of family letters, painstakingly documented by his great aunt, he has created The Lost Boys, a theatrical examination of the impact of WWI and the human impulse towards remembrance of things past.
"The material has always been in my family," says Thomson, referring to the collection of letters from his grandmother's generation. "There were 10 kids in the family. Five boys went over. Four didn't make it." Thomson grew up being told how wonderful the letters were, but as a 12-year-old he failed to see why.
"I found them boring," he says. "It was all 'What about money?'; 'How is Mom?'; 'Please send more socks.' " The mundane topics of the soldiers' letters didn't reveal the underlying drama to him until many years later. Then the material began to seize his creative imagination.
"I was thinking of a television series first," he says. Then Ottawa's Great Canadian Theatre Company invited him to create a theatre piece. In order to truly read the letters, he realized, "You have to know a lot about the War." Thomson spent hours with regimental war diaries and medical records in Ottawa's War Museum and Britain's Records Office (where, ironically, the records of one of his great uncles had been lost in the bombings of WWII).
Thomson's original conception was to perform a staged reading of excerpts from the letters, but "It's ended up being the personal journey of me," he says. He found that the story that was emerging had to do less with the details of history and more with the question as to why humans find it important to revisit the tragedies of the past. "Why do we have gravestones? Why do we mark places?"
The truth of Ypres, and of wars in general, is that they never really end. "It is a story that is ongoing," he says. "It is a large narrative that is not yet complete."

The Lost Boys runs from February 7 to March 9 at CanStage's Berkeley Street Theatre, 26 Berkeley Street. For tickets call CanStage at 416-368-3110 or TicketMaster at 416-872-1111.

Publication Date: 2002-02-03
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=918