The hero's return

While they call themselves "two old farts," they're really two national treasures. John Gray and Eric Peterson are the creators and performers of Billy Bishop Goes to War, the modest little play about a plucky First World War fighter pilot that has become a classic in the Canadian theatre canon.

Billy Bishop, a likable Canadian kid who became the toast of London society for his aerial exploits, was an appealing symbol of colonial Canada itself.

The show, which premiered in Vancouver in 1978, went on to critical acclaim on Broadway, traveled to the Edinburgh Festival and London’s West End and still gets produced regularly. Now, Gray and Peterson are back in the cockpit for a 30th — or, more accurately, 31st — anniversary revival.

The two were in their 30s when Billy Bishop first hit the heights. They’re in their early 60s now, older, wiser, but still full of the irreverence and high spirits that are part of the play’s enduring appeal. Sitting down for a joint interview at Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre, which is producing this revival, they laugh at the idea of reliving their glory decades later.

"We used to joke that we would one day have a production called Billy Bishop Goes to Seed," Gray says.

"Well," Peterson replies, "then I guess we’re doing it!"

On a more serious note, this revival — directed by Ted Dykstra and opening Aug. 12 — may hit closer to home than any of the duo’s previous versions.

"This is the first time it’s been done by us when our country has been at war," Peterson says, "where we actually have young men and women in Afghanistan dying and being maimed. The Canada we are playing to is so much different than it was when we originally did it."

Billy Bishop was born amid the nationalistic fever of the 1970s, when homegrown Canadian plays were all the rage. Peterson and Gray, who’d contributed to collective Canuck projects at Toronto’s seminal Theatre Passe Muraille, decided they should build their own show about a Canadian hero. Peterson came up with the subject: William Avery Bishop, the young flying ace from Owen Sound, Ont., who became famous for shooting down 72 German planes during the First World War.

It was an offbeat choice for a pair of baby boomers who’d come of age during the Vietnam War. For the contrarian Gray, therein lay the appeal. Besides, the stakes were as low as you could get. The piece would be a two-man musical with Peterson playing all the roles and Gray, an erstwhile rock musician, plunking out the score on a piano. "We thought this would be a way for us to actually put on a show for very little money," Gray says, "and maybe make some money — buy a car, maybe."

The premiere, at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre, was less than auspicious. "There was a newspaper strike and a postal strike at the time," Gray recalls. However, word of mouth turned the show into a held-over hit and, before long, the two were taking it east to Passe Muraille and then on tour. Among the enthusiastic audience members was Lewis Allen, the cigar-chomping, Tony-winning producer of such Broadway hits as Annie. Allen, in turn, recommended the show to legendary director Mike Nichols, who proposed bringing it to New York.

Peterson says he and Gray were doubtful. "When the prospect loomed on the horizon that we’d be going to Broadway, we said, ‘Oh, sure, sure .…’"

"We’d never worked in a [real] theatre," Gray adds. "We worked in converted churches and railway stations … funeral parlours .…"

The play made its Broadway debut at the Morosco Theatre in 1980 to glowing reviews, but closed after only 12 performances. (It then moved off-Broadway and continued to run for several months.) Gray has a pithy explanation for their brief stay on the Great White Way: "Americans weren’t overly keen on coming to see two unknown Canadians do a show about an unknown Canadian war hero in a war that America didn’t win."

However, basking in the bright lights of Broadway had spinoff benefits. Thanks to the positive critical response, the play received a spate of productions across North America. Gray and Peterson, meanwhile, took the show to the U.K., and a CBC/BBC television version was broadcast in 1982.

For all the international attention, Peterson says the real reward was creating a play that Canadians loved. "We did two wonderful tours back and forth across Canada and that was very exciting, to see the kind of connection we suddenly made with audiences."

Billy, a rough, likable Canadian kid who becomes the toast of London society for his aerial exploits, was an appealing symbol of colonial Canada itself — a can-do nation happy to help the mother country without taking Britain’s pomp and circumstance too seriously. Coming shortly after the end of the Vietnam War, when antiwar sentiment was still strong, the play also caught people off-guard.

"What I think was new about Billy Bishop was that it didn’t address the notion of whether war was a good or a bad thing," Gray says. "It addressed the idea of what it was like. You had the horrors of war, but you also had the reality that men say that it was the best time they ever had, the most intense, the time they felt most alive. And you have to explain that, too."

Gray and Peterson eventually put Billy Bishop aside and went on to separate and notable careers. After penning a handful of successful musicals (Rock and Roll, 18 Wheels ), the Vancouver-based Gray remade himself into a novelist and journalist. Peterson became a favourite on Canadian television, starring in the long-running CBC-TV drama Street Legal  and, more recently, as Brent Butt’s cranky dad on the hit CTV sitcom Corner Gas. That modest show, shot in Peterson's native Saskatchewan, has enjoyed the same kind of grassroots popularity as Billy Bishop.

The last time Peterson and Gray re-teamed was in 1998, to do a 20th-anniversary version of the play. Like the current revival, it was retooled to reflect the performers’ ages. Gray says the story only gains poignancy as they grow older. At this point he and Peterson, both 62, are the same age as the real Bishop when he died.

"The whole question of survival has come into play this time," Gray notes. "Billy Bishop is about a man who survived [the war] and who has experienced the ironies of survival. What we’re discovering at this age is that it’s very close to what everyone experiences as we get older — in surviving, you get to go to your friends’ funerals. That’s what happens. So in a way, war isn’t any different from life — it’s just one hell of a lot faster."

Billy Bishop Goes to War runs at Toronto's Young Centre for the Performing Arts to Aug. 29.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.