Edmonton Journal Review, August 17 2007
// August 29th, 2007 // Reviews
Canadian Hypocrisy the butt of duo’s wit
* * * * (out of 5)
The Churchill Protocol, from Ottawa’s Gruppo Rubato, is one of those productions you can’t always count on finding at the Fringe. To wit: a new and topical pocket Canuck satire with a Strangelove-ian conspiracy premise, outrageous characters, real actors, sharp direction, and a sting.
It also has a goat. Two really, but I don’t want to give away too much. The black comedy, by the team of Patrick Gauthier and Kris Joseph, takes us deep into the heart of our national ambivalence and waffling hypocrisy about all things military.
At the polar bear detention centre in Churchill, Man., mysterious military cargo flights have been arriving from Afghanistan laden with live freight. An ambitious Globe reporter (Gauthier) is sniffing around, convinced he’s on the edge of an explosive, career-making scoop about the secret imprisonment and torture of terrorist detainees. That’s why he’s having a clandestine meeting with the outpost colonel (Joseph, in a performance of riotous bombast and mania). The latter, incidentally, has invented several secret weapons, including a ray gun with digestive repercussions and an ingenious new way of felling the enemy using his mind, sure to appeal to squeamish Canucks tied to the hackneyed old myth that we are a peacekeeping nation.
“We can actually have warfare without war!” proclaims the Colonel triumphantly. “We can actually have the kind of military we think we already have.”
There is a mystery here, and a mysterious crate, and some well-aimed barbs at a sanctimonious country where people are too morally lethargic to vote. And the subject of goats just keeps coming up as the plot twists suspensively away.
Funny, furious and smart.
