The Art of War puts Canadian wartime art on centre stage

When award-winning Saskatchewan playwright Yvette Nolan saw an exhibition of Canadian wartime art on display in Ottawa, she was amazed that artists had been sent overseas and into danger to document the war as they experienced it.

“I just kept turning over the idea of these artists plodding around Europe with paints and brushes, risking their lives to capture some kind of truth to tell the folks back home,” Nolan recalls.

Many of those paintings had been packed up and stored away until the early 2000s, when the construction of the Canadian War Museum was underway. Unique perspectives of wartime experience, having long gone unseen, were finally back in the public eye.

So Nolan began to write about it: A play about art about war.

More than two decades — and one pandemic — later, Nolan’s work on The Art of War has finally come to fruition. The show opens in Saskatoon on Thursday night at the Remai Arts Centre BackStage Stage, and runs through the Remembrance Day weekend.

The play tells the story of a fictional wartime painter, Nick, as he grapples with his role and impact as an artist in battle and beyond.

“It would be almost impossible to explain to people back home what the soldiers were experiencing,” said actor Joshua Beaudry, who plays Nick’s friend Newman. “A photograph could give you an idea, but the visual artists were able to filter war through their own particular lens — their frame of mind, the way they saw it — and could communicate the horrors of war and bring that home to the people here.

Nolan had intended to premiere The Art of War in 2021; a year after COVID-19 had spread around the world, there was a moment wheN cases were beginning to drop, and she and her fellow artist were hungry to jump into rehearsals and get back into the theatre.

They almost made it to opening night before cases spiked again, and the theatre had to go dark.

“There was a real grief about the fact that we weren’t going to be able to do it,” Nolan recalled. “We got all the way to opening, and we had to pull the plug. It was hard to cancel it.”

But since that almost-premiere, Nolan saID global events have made the play even more acutely relevant.

“When we did this play two years ago, the world was in a global pandemic, but we weren’t in war in the same way,” said Nolan. “Right now, we are profoundly in war — between Gaza, the Middle East, Africa and Ukraine, the world is in war. And we are all connected, and it affects us all. So here we are as artists, making art in wartime, and wondering what our responsibility is.”Nolan notes that the Canadian Forces Artists Program, which evolved from the war art programs of The First and Second World Wars, is still active today and recently issued a recruitment call for artists to deploy with the Canadian military in 2024 and 2025.

“What is the role of the artist in society, if this is something that we do?” she said. “If we are sent into conflict, what is our role?

“I think artists are always grappling with making sense out of circumstances, making order out of chaos. I think art is a way of trying to figure things out, for a community or communities. It certainly feels like, in this play and at this time, we are trying to make sense of what is valuable to us as human beings and what our truths are as humans.”

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