[In the following excerpt, Messenger briefly recounts the flaws in the original production of Walsh, but enthusiastically praises Pollock's rewrites and changes in script and finds the restructured Walsh an excellent and moving historical play.]

A play is a slice of life—any slice, whether it be the thick wedge carved for himself by the historian, the neatly trimmed piece of the sociologist, the oblique cut of the psychologist, or any of the variously shaped chunks chiselled off by other students of human experience. What matters is how well the dramatist transforms his chosen slice into something that reaches out from the stage to the minds and hearts of the audience in order to raise their consciousness (or conscience) or to tickle their fancy—in the classic formula, to instruct or delight. The four recent Canadian plays reviewed here are designed almost exclusively to do the former. There is precious little to delight in the clashes of white culture with the cultures of Eskimos and Indians, in the sexual conflict of a physically crippled man and an emotionally crippled woman, or in the agony of an intelligent young man dominated by a brutal, TV-zombie of a father. But there is instruction aplenty, and, in varying degrees, the dramatists succeed in reaching us.…

The focus [of Walsh] is clear, the language rings true, and the gap between two cultures is firmly bridged by a common humanity. Pollock has taken on the difficult job of writing a history play and has solved the immense problems that that thick slice of life involves, particularly problems of exposition and compression. The story of Sitting Bull's search for refuge in Canada after he defeated Custer and his Longknives at Little Big Horn is one of many tragic chapters in the annals of the North American Indians. For some years, Sitting Bull and his Sioux camped near Fort Walsh, negotiating with the North West Mounted Police and through them with Parliament for a permanent home, a reservation like that given to the Santee Sioux in Manitoba. But it was decided that these Indians were the Red Children of the Great White Father, not of Queen Victoria, the Great White Mother, and they were instructed to return across the line. To insure their compliance and to keep relations smooth between Ottawa and Washington, Sitting Bull and his people were given no food, clothing, or other supplies. For a while, they chose to starve and freeze. Finally, trusting American promises, they went back. Those promises were broken and Sitting Bull went to jail. Ten years later, Sitting Bull was killed.

The bare bones of the story are complex enough in themselves; a wealth of detail that can put flesh on the bones is available in such sources as Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which Pollock occasionally echoes in her own dialogue. But the dramatist is the one who has to make the hard choices, selecting what a play can contain and still be a play, not just history on stage. Pollock has made the right choices. The play as printed, a revised text, deals successfully with the business of narration and expossition that can strangle an episodic history play. The original text as produced at Theatre Calgary raised the critical eyebrow of Jamie Portman, writing about these problems in Canadian Theatre Review No. 2, though he found the play “vibrant and exciting” despite the severely limited time and money that were expended on the production. Portman said that Sharon Pollock was working on the problems. She worked, and she solved them. The play is now alive from the very beginning, despite the weight of historical fact it must communicate. The device that accomplishes this is Harry, who moves easily between his roles as narrator and as wagon master, with the American flavour of his speech setting him off from the others and complementing both his roles. I have not seen the original version, but I suspect that Harry saved the day.

The focus of the play, however, is not Sitting Bull but Major James Walsh, North West Mounted Police, and the play centres on what the Sioux dilemma does to him. Here is the stuff and structure of classic tragedy: a man torn between genuine devotion to his duty and the principles and virtues it involves, and his human commitment to a suffering fellow-creature who trusts him. He must betray that trust to fulfill his duty. When Sitting Bull is killed, the circle of betrayal is complete. In a moment of the kind of wordless visual symbolism possible only on stage, Walsh strips off his gun and scarlet tunic. Like Creon in Sophocles' Antigone, he is destroyed, not physically but morally, by the consequences of his impossible tragic choice. The play presents the scope of history, the sorrows of the Indians and the perfidy of governments, all focussed in the tragic conflict within Major Walsh. It is a fine piece of work.