news | Monday June 17, 2013

John Murrell’s new play, Peace in Our Time, Premieres at the Shaw Festival

Peace in Our Time, the latest play by John Murrell and an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Geneva, is premiering at the Shaw Festival this season (May 19 – October 12, 2013).

The play was recently reviewed by Jamie Portman in the Ottawa Citizen. The following are excerpts from his article.

Over at the Court House Theatre, a … display of attractive visuals has been supplied by designer Camellia Koo as backdrop to the shenanigans that erupt in the world premiere of Calgary playwright John Murrell’s political romp, Peace in our Time.

This is Murrell’s zestful reworking of one of Bernard Shaw’s most troublesome plays, the 1938 Geneva, which climaxed with three notorious dictators – clearly based on Italy’s Mussolini, Germany’s Hitler, and Spain’s Franco – appearing before a League of Nations tribunal.

Shaw kept updating and revising Geneva until he was in his 90s, thanks to changing world conditions. It could be argued that Murrell has merely maintained the precedent, but in the process this award-winning playwright also reminds us how good he can be with comedy.

Yet Murrell remains faithful to Shaw’s concerns over failure of world government – in this instance, the loftily named International Committee for Intellectual Co-operation of The League of Nations – to maintain the peace.

Indeed, given the growing impotence of today’s U.N., both Geneva and its successor seem remarkably prescient works – also sobering ones despite the comic buffoonery that enlivens Blair Williams’s production.

[…]

The full article is available here.