Views and Reviews

• Published in: Canadian Theatre Review
• Main Author: Houston, Andrew
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) 2006
• Subjects: Visual Arts and Performing Arts; Newfoundland
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/ctr.128.016; https://ctr.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/ctr.128.016

In the spring of 2006, when Sir Paul McCartney came to New foundland to protest the seal hunt , the whole event seemed all too familiar. Hadn’t these battle-lines been drawn many times before? This division between an international class of celebrity do-gooders and a class of workers doing some god-awful job in the service of survival; this divide between a lobby of influential elites and a community of people in a remote part of the world - haven’t we seen all of this before? Here was a conflict replete with differences in politics, economics, culture and power over the media circus engendered by the battle. While the media focused on the obvious passions being inflamed by the event - the impoverishment in a rural Newfoundland community, the way the doomed seals tend to look just like the family pet or the way the celebrity (rock star, film actor, etc .) tends to look heroic as he or she apparently puts his or her own life at risk in the service of saving the world - I wondered more about what the staging of this conflict said about deeply perceived notions of enlightenment as they relate to one’s location in the world or simply to one’s place in Canada.