Shout It From the Rooftops

Night trippers: Oxford students T. E. Lawrence (Tom Rooney, left) and Robert Graves (Jonathan Crombie) vex the administration with their rooftop excursions in the play The Oxford Roof Climber's Rebellion. (Paul Toogood/GTC/Taragon Theatre)

You’re a couple of young soldiers who’ve had to fight a bloody and senseless war, then watch the victors greedily carve up the spoils. Now you’re in the peaceful enclave of the University of Oxford, trying to recover from the experience. How do you show your disgust and disillusionment with the politicians who betrayed you and, at the same time, blow off some steam?

If you’re Lawrence of Arabia and the poet Robert Graves, you steal livestock, shoot your typewriter for insubordination and fly the university chancellor’s trousers from the pinnacle of a library roof. At least, that’s how Calgary playwright Stephen Massicotte imagines it in his new anti-war play, The Oxford Roof Climber’s Rebellion.

Massicotte’s historical comedy-drama, premiering this fall in Ottawa and in Toronto, focuses on the friendship between the two famous First World War veterans who met in 1920 at Oxford. Col. T.E. Lawrence had gone there to write The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, his memoir about the Arab Revolt, while Capt. Graves, who’d survived the blood-soaked trenches of the Somme, was taking a belated undergraduate degree. Both had come out of the war with physical and psychological scars, but as Graves revealed in his memoir, Goodbye to All That, they weren’t above acting like a couple of frat boys on an Animal House-style spree. Among other hijinks, Graves described plotting with Lawrence to raid the grounds of Magdalen College and rustle its herd of deer. Another time, Lawrence shattered the Oxford calm by ringing a train station bell — a souvenir of one of the Arab attacks on the Hedjaz Railway — out the window of his rooms. When Graves protested that Lawrence would wake the whole university, Lawrence replied, “It needs waking up.”

“I thought [their friendship] was a smashing idea for a play,” says an enthusiastic Massicotte after a rehearsal at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre. “I especially liked the way they engaged in these undergraduate pranks. It seemed like they were trying to go back to a time before the war, when they could be young and irresponsible. I thought it would be great if that became their form of rebellion after the war, against their own personal guilt in the war, and the anger and rage they felt at the people who made them go to war. It would be a kind of protest.”

British soldier, adventurer and author T. E. Lawrence, circa 1920. (Illustrated London News/Getty Images)

While Massicotte has taken some liberties with the facts, much of the play is based on real antics instigated by the daredevil Lawrence, who grew up in Oxford and was known to clamber over the rooftops of its ancient colleges for a lark. As conjured up by the playwright, Graves (who was an accomplished rock climber in real life) joins his comrade in his nightly escapades, many of them aimed at provoking Lord Curzon, Britain’s foreign secretary and the chancellor of Oxford, who symbolizes, for Lawrence, Britain’s betrayal of Arab independence.

Massicotte, a military-history buff who scored a cross-Canada hit a few seasons ago with another First World War drama, Mary’s Wedding, says this is his way of dealing with 9/11 and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“This is my play about how people cope with these things,” he says. “All the characters are trying to recover from the effects of war, they’re all trying to do their best and move forward.”

He adds that there is a direct parallel between the play’s historical backdrop — the Iraq uprising of 1920 — and the current insurgency. After helping the Arab peoples defeat the ruling Ottoman Empire during the war, Lawrence had pushed for Arab independence at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, only to be angered and disheartened when Britain laid claim to Iraq, then called Mesopotamia. He was eventually lured from Oxford to assist Winston Churchill in hammering out the settlement that led to the creation of the modern Iraqi state.

“The British wanted that area because they’d discovered how much oil was there, so there was no way they were going to give it up to the Arabs,” Massicotte says. “They ended up facing a bloody rebellion that summer in which a good number of British soldiers were killed, as well as thousands of Iraqi Arabs. They even called them ‘insurgents.’ It was very much like what is occurring now.”

Besides boasting contemporary resonance, the play also bids to show a lighter side to Lawrence, who remains one of modern warfare’s most complex and enigmatic figures. “Lawrence’s humour doesn’t usually get a lot of emphasis,” Massicotte says. “He had this puckish, almost Andy Warhol-ish sense of humour. He was a trickster and a prankster, making fun of anybody that was willing to believe in him. It was almost an act of self-mockery and self-pity. I wanted to capture a Lawrence that expressed his self-loathing and self-defeat in a witty way.”

Seasoned actor and Lawrence look-alike Tom Rooney is portraying the elusive hero in the play’s debut, a co-production between the Tarragon and Ottawa’s Great Canadian Theatre Company. He heads a cast that also includes Jonathan Crombie as Graves, Victor Ertmanis as Lord Curzon, Michelle Giroux as Graves’s wife Nancy Nicholson and Paul Rainville as Lawrence’s manservant Jack. The play is directed by Tarragon artistic director Richard Rose.

Playwright Stephen Massicotte. (Paul Toogood/GTC/Tarragon Theatre)

Massicotte, 37, says he’s been a Lawrence of Arabia fan from the time he first saw David Lean’s classic 1962 film as a teenager in the Air Cadets in Thunder Bay, Ont. Later, as a cadet officer, he found Lawrence’s writings a source of inspiration. “Many of the aspects of leadership, responsibility and motivation that Lawrence spoke of I tried to embody or could identify with,” he says.

With both a father and stepfather in the Canadian Air Force, and a family history of war service, Massicotte might well have become a soldier himself. “It was the thing to do in my crowd when I was growing up,” he says. “Friends I played Dungeons and Dragons with are now fighting the Taliban.” While he doesn’t know Josh Klukie, the young private from Thunder Bay who was killed Sept. 29 in Afghanistan, Massicotte is friends with his commanding officer, Maj. Geoff Abthorpe. “He’s been sending me e-mails about some of the engagements they’ve encountered,” he says. “The military had a strong pull on me. It still does.”

But his love of theatre was stronger. It led him to study drama at the University of Calgary, where he enjoyed his first success as a playwright with The Boy’s Own Jedi Handbook. A comedy about coming of age with the Star Wars movies, it became a cult hit, spawned two sequels and ended up on the mainstage of Alberta Theatre Projects. ATP also premiered Mary’s Wedding, a tragic romance set against the Battle of Moreuil Wood, which, since 2002, has had more than 35 productions in Canada, the U.S. and Scotland.

Next on Massicotte’s agenda is Madame X, a play about fin de siècle American painter John Singer Sargent, which he’s writing on commission from the Stratford Festival. He also figures he has at least one more play about First World War in him, as it continues to have relevance today.

But if war hasn’t changed much in a century, rebelling against it has. Massicotte compares the lonely dissent of men like Graves and Lawrence with the massive international outcry against the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and sees hope. “That was the greatest single, universal anti-war protest in history,” he says. “And that was within 100 years of World War One. So maybe we have made progress. We can’t stop a war yet with protest, but maybe, sooner or later, we will be able to.”

The Oxford Roof Climber’s Rebellion opens Oct. 10 at the Great Canadian Theatre Company in Ottawa and Nov. 7 at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto.

Martin Morrow is an author and critic based in London, Ont.

CBC does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of external sites - links will open in new window.