Dedication by Edward Riche: A Workshop Reading of a New Play in Development

RCA Theatre Company and The Arts & Culture Centre present a workshop reading of a new play in development – Dedication by Edward Riche

Cox & Palmer Second Space

$10 at the door

Directed by Charlie Tomlinson*

Featuring Steve Cochrane, Jerry Etienne* & Allison Kelly

*appearing courtesy of Canadian Actors Equity

On July 1, 1924 Field Marshall Douglas Haig, Commander of The British Expeditionary Force in World War I comes to St. John’s to dedicate the National War Memorial.  “Dedication” imagines the Field Marshall’s morning in St. John’s preparing for the ceremony.

Haig’s batman having taken ill a groom from the Governor’s stables, Charles Edgecombe, is assigned to help Haig dress for the occasion.  Edgecombe turns out to have been a prisoner of the Bolsheviks during the later stages of the war and may have “radicalized” while in their custody.

Once dressed Haig is obliged to submit to an interview by a young local journalist, Miss Drover, a suffragette and nurse to a brother horribly wounded, mentally, spiritually and physically in the war.

These three characters cannot but come to debate and disagree about the causes of the World War and its consequences, about colonialism and capitalism, about patriotism and duty, about the horrors of the past and the hopes for the future, about modernity itself.

The play does not revisit in great detail the tragedy of Beaumont Hamel, that story has been well served by existing plays, but looks at the larger causes and costs of the War, through the lens of international geopolitics and the very personal.