Arts Club Theatre Company presents Helen Lawrence, March 13-April 13 at the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage, 2750 Granville St., Vancouver. Tickets from $29 at artsclub.com or 604-687-1644.
In perhaps the biggest scandal in B.C. police history, Vancouver's former police chief
Walter Mulligan fled to Los Angeles following accusations of corruption.
His departure came in the midst of a royal commission, launched in 1955, which probed the entire police department and exposed the city's top cop and a number of his officers as crooks on the take. The widelypublicized inquiry into what became known as the Mulligan Affair served as a source of inspiration for visual artist Stan Douglas
and screenwriter Chris Haddock when creating the story for Helen Lawrence, a new multi-media production presented by the Arts Club Theatre Company.
"We sort of traced back those events to the time period they were occurring to discover that there was a great deal of police corruption and political influence intermingling," says Haddock, a veteran screenwriter, director and producer whose TV credits include Da Vinci's Inquest, Da Vinci's City Hall and Intelligence. "The city's development was all mixed up with gambling and vice."
Helen Lawrence takes place in the petty crimeridden Vancouver of 1948. Although the characters and events are fictional, the story is set against the real history of mid-century Vancouver - a city still recovering from the global devastation of the Second World War and awaiting the unforeseen promise of the 1950s.
The play is set in two main locations. Hogan's Alley, once a hotbed of gambling and prostitution, was razed in the early '70s to make way for the Georgia Viaduct.
"When you drive east to west on the Georgia Viaduct, where it crosses Main Street there, you're driving literally on the cinders and ashes of Hogan's Alley," Haddock says.
The other spot is the old Hotel Vancouver, located where the TD Tower now stands. It was demolished in 1949 "for very dubious reasons," Haddock adds.
Featuring crooked cops, a revenge-seeking femme fatale and an unsolved murder, Douglas and Haddock's story had all the ingredients for a classic film noir.
"The idea of taking the film noir approach to it just evolved quite naturally out of our interest in seeing how films of that period were representing some of those same concerns and post-war anxiety," Haddock says. "The blackand-white images appealed to us, the whole style was obviously intriguing, but it just served as almost a style metaphor for a lot of the things we were curious to investigate."
Helen Lawrence marks the theatrical debut for both Douglas and Haddock. But, as Haddock points out, the production really straddles the line between theatre and cinema. Audiences will be confronted with a bluescreen enclosed stage on which the play itself is performed. Filmed and live images of the actors are projected into furnished virtual spaces, so the story unfolds simultaneously as a film and a play. If that sounds like sensory overload, Haddock offers his assurance that the production is careful to focus the viewer's attention.
"One minute it draws you to the artifice and the next it reveals the complete sort of naked nature of the stage presentation," he explains.
Douglas unearthed partial blueprints of the old Hotel Vancouver to aid in the creation of his computer-generated sets. Meanwhile, Haddock also immersed himself in the visual history of late-'40s Vancouver. Formal research, combined with popular lore and his own memories of growing up in Vancouver allowed Haddock to better grasp the atmosphere of the time.
After its world premiere in Vancouver, Helen Lawrence is set to embark on an international tour. Non-Vancouver audiences may not be familiar with the referenced history or landmarks, but Haddock is certain the production will have wide appeal
regardless. Based on his own experience, he says, viewers appreciate a specific location as opposed to "a universally appealing Nowheresville."
"When I began Da Vinci's Inquest I told the CBC that I wasn't interested in making anything generic. I really wanted to make something that was very specifically about Vancouver," he says of the award-winning series, which was filmed and set locally. "I've discovered the more specific you are about your tale, your characters, your locations, the time period, the more universal it becomes because people recognize specificity, they don't recognize generality."
The idea for Helen Lawrence was conceived several years ago by Douglas, who initially
envisioned the project as a gallery installation. He and Haddock later explored the possibility of a TV script, but eventually secured interest from Canadian Stage and pursued it as a multimedia play.
"From there we really went forward, so it has been about a five-year gestation from the very beginning," Haddock says, adding, "It's going to be hugely entertaining for people."
