By Galen Simmons
James Dallas Smith as Hugh, Madeline Kennedy as Anya and Richard Comeau as Bobby in the Blyth Festival’s 2025 production of Sir John A: Acts of a Gentrified Ojibway Rebellion. Photo by Lyon Smith.
What happens when historic oppression is framed through a modern lens?
In playwright Drew Hayden Taylor’s sesquicentennial play, Sir John A: Acts of a Gentrified Ojibway Rebellion, as directed by Vinetta Strombergs for the 2025 Blyth Festival, 19th-century colonial nation building and the oppressive drive of Canada’s colonizers to unify a country at all costs is put head to head with an Anishinaabe man’s modern-day mission to reclaim his late grandfather’s identity and connection with his culture and history, even if that means digging up our first prime minister’s bones and holding them for ransom.
Without missing a beat, the play alternates between an increasingly intoxicated Sir John A. Macdonald (Randy Hughson) as he opines on matters of his day, 19th-century politicking and his racist and elitist views on Canada’s Indigenous peoples, and the modern-day Kingston caper dreamt up by an enraged and frustrated Bobby Rabbit (Richard Comeau) and his friend, the loveable, sensitive and artistic Hugh (James Dallas Smith), who wants nothing more than to listen to classic rock and insert his own name into the lyrics (“What I Like About Hugh,” for example).
While Hugh has understandable reservations about helping Bobby dig up Macdonald’s bones as a bargaining chip for the return of his grandfather’s medicine bundle, on display in some European museum, after Bobby tried all legal avenues he could think of to get them back without success, Hugh realizes he can’t let his friend go it alone. Thus begins a road trip from the rez to Kingston.
Along the way, the pair meets Anya (Madeline Kennedy), a headstrong, Queen’s University dropout and summer employee of Bellevue House National Historic Site, stranded at a McDonald’s near Perry Sound after breaking up with her girlfriend while on a cottage vacation. With no wallet and no way home to Kingston, Anya reluctantly joins Bobby and Hugh on their road trip, sparking a spirited and emotionally wrought debate between Anya and Bobby about the importance of the role Canada’s first prime minister served as a nation builder versus the legacy of atrocities and cultural genocide he left on Canada’s Indigenous peoples.
Paired with Macdonald’s drunken ramblings, delivered hilariously in an impeccable-yet-slurred Scottish accent by Hughson, a veteran actor with 13 seasons at the Stratford Festival, the debate between Bobby and Anya makes for a fascinating exploration of both the facts and myths surrounding Canada’s founding father and whether revenge can do anything to address the problematic thinking of the past and solve the issues of today.
While Comeau – who has also performed in Stratford, most recently in the 2022 play, 1939 – and Kennedy have an undeniable and fiery chemistry on stage that kept me on the edge of my seat throughout their combatant back-and-forth, it’s Smith who helps them find a middle ground and brings much of the heart, soul and comic relief to the otherwise difficult subject matter.
This is the type of theatre that makes me proud to be Canadian. Through art and the considerable talents of both cast and crew in this production, we as the audience have the opportunity to open our minds to two vastly different perspectives on our nation’s history and, like Hugh, find a middle ground on
which we can stand, work towards a better understanding of our past and move forward into the future together.
Sir John A: Acts of a Gentrified Ojibway Rebellion runs on the Margaret Stephens Stage at Memorial Hall in Blyth until Aug. 3.
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