'Billy Bishop' revisits WWI fears and thrills

Shelley Bolman plays a number of roles in addition to the main character in "Billy Bishop Goes to War" at Gloucester Stage. Musical director Will McGarrahan accompanies Bolman on piano. (Shawn G. Henry)

GLOUCESTER - "Billy Bishop Goes to War" has an almost cult status in Canada. But despite multiple awards, a Broadway staging produced by Mike Nichols, and a made-for-TV movie, this spare, often moving "play with music" about one young man's journey through World War I is less instantly familiar in the United States.

That may be one reason that the Gloucester Stage Company has brought it back to open its summer season. Another reason could be the way it showcases the talents of actor Shelley Bolman, who plays Billy and a small flock of other characters, and musical director Will McGarrahan, who accompanies Bolman on piano and in song.

But the most compelling reason to see it may be the one that's most obvious from its title: It's a story about war, and about what happens to a person who becomes a warrior. Neither glamorizingly heroic nor polemically pacifist, it speaks both to those who have felt the allure of testing themselves in battle and to those who are horrified by the very idea of combat.

Bolman's Billy clearly experiences those feelings and more. An indifferent and occasionally troublemaking student at Canada's Royal Military College, Billy is surprised to find himself a commissioned cavalry officer when his country joins Britain's fight against "the Hun." Miserable, stuck in the mud with his horse, and appalled by the destruction he sees, he looks up one day and sees a plane - and his future.

Billy's raptures as he discovers the joy of solo flight are among the play's most moving. They're also complex, both for Billy and for his audience: The beauty of the sky is inextricably linked to the horrors of destroying the enemy planes that share it. What's particularly frightening is how quickly Billy grows to relish that destruction: the power, the triumph over a worthy opponent, the thrill.

Bolman, in a remarkably nuanced and engaged performance, conveys all these layers of pleasure and pain. He can seem like a gleeful kid with a new toy as he hunts down his prey, then a mournful old man reflecting on the toll of war, then a riotous young blade as he blows off steam with a night on the town. If Billy's bloodthirst sometimes unnerves us, it nevertheless remains accessible, even understandable, precisely because it unnerves Billy, too.

"Billy Bishop" also holds interest on this side of the Atlantic for its perspective on the "colonials" who bolstered Britain's war effort, even as they were despised and dismissed by the upper-class officers under whose flag they fought. Bolman is particularly deft and amusing in his quick shifts: from the rough-and-tumble Billy to the medal-toting toffs he encounters or, with an icy hauteur worthy of Margaret Dumont, the aristocratic Lady St. Helier, who becomes his protector.

None of this, perhaps, is startlingly new or unexpected. Similarly, neither the script nor the songs (all written by John Gray in collaboration with Eric Peterson) take us anywhere we haven't been before. But, particularly with the fine, melancholy voice and somber presence of McGarrahan anchoring Bolman's more animated work, director Scott LaFeber's production does take us somewhere worth going - particularly now, when young men and women are once again flying off to fight one of those battles that were never supposed to happen again, not after Billy Bishop's War to End All Wars.

Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.