In an era where the horrors of war stream live on social media from Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, Myanmar and so many more places, Yvette Nolan’s The Art of War at the Stratford Festival poses a profound and timely pair of questions: how do we truly capture the essence of conflict — and what role does art play in processing its trauma and making meaning of it?
This intimate 90-minute production, directed with precision by Keith Barker in a what is functionally a series of conversational vignettes, explores these questions through the experience of fictional Canadian World War II war artist named Nick (Josue Laboucane). Dispatched to the front lines with a paintbrush and a rifle, his mission is to document the war — not through the immediacy of journalism or combat photography, but through the contemplative medium of painting. Nick’s story refracts the experiences of some of our most iconically Canadian artists: people like the Group of Seven’s Arthur Lismer and Lauren Harris, who sharpened their craft and honed their aesthetic on the battlefield, as part of Canada’s official war arts programs. Inside a mini-history lesson on this little-known ongoing project, The Art of War offers a resonant meditation on art’s power to shape national identity and bear witness to humanity’s darkest moments.
Laboucane brings a hand-wringing, slightly overwrought earnestness to his role, perfectly capturing Nick’s internal struggle between artistic duty and all-too-human horror. The rest of the small cast also acquit themselves with aplomb. Jordin Hall delivers a sly, memorable turn as Newman, Nick’s charismatic fellow soldier and philosophical foil. Not what he at first seems, Newman might be the most interesting element of the play (though I couldn’t decide if it was unfortunate or wryly appropriate that I heard Jerry Seinfeld’s sardonic voice each time Nick greets him by name). Newman’s recurring exchanges with Nick form the intellectual backbone of The Art of War, exploring the nature of artistic responsibility in wartime, as well as the nature of trauma and what we do with it.
Meanwhile, Jenna-Lee Hyde brings a breathtakingly shaky physicality and raw emotion to her role as Magda, a wary war victim whose story is one of many fragments of war that Nick struggles to process personally and integrate artistically. Rylan Wilkie disappears inside two strikingly different roles that push Nick to further examine his experience and his art. And Julie Lumsden makes the most of a pair of minor turns: as the art historian whose lecture provides the show’s educational bookends, and as a Canadian Armed Services entertainer, whose haunting vocals argue for art as a respite from war… yet on stage seem instead to magnify its human toll.
Teresa Przybylski’s minimalist set design, combined with Logan Raju Cracknell’s evocative lighting and Adam Campbell’s immersive sound design, create a space where experience and representation blur. The sparse staging serves the production’s episodic nature perfectly: compact set pieces shift and reconfigure in darkness, helping us track Nick’s dogged attempt to construct and depict meaning from chaos. As Nick explains, war artistry is not about romantic plein-air painting amid falling bombs and whistling bullets. Rather, it’s the painstaking process of collecting fragments and possibilities: visual ideas to reassemble later, on a fresh canvas, in order to manifest deeper truths.
And just as Nick fills his sketchbook and his imagination with pieces to reconstitute into art, so, too, do we experience The Art of War as fractional tableaux separated by increments of darkness. The show includes no battle scenes, yet we feel the weight of war accumulating through Nick’s mounting anguish and the steady increase in the small canvases around him after each moment of darkness. Nor do we ever see the finished paintings which are the end result of Nick’s much-discussed process. In this light, projections of real Canadian war paintings in the Studio Theatre provide helpful context, but are also a clever dodge.
For ultimately, the show’s staging and structure make Nick’s struggle ours. In its calculated incompleteness, The Art of War mirrors both the artist’s process and the subject’s resistance to resolution. Its fragmentation makes the play an unsettling and not altogether satisfying experience … but that’s more a feature than a bug. The inescapable point is that we’re on our own, piecing together the show’s rapid succession of psychological exchanges and symbolic moments — its various shards, both staged and implied — into a coherent picture of what war is …. and who we are.
The Art of War continues at the Stratford Festival until September 27, 2025. Tickets are available on stratfordfestival.ca.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
