When playwright-actress Julia Mackey wrote her first one-act play in 2006 she could see herself performing it for a couple of weeks.
She had written comedy sketches and small dramas, but Jake’s Gift was a literary departure, something altogether more ambitious. She was also far more experienced as an actress, so why have unrealistic expectations?
Why should a play about a Canadian Second World War vet’s unlikely bond with a 10-year-old French girl elicit anything more than passing interest? After all, war is well-trodden terrain for artists, and audiences can be wary about revisiting it and listening to tired clichés.
Yet fast forward six years and Mackey will be giving her 611th performance of Jake’s Gift when she comes to Barrhead on Nov. 30 as the second of this season’s arts council acts.
The performance dovetails with the town’s mood of reflection following the Remembrance Day parade and ceremony on Nov. 11.
Mackey’s solo show has proved a huge hit across Canada since she started touring in 2008, earning critical acclaim and attracting audience members of all ages, from schoolboys to granddads.
After performances on the fringe theatre circuit, word began to spread about the thoughtful, comedic and sad 60-minute play.
More and more requests came in for Jake’s Gift, requests she and director Dirk Van Stralen were grateful, even privileged, to accept.
“I have been moved and totally blown away by the response,” she said last Wednesday from Manitoba, the latest leg of her latest tour.
So many productions, yet Mackey has never become bored with playing the four characters she created.
“The script may remain the same, but each performance is slightly different,” she said. “I love doing it and sharing the story.”
There have also been breaks between touring, so monotony has never been a danger.
The writing of Jake’s Gift was a long, evolving process that started when Mackey was in a theatre workshop in Vancouver.
As the germ of an idea took shape, she did not feel her life experience could help her draw a war veteran’s character effectively.
“I also wanted to expand the story,” she said.
Watching the news one day, she heard about a gathering of D-Day vets in France; surely this was her chance to listen, learn and gain an insight into events 60 years ago. First person testimony is so much more powerful than black-and-white newsreel or grainy pictures.
In 2004, she attended ceremonies in Normandy marking the anniversary of the 1944 landings of Allied forces along a 50-mile stretch of the French coast.
Juno Beach – one of the five sectors where 160,000 troops landed on June 6 – would become the setting for Jake’s Gift.
“I interviewed as many Canadian vets as I could,” she said.
Mackey also learned that her granddad, Ken Mackey, had served with the Navy in the war, something she only discovered when she saw his medals case at her father’s home in Devon in the south of England.
However, it wasn’t granddad that she had in mind when she created Jake, a name that came to her randomly while she was at the B.C. theatre workshop.
“He was based on two or three veterans that I spoke to,” she said. “They were aware of their influence.”
Finally Mackey felt equipped to write her play, drawing Jake as a curmudgeonly 80-year-old Canadian Second World War vet who revisits the shores of Normandy on the 60th anniversary of D-Day, the shores where his older brother Chester was killed.
Wandering along Juno Beach, he meets Isabelle, a precocious and inquisitive 10-year-old French girl. At first crusty old Jake sees Isabelle as a pest, a view spelled out in the play’s funnier moments.
Yet as their relationship develops something beautiful emerges, a friendship made more poignant by the disparity in their ages. Jake’s burden, the survivor’s guilt, begins to ease and there is an exchange of gifts.
To learn more, you should go to Barrhead Composite High School drama theatre on Friday. The show starts at 8 p.m. and will open with a performance by the Magic Lantern Singers from Sangudo.
So why has Jake’s Gift proved so successful?
Mackey, who also plays more minor roles in Jake’s Gift – a schoolteacher and Isabelle’s grandmother – believes there is a growing feeling that the world is quickly losing a generation who fought in the Second World War.
The testimonies of those who witnessed and performed extraordinary acts contain lessons for people of any generation, whether they live in peacetime or war, she says.
“Jake’s Gift is more than a war story, “ she said. “It deals with loss, which is a universal experience.”
That may seem like a bleak theme, and the ending may pull at the heartstrings, but viewers should not expect a single tone production.
“There is lot of comedy as well,” Mackey said.
Mackey, an actress since 1994, has been constantly amazed by the diversity of audience members over the years, from 10-year-olds to 90-year-olds.
Hopefully, she will see a similarly diverse sea of faces in Barrhead.
“I’ve never been to Barrhead before and am looking forward to coming,” she said. “The people we’ve met from there have been so lovely.”
Mackey said she found visiting small, rural communities an immense privilege, since so many who gave their lives in the Second World War came from them.
Although she was born in Birmingham, a large industrial city in the UK, and grew up in Montreal, Mackey has become familiar with the ways of small communities, having made Wells in B.C. her principal home; she also stays in Vancouver.
When Mackey writes a follow-up to Jake’s Gift, it will probably be to the peace and quiet of Wells that she retires. She has a couple of ideas for further plays, neither of which deal with the Second World War.
“It is a matter of finding time to develop the seedlings,” she said.
Time has been a rare commodity since Jake’s Gift took off. Not that she is complaining.
The play’s success is a gift that she treasures every day.
