SOURCE: Nothof, Anne. “Crossing Borders: Sharon Pollock's Revisitation of Canadian Frontiers.” Modern Drama 38, no. 4 (winter 1995): 475-87.

In the following essay, Nothof presents three examples (Walsh, The Komagata Maru Incident, and Fair Liberty's Call) in which Pollock blends historical documentation with fictional embellishments to refute the commonly held belief that Canadian history is lacking in controversy and has no issues of immigration double standards or racial discrimination.

Sharon Pollock's “history plays” are essentially iconoclastic, deconstructing comfortable assumptions about the growth of the Canadian nation and the peaceful integration of “others” from across the borders. In two of her early plays—Walsh, which premiered at Theatre Calgary in 1973, and The Komagata Maru Incident, which was first produced at the Vancouver Playhouse in 1976—she demonstrated how the politics of exclusion determined the characteristics of a “white man's country.” In Fair Liberty's Call,¹ which opened at the Patterson Theatre in Stratford, Ontario...