Beyond Heroism: War and Loss in Jake's Gift

Written and performed by Julia Mackey, ‘Jake’s Gift’ is being staged by the Lunchbox Theatre and is running till the 17th of November. It is a story that delves into themes of soldierly sacrifice and loss, doing so with performative and authorial efficiency. It is a play that has received a fair number of accolades and has come to be seen as a testament to the spirit and distinctness of Canadian theatre. The play follows Jake, an aged Canadian veteran who returns to Juno Beach in Normandy for the anniversary of the D-Day landings. I must admit, that I am wary of plays that memorialize themes of war, liberation, and the deliverance of victory without challenging the audience to examine contradictory ideals around these themes. War might be a historical necessity, but it is a savage and depraved necessity, one that gave us the Allies’ liberation of France but also gave us the Bombing of Dresden (air raids that killed tens of thousands of German civilians), the rape of Berlin (sexual violence inflicted by soviet soldiers on German women), the French Colonial rape of Italian women, an event known as the Marocchinate, and the US government’s internment of Japanese Americans. This is not to subject the historical mission statement of the Allies to contemporary interrogation; it is to acknowledge that even amid liberation there exists the brutal reality that war carries with it the scars of moral compromise. Bertolt Brecht’s (German Playwright) approach to understanding the role of catharsis (emotional closure in the theatre) is important here. For Brecht, catharsis discourages critical thinking and the false sense of closure that we may experience in the theatre is akin to swallowing a narcotic, one that disorients the truth of our social condition. There is always an inherent danger to feeling good in the theatre, it might come at the cost of being able to examine reality truthfully. In other words, sometimes, crying in the theatre masks social and cultural practices that are insidious. Seemingly innocuous emotions perpetuate the political logic of war, arms spending and State militarism, they may inadvertently nourish social perceptions around the peremptory righteousness of State power.

Even through a Brechtian lens though, this play comes out on top, it does not deify war, and it does not turn ideology into a centrepiece of dramatic attention. It does something much more enlightening; it is a performative portrayal of the inner lives of people trying to negotiate through the tumultuous emotions of loss. It assumes that war is a historical inevitability in the world that we live in, and no matter how much we wish to repudiate that notion, it is descriptively true. The war in this play is a thematic backdrop to lives fractured by absence, where memories of the fallen haunt the spaces that we live in and inhabit. One of the most haunting scenes in the play is when Jake slowly puts on his uniform. The spotlight isolates him, everything else at the edges of the spotlight is cast into darkness. Here, Jake is illuminated in harsh clarity, the shadows around him are the weight of excruciating memories that cannot be escaped. Time itself seems to slow down during this sequence, and the painstaking act of slowly putting on his uniform reveals an irrepressible truth; some losses will never be redeemed, some absences will remain unfulfilled, and some scars will always come close to breaking us. Jake’s fragility is exposed to us in that silent sequence, but we also see some of his resilience, and this is one of the reasons that we are left with a healthy quantum of hope by the end of the play. Unlike nihilistic portrayals of war, of which there any many artistic masterpieces, Jake’s Gift leaves us with what the philosopher Jonathon Lear called radical hope, it is a hope that transcends the confines of our cultural imagination, and a willingness to embrace a future that cannot be fully understood or known. Isabelle the young French girl in the play embodies this radical hope, she is the conceptual expression of a covenant between the future and the past, a reminder that memory and loss need not leave us in a state of emotional catatonia but can fuel a quiet resilience. Hope creates the conditions to remember, heal and build anew. The scenes between her and Jake at the graveyard are especially powerful, there is a beautiful line in the play, something to the effect of, tombstones are windows through which the dead interact with our world. Suggesting that the dead are never really dead, that they interact with our world, and we are the custodians of all of their stories. Beyond the constructed valour of ideological soldiery, there is the personal valour of human beings who confronted and endured death with fear, courage, bravery and wistfulness. A panoply of emotions that constitute the essence of what it means for all of us to be human.

Julia Mackey’s performance was stunning, switching between characters in microseconds. Everything from her posture to the movement of her eyes shifted seamlessly, capturing the wounded soul of an old man and the ebullient spirit of a young girl with remarkable skill. Mackey’s performance was an act of immersive embodiment, we were breathing each moment and living each heartbeat with her characters. Her performance is also a masterclass for young actors looking to learn how to constructively use silence in a performance, she was not afraid to take her time. Mackey’s use of silence becomes a powerful and dynamic language on its own. This is something that modern theatre needs a lot more of. In the rapid churn and anxiety of modern living, performative silence in the theatre is a loud reminder that most of life is experienced in the unsaid, the unstated and the unexpressed. This play in many ways is a reclamation of time, and also a symbolic expression of how the dead might experience it, suspended in an expansive and unmeasured quiet.

Dirk Van Stralen, the director, wrote in his forward note on the play program/brochure that he was looking for simplicity, for something that would not distract the audience from the economy of the story. How right he got it, and how beautifully this simple vision was executed. The play had the distinct touch of a sensitive Auteur, a light but purposeful hand that brought out the essence of those dramatic moments, giving the story room to breathe and inhabit the space around us.

Gerald King’s use of the lights was masterful, his lighting design was as much a part of the story as the script was, sculpting a wide plethora of emotions on stage and directing our gaze to exactly where it needed to be. He created moments of intimacy, vastness, warmth, and solitude. His artistry transformed light and darkness into silent narrators, amplifying the depth of the play and inviting the audience to experience each memory and moment.

In Jake’s gift, the simplicity of the storytelling, poignant lighting, and incisive direction all converge to remind us that memorializing the sacrifices of soldiers need not always be done at the level of ideological grandeur. Instead, it can reside in the intimate reflection of loss, allowing us to interpret the humanity of soldiers beyond the jingoistic abstractions of heroism.

Rating – 8/10