Two Plays

This volume contains two uniquely Canadian stories of exile. Whether portraying the romantic lovers in The Island of Demons, or the political revolutionary Gabriel Dumont in Six Dry Cakes for the Hunted, the plays are related by their underlying themes. From the earliest days of settlement in Canada, those who have adhered to their ties to colonial power have consistently demanded the banishment of all those whose vision originates in commitment to the particulars of the “new land.” It is not so much their acts, but rather the context of thought and imagination from which they act, that leads to the exile of the protagonists in these two plays.

George Woodcock
Playwright, essayist, biographer, poet, teacher and mentor George Woodcock was born in Winnipeg in 1912 and raised in England. He returned to Canada in 1949 and briefly homesteaded on a farm near Sooke, B.C., before moving to Vancouver to teach at the University of British Columbia. There he was the founding editor of Canadian Literature, the first periodical exclusively dedicated to the study of Canadian Literature. He has written and edited more books and articles than most people read in a lifetime. In 1977, Talonbooks published Woodcock’s Two Plays.