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CBC
04-05-2025
- General
- CBC
Vancouver writer uncovers truths of survivors of Empress of Ireland shipwreck
When fog blanketed the St. Lawrence River on May 29, 1914, a ship carrying hundreds of passengers and crew was rammed by a passing coal ship. The passenger vessel, known as the Empress of Ireland, sank in just 14 minutes, killing most of the people onboard. The story of the shipwreck and those who survived it are featured in a new book by Vancouver author, journalist and historian Eve Lazarus, one she spent years researching to find out the truth about what happened. It all started when she was hired by a lawyer who owns a summer home near Rimouski, Que., where the Empress went down. Having swum in the St. Lawrence most summers, he came across the story of a survivor of the wreck, a UBC history professor by the name of Gordon Davidson and one of 75 B.C. passengers, who had allegedly survived by swimming 6.5 kilometres to shore. "He talked to diving instructors and ice polar swimmers and biologists, anyone he could find that could verify that that was possible," Lazarus told CBC's North by Northwest host Margaret Gallagher. "Everyone said no, no, it just wasn't possible, not in that cold temperature at that time of year. So he hired me to see if I could find the origin story." The ship, which was travelling from Quebec City to Liverpool, England, had 40 lifeboats on board, but only four were deployed when the ship sank so quickly. About one in five passengers survived, but a higher proportion of the 400-some crew made it out. Lazarus said the crew was criticized for not prioritizing the safety of passengers, but her research tells her there was nothing selfish about how things worked out. "Fifty per cent of the crew would have been on duty that night in the middle of the night, and a lot of them worked in the engine rooms where it was really dangerous and really hot. They had escape routes to the top deck … so a lot of them were able to get to the top deck very quickly and help with lifeboats and get that going." Because this happened in the middle of the night, a lot of passengers stopped to dress before fleeing the ship, which would be their fatal flaw. Lazarus went out on the river in a Zodiac in 2019 and sat atop the site of the wreck. "You could see it on radar, and knowing there are still 800-and-something remains of people, it really is an underwater graveyard still down there," she said. "It was very difficult for me to come to terms with that. It was very powerful." Lazarus said a lot of the reporting that came out of the sinking of the Empress of Ireland occurred just a few hours after it happened. Reporters descended on Rimouski, she said, and started interviewing people who were dealing with traumatic injuries, were recovering from the cold or who had lost their entire families. They were in shock. Reporters, in those days, would have been using shorthand to write stories and phoning them into their respective newsrooms, Lazarus pointed out, creating another opportunity for error. "It's not surprising that a lot of it was wrong." Davidson did not swim ashore following the Empress of Ireland's demise, Lazarus learned. Instead, he was rescued in a boat. She believes the lore around his harrowing swim started with a story in Vancouver's The Province newspaper, where a reporter speculated that, because Davidson was a good swimmer, he must have swum. "It was still an incredible survival story, but I couldn't understand how that story could get so wrong," Lazarus said. "[The story] became real, and that was the story that went to all these newspapers and books."
CBC
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
CBC proudly partners with DOXA for 11 days of bold documentary cinema
CBC is proud to return as media partner of the 2025 DOXA Documentary Film Festival, screening in Vancouver theatres from May 1-11. DOXA is Western Canada's largest documentary film festival and this year is celebrating its 24th edition with 11 days of over 65 films including shorts, features, mid-lengths, world premieres and special presentations from across Canada and around the world. Catch CBC's North by Northwest host Margaret Gallagher at the festival's opening night presentation of Elizabeth Vibert and Chen Wang's Aisha's Story, screening on May 1 at The Vancouver Playhouse. This year, don't miss DOXA's inaugural paraDOXA program, highlighting experimental films that push the boundaries of documentary form – including the Canadian premiere of To Use a Mountain.
Telegraph
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
North by Northwest: A bravura staging that will keep you grinning at its sheer inventiveness
Of all the films to stage, Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 thriller North by Northwest – with its set pieces featuring trains, planes, automobiles, and Mouth Rushmore – is not a screechingly obvious choice. As adapted and directed by Emma Rice, this new touring Wise Children production inevitably goes for larky, knowing stagecraft and theatrical silliness over big-budget special effects: the crop-dusting bi-plane is made of waving banners and an aerosol can, while a big wobbly pile of suitcases mount up for Rushmore. Phones appear out of pockets, labelled suitcases remind us where we are and who each character is, and there's some panto-style audience interaction to make sure we're following the twisty plot ('You're going to need to be on the ball to keep up with this story!') Rice cleverly draws out the theatricality inherent within a movie that's so much about the sustained role-playing of espionage. Our baffled hero, ad man Roger Thornhill, suffers positively Shakespearean levels of mistaken identity when he's incorrectly identified as an American secret agent – and must endlessly attempt to escape being captured or murdered by a shadowy (and here, notably Russian-accented) foreign spy gang. But Thornhill's feelings for Eve, a classic Hitchcock icy blonde who helpfully hides him on a train, soon complicate matters… If the script follows the film mostly beat-for-beat, the mood is generally more Rice-esque than Hitchcockian: a spy caper with the emphasis on capering, rather than suspense or thrills. And there are moments, such as the teetering-off-a-mountain finale, that really can't translate – not helped by Rice waiting for the denouement to crowbar in some under-developed and earnest back stories for the villains, by which time it's too late for us really to care. But mostly, this production is a heck of a lot of fun – a bravura staging that will keep you grinning at its inventiveness. A heroic cast of six play umpteen suitcase-swapping roles with wit and swagger. Soundtracked not by Bernard Herrmann's high-drama score but by a slinkier backdrop of lounge jazz, the cast shimmy, sway, and soft-shoe around Rob Howell's gorgeous set of extra-tall revolving doors. Amid gliding dance routines, the actors lip-sync to 1950s numbers – Get Happy, Orange Coloured Sky – which can animate trickier to stage sequences too. A drunk-driving car chase, or sexy seduction in a train carriage? There's a song and dance for that. (The music's volume could go up a touch, mind.) Ewan Wardrop is reliably entertaining in the Cary Grant role of Thornhill – even if it's impossible to wipe the great man entirely from one's memory while watching – while Patrycja Kujawska's Eve is more soulful than seductive in the role made famous by Eva Maria Saint. The virtuoso multi-rolling by the rest of the cast is always a blast to watch, but arguably leaves a character such as Vandamm – the James Mason villain of the film, here played by Karl Queenborough – feeling only lightly sketched. The real star of the show is the remarkable, chameleonic comic talent of one of Rice's regulars, Katy Owen. She plays the Professor, an intelligence boss here speaking like an old-guard British officer with ripe RP – and is also our narrator. The Professor helps chivvy the convoluted story of double-crossings along, as well as occasionally alluding to the post-war trauma everyone is suffering amid this 'global battle for security' – words to induce a shudder, even in this most enjoyable of evenings.
Telegraph
16-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Emma Rice on Alfred Hitchcock: ‘Cancel him? That's the road to madness'
'With paper and a pair of scissors, an aerosol can and some suitcases,' is Emma Rice's answer when I ask her how she plans to stage the famous biplane scene in her forthcoming adaptation of North by Northwest. Another director might have been tempted to use hi-tech wizardry, or video projection at the very least, to recreate the unforgettable moment Cary Grant's Roger Thornhill dives into a cornfield to escape a murderous aircraft in Hitchcock's 1959 Cold War caper. But in Rice's show, she says, the most sophisticated gizmo is a revolving door. 'We've only got a cast of six, and the actors not only play several characters but have to remember whether their door is spinning clockwise or anti-clockwise. So it's fiendishly structured, just like Hitchcock.' We are talking, before rehearsals begin, in the Lucky Chance – the former Methodist church in Frome, Somerset, which Rice's theatre company, Wise Children, recently acquired as its permanent home. It's draughty and a bit damp, but, in typical Emma Rice fashion, it's warmly fitted out in a kitsch, giddy way – neon-pink paint everywhere, fairy lights, mirrors. A director with a folk spirit, who revels in the sensual and the romantic – her hits with her former company, Kneehigh, include a screen-to-stage adaptation of Brief Encounter and the magical Marc Chagall homage The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk – Rice is not an obvious fit for the work of a cinema auteur known for ice-cold psychosexual riddles. Yet she argues that North by Northwest, in which Thornhill, on the run for a crime he didn't commit, finds himself embroiled in a plot to smuggle state secrets out of the country, is more progressive than it might initially seem. 'Eve is the film's moral compass, she's a feminist icon,' says Rice, referring to the femme fatale who becomes Thornhill's lover, played in the film by Eva Marie Saint. 'You have this brave, committed woman and this totally lost man. Hitchcock thought it was his best depiction of a marriage.' Rice has been drawing, too, on the stage directions in Ernest Lehman's original screenplay, which, she says, 'are very sexual. The scene between Thornhill and Eve over dinner on the train: it's alarmingly explicit. So I've had a bit of fun with that.' I ask if she has any qualms about adapting the work of a director whose legacy sits somewhat uneasily alongside accusations of misogyny and reports of unsavoury behaviour on set; in her 2016 memoir, the actress Tippi Hedren claimed the director sexually assaulted her while filming The Birds and Marnie in the 1960s. 'Can you ignore that side of him?' Rice asks rhetorically. 'You know, I might have done. He's iconic, and I liked the idea of thinking, 'I'll have a bit of that.' I don't feel I need to apologise or worry – that's the road to madness. You'll never find the perfect artist who has never said or done anything wrong. 'Anyway,' she adds, 'I'm more interested in the material than the artist. I'll never do one of those desperate 19th-century Hedda Gabler-type plays in which women kill themselves. I can't bear victimhood. I like my women to stay alive and surprise us all and be naughty and sexy and smart.' As a description, that pretty well fits Rice herself. She is forthright, mischievous and more than a little punk, dressed today in leopardskin leggings, her silvery quiff as perky as a porcupine's quills. In 2015, she was appointed artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe, in a move that was greeted with both surprise and delight. Rice – the daughter of a lecturer and a social worker, who attended a Nottingham comprehensive school before training at the Guildhall – is no traditionalist and admitted at the time that she preferred The Archers to the Bard. Yet many thought her irreverent, though exacting, approach would be just the breath of fresh air the venue so sorely needed. Within two years, she was gone, after the Globe board objected to her disregard of original practices and fondness for glitterballs. The dismissal was brutal, humiliating and, for Rice, deeply hurtful. Looking back, a decade on, she sees how the episode ultimately had a galvanising effect on her career. 'Thanks to what happened with the Globe, I'm sometimes portrayed as anti-establishment, but I was never reacting against something,' she says. 'I'm for all sorts of theatre; I'm not against any of it. But I do love being popular. Making work that people are moved by – but also, crucially, entertained by – really matters to me.' In fact, Rice straddles both the margins and the mainstream. Her work is in thrall to fairy tale and slapstick, but it's also firmly establishment: Brief Encounter was a West End hit, and she works frequently with major theatre companies, including, most recently, the RSC, for which her staging of Hanif Kureishi's landmark 1990 debut novel The Buddha of Suburbia was a critical and commercial success. Although she may have a reputation for whimsy and clowning, her ideas are nevertheless deeply rooted in British social history. 'I return over and over again in my work to the period after the Second World War and that bubble of hope that meant my mother and father became the first in their families to go to university,' she says. 'My grandparents were working class and weren't able to be educated, while my grandad fought in the war and never spoke about it. So I have this immense gratitude for that period. 'The reason I can sit in this magic playground' – she casts an arm around the Lucky Chance bar – 'is because my parents did the work and my grandparents made the sacrifice. And North by Northwest sits in that really fertile pot of hope and fear, and that feeling that the war, which by implication its male characters would almost certainly have fought in, must never happen again. 'And yet,' she says, taking a breath, 'here we are today, once again on the verge.' We are speaking in the week that Trump described Zelensky as a dictator. 'God knows what's going to happen. I feel as though I haven't been fearful in my whole life and now suddenly I am.' Rice once told an interviewer she was a child of Thatcher, much to the horror of her socialist parents: she later clarified that she had merely meant she grew up under Thatcher, rather than ascribed to her politics. Yet now she says: 'You look back on that period and you think, well, at least it was decent and transparent and had a clear moral code. At least Thatcher had a plan, and loved talking to the press because she wanted to have the argument. And now..?' The last time I spoke to Rice was in the middle of the pandemic and Wise Children, the company she set up after leaving the Globe was, like so many, on its knees. Things are much more stable now, to the point that the company was able to buy the Lucky Chance outright on the back of such successful productions as her wild and fabulous 2021 adaptation of Wuthering Heights, which is about to embark on an international tour. But the fear of failure never leaves her. 'I think the unthinkable all the time,' she says. 'There are fewer audiences regionally, so there is less money, and it costs three times as much to stage a show now as it did before the pandemic, so I've had to scale back what we do.' The day before we meet, Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary, announced an extra £270 million of arts funding: is Rice confident the sector is in safe hands under Labour? 'I can't, hand-on-heart, say the Government needs to give the arts more money, because look at what it's facing,' she says. 'Of course, I say that as a theatre maker who has benefited from funding from the minute I went to drama school and, yes, funding is absolutely vital. But you have to make the business case by putting on theatre that people want. It's not medicine.' Theatre may be in her bones, but Rice admits there are some days she thinks about stepping away from it altogether. 'It's an ancient art form, but I don't take it for granted,' she says. 'The more you think about it, theatre is a very weird thing we do.'
CBC
16-02-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Jack Wang explores complexities of love and war in new novel set in Vancouver
It's 1942. Josiah Chang leaves his work as a tree faller in B.C.'s Cariboo for the big city — Vancouver — with plans to serve his country in the Second World War. But when that doesn't work out, he finds a job as a riveter, building ships, to support wartime efforts, instead. There, he meets a woman named Poppy, and their love is tested during a time when interracial relationships are, to put it politely, frowned upon. The Riveter author Jack Wang said he is fascinated with the involvement of Chinese-Canadians during the war, as it's something he never learned much about while growing up in Vancouver. "It just seemed like, especially since a lot of these veterans are no longer alive, that this was a story worth telling," he told CBC's North by Northwest host Margaret Gallagher. Wang said his character Josiah is based, at least in part, on Richard Mar, the only Chinese-Canadian who served in the First Canadian Parachute Battalion during the Second World War. "[Mar] was part of the Battle of the Bulge, and he jumped into Germany." Wang said. "That sort of forms the contours of the storyline for The Riveter." Josiah's initials, J.C., were chosen to honour Johnny Canuck, the Canadian version of Uncle Sam or John Bull, used to inspire during the war. And while Wang's latest work is a story of war, it's also a story of love. One of the first times Josiah sees Poppy, she's stepping out of a storage shed — and a man steps out behind her, hinting that something has happened between them. "She's a woman who's ahead of her time," Wang said. His inspiration for Poppy: Penelope in Homer's The Odyssey. "Penelope is this figure of faithfulness. She is this paragon of virtue, and that's her defining characteristic," Wang said. I was interested in a woman who was perhaps not so interested in waiting around for a man to come home from war, and a woman who valued her own needs and desires and how might that complicate a relationship." Heavily researched A great deal of research was done to paint an accurate picture of the time and places Josiah finds himself, Wang said; he poured through encyclopedias and historical documents, but he also physically visited places like Fort Benning, Ga., where some Canadian military members trained. "When I was describing, for example, the barracks at Fort Benning or the mess hall, I'm describing them from actually having seen them," he said. "Fortunately, Vancouver's a fairly well-documented city," Wang said.
