The wind has changed, and Billy Bishop Goes to War has departed Toronto…for now. The award-winning musical about Canada’s most decorated WWI flying ace which ended its run at Soulpepper over the weekend is also one of the most performed Canadian plays of all time. Interestingly, the play is still–over three decades since its opening night in 1978–a work in progress.

The production, directed by Soulpepper founding member Ted Dykstra, featured its original ensemble of Eric Peterson and John Gray. Best friends then and now, Peterson and Gray wrote and performed the musical (Gray on piano and narration, Peterson on the rest) as young men in their thirties, toured it again in their early fifties and brought it to the stage this time around in their sixties. Says Peterson, who portrayed Bishop as well as 18 other characters of varying sexes and nationalities: “Now John and I are the same age the real Billy Bishop was when he passed away quietly in his sleep at the age of sixty-two, and so, it is a Bishop looking back on his life from the end of his life that inform[ed] this Soulpepper production.”

Billy Bishop Goes to War is a war story as much about Canada’s involvement in WWI as it is about its title character’s endearingly flippant attitude towards his considerable contributions to the war effort. The play is patriotic, but never corny or jingoistic, as war productions sometimes go. Instead, Bishop’s Canadian heritage is explored best through song when he, at war, sings simply and sincerely of his hope to die in Canada, not in a trench. It is at moments like these that the audience gets it–how fortunate we are to live in Canada, in peace.

The production was highlighted by Gray’s sensitive piano accompaniment which provided texture to Peterson’s buoyancy, his apparent agelessness. Whether or not the play will undergo another rewrite remains to be seen, but the profundity of Peterson and Gray performing it in their sixties was captured in the film version of Billy Bishop Goes to War which also ran at TIFF this year. Directed by Barbara WIllis-Sweete, the film ensures this Soulpepper rendition of a Canadian masterpiece about the wastes of war–and the height the human spirit is capable of soaring to–will endure.

Soulpepper Theatre Company is one of Canada’s foremost stages, located here in the Distillery District. Soulpepper’s Fall 2011 season is underway with White Biting Dog by Judith Thompson, Arthur Miller’s The Price, Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple, Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen, adapted by Morris Panych and Parfumerie by Miklos Laszlo, adapted by Adam Pettle and Brenda Robins.