Nicolas Billon’s Butcher opens at Centaur Theatre

Nicholas Billon is a fresh and exciting new voice in Canadian theatre, already making waves far beyond our borders. His plays have been produced across Canada, including at the Stratford Festival, as well as in New York, Paris, and Mumbai. A professional writer for just over a decade, he already has a string of prominent awards, including the 2013 Governor General’s Award for Drama for his trilogy, Fault Lines.

Barbara Ford: Your subject matter is ripped from the front, and back pages of the news. What grabs your attention?
Nicolas Billon: I’m not a fan of “write what you know.” One of the great joys of writing is to put myself in someone else’s shoes, explore questions that I’m struggling with, and play devil’s advocate to my own beliefs and biases. It’s less about finding stories that are ripped from the headlines, but rather examining the forces behind the events.

BF: Do your plays have recurring themes?
NB: More often than not, I understand my plays from what people tell me about them. One theme that seems to always work its way in, however, is the relationship of individuals to institutions. I see it as a variation of the classical Greek obsession with the relationship between humans and Gods. Also, it appears I enjoy setting my plays on Christmas Eve … and have something terrible happen.

BF: Since the world premiere of in 2014, at Alberta Theatre Projects in Calgary, how many other theatres have picked it up?
NB: There are 5 Canadian productions this season: Montréal, Ottawa, Toronto, and Winnipeg in both official languages. There’s a production in Chicago, and one in the works in Paris.

BF: Why is a tenth of the play in an invented foreign language?
NB: The idea came from Greek drama. Butcher is a very loose adaptation of The Oresteia and one of the tenets of Greek drama is that violence takes place off-stage. I agree with this. There is a moment in Butcher when an event of great violence is described and I didn’t want to exploit it in any way. The violence comes across in the foreigner’s description and the horror of the event in the faces of those listening. I’m proud of that moment in the play: I think it’s one of the few examples where an idea works as well in my head as it does in practice.