Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Postcolonial Tragedy In The Crowsnest Past: Two Rearview Reflections By Sharon Pollock And John Murrell, Anne Nothof

Great Plains Quarterly

In two very different versions of a story of rum-running along the British Columbia-Alberta border in the Crowsnest Pass in the early 1920s, Sharon Pollock and John Murrell replay history as tragedy. Murrell's libretto for the opera Filumena captures the passion and pathos of the exceptional true-life story of Filumena, who at the age of twenty-two was the last woman to be hanged for murder in Canada. In the context of an Italian community compromised by bigotry and ambition, Filumena is rehabilitated and written back into history as a woman who resists a transplanted patriarchal authority. Pollock's play Whiskey Six …