Deverell of the Globe: Selected Plays by Rex Deverell

Abstract

Rex Deverell is not only an intriguing phenomenon, but one of our most undervalued playwrights. A Baptist minister of the Social Gospel persuasion from the East who went West, he has been exclusively associated with one theatre almost from the beginning of his professional career. Serendipity led him to Regina’s Globe theatre in 1971, where he has remained as playwright-in-residence for the past 15 years. In Ken and Sue Kramer he found artistic directors who encouraged his desire to write plays that explored history, society and personal morality from a socialist perspective. He is also, he insists, a regional writer whose sense of place is fundamentally political. He recently wrote of this self-identification with region that his “religious and aesthetic consciousness became linked into the militancy and vigour of the Saskatchewan left/right political dialogue.”