Jean-Nicolas Masson as Thomas D’Arcy McGee, cuts a fine figure as he  finishes the evening with a most uplifting and impassioned plea for what it is to  feel Canadian in this new nation of Canada. All this happens just before he is assassinated and that is where the play ends.  One could say that Talish Zafar has written a  prequel to Pierre Brault’s  award winning monodrama  Blood on the Moon. Speaking before the Canadian parliament in this final moment, McGee  seems to epitomize the spirit of what Canada has  become and it makes us realize that the death of this man in 1868 was a great loss to the country.  The speech, made up of  authentic  excerpts from earlier published speeches by McGee, embellished by playwright  Zafar , was flowing, patriotic prose, which gives one the sense of this  interesting and certainly timely script  staged by director Dillon Orr and performed in the tiny ground floor space of the Bytown Museum. Certainly not the best place for a play,  with bad acoustics, no lighting facilities and almost no room to manoeuvre for this four person cast, the space proved to be the most difficult obstacle to overcome.

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