Passports are bargaining chips in these two political plays, each of which is set against a backdrop of racially driven violence. The personal becomes political in Richard Sanger’s finely crafted play, Not Spain, about a young Canadian journalist in a nameless foreign city convulsed by war. Sophie has no clear plan, just an impulse to go “where there’s a story.” By chance, she meets Andrei while visiting an ancient monastery. He helps her with her story about factions and violence and families caught in the crossfire, but at a price. Sophie ends up acting as a kind of go-between, arranging for exit papers that offer a new beginning in Canada for someone Andrei says is his sister.

Simon Johnston sets his action-filled play Running Dog, Paper Tiger in Hong Kong during a period of violent anti-British riots in 1967. The colony is under martial law and the Simmons family, mixed-race Eurasians, find themselves caught on all sides of the conflict. In a key scene, the British-born Chief Superintendent of the Hong Kong Special Branch offers an enticement: If they provide useful information about the rioters they will receive unrestricted passports. The catch is, their own son is the link to the protesters.

Both plays explore the consequences of violent conflict based on the politics of race and identity. They also demonstrate two highly contrasting approaches to theatrical story-telling. Not Spain explores ambiguity. Andrei is a typographer who does not read. Sophie is a journalist who drifts into rather than chooses her stories. Their story unfolds through a sequence of scene fragments and short exchanges of dialogue, inter-cut with image-filled monologues that cast light on the characters and the opportunistic circumstances that have brought them together. Divided by culture and experience, Sophie and Andrei see in each other a chance to further their own ends. Eventually, each discovers they have been betrayed by the other.

Sanger, an accomplished poet based in Toronto, is the 1998-1999 writer-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick. In Not Spain, he has written a contemporary Brecht-like parable without casting judgment on his characters or reducing them to didactic mouthpieces. This is the kind of theatre that generates lively conversation about the nature of truth and the ethics of journalism. It shows how complex human situations become further distorted by attempts to render them as formulaic news stories.

While Sanger’s play is essentially reflective, Simon Johnston’s Running Dog, Paper Tiger is, comparatively, all action. Canadians may be partying at Expo, and Americans enjoying the Summer of Love, but riots in Hong Kong have resulted in a period of martial law. Real explosives replace Chinese New Year firecrackers as armed demonstrators whip up anti-British sentiment and chant from Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. Johnston captures the adrenalin and the danger of the time by calling for pictures of the actual events of 1967 to be projected onto the scene. But this is not a docu-drama; Johnston has crafted an emotionally taut play about a family in crisis.

In Running Dog, Paper Tiger, the Simmons family is caught uncomfortably between the two dominant cultures in Hong Kong. They feel neither British nor Chinese enough to belong to either group. The father is a violent patriarch, the mother a true survivor who knows how to keep the peace as well as a secret. Their two teenage sons long to escape, while Campbell, the Chinese-born orphan houseboy, is a strangely influential presence.

Johnston, who was born and raised in Hong Kong, has written plays for television and radio – and it shows. His drama about parents and children who are unable to communicate with each other is set within the context of a political conflict. In addition, he frames the action of 1967 inside a memory play, set 20 years later. Brought together by a funeral, the two Simmons boys and Campbell, now in their 30s, use the reunion to re-examine the events of 1967 that changed the course of their lives.

In these entertaining and stimulating plays, which have been staged professionally, Sanger and Johnston cast light on the timeless issues of loyalty, identity, and the role of the witness.