Sharing a title with Henry Kissinger’s infamous book, Tim Carlson’s play Diplomacy is a graphic, conflict-fuelled drama with moments of heartbreak and dark humour—a reflection on the international themes that have come to define our contemporary world. Nominally about Canada and America’s active military involvement in the Middle East’s many theatres of war, it scrutinizes the part the media plays in manufacturing our private reactions to foreign policy—how the new phenomenon of “embedded journalism” has become complicit in making everything personal, political.
Roy deserted the US Army during the Vietnam War to become a historian specializing in Canadian diplomacy. His Vietnamese-born wife, Thu Van, has flashbacks to the “shock and awe” she experienced as a girl, while the new armed conflicts heat up in the Middle East where their daughter, An, serves as a Canadian diplomat in Damascus. Roy’s best friend Sinclair is an ambitious, possibly unprincipled, newsman. His interest and obvious involvement in Thu Van’s public self-immolation makes him decidedly suspect. “We don’t need a lot of martyrs but we need a few,” argues Thu Van in Sinclair’s videotape of her suicide statement.
Following the suicide protest of Thu Van, Roy’s principles are shaken: once believing his desertion was an honourable reaction to a dishonourable war, he now believes he was misguided. His grief, fury, fear and despair keep this play on its razor’s edge.
Like diplomacy itself, perhaps none of Carlson’s characters are new. But his dramatization of how our personal lives are increasingly shaped by what used to be called “public affairs” is compelling—the usefulness (or uselessness) of martyrdom certainly remains an overwhelmingly contemporary question.

Tim Carlson is the artistic producer of Theatre Conspiracy in Vancouver. Tim is currently leading Conspiracy’s creation of Live From the Bush of Ghosts, inspired by Amos Tutuola’s novel and the Brian Eno/David Byrne recording. He developed the newsroom comedy A Liar’s Guide to Non-Fiction during his time as artist-in-residence at the Vancouver Playhouse.Conspiracy’s premiere production of Omniscience was nominated for six Jessie Richardson theatre awards in 2005, including best production. Omniscience was translated in German in Theater der Zeit’s anthology, Dialog. The translation received a staged reading at Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theatre in 2006 and was produced by Theater Magdeburg in 2007. The play premiered in the U.S. at Stage Left in Chicago in April 2008 and a Portuguese-language translation was produced by Novo Grupo de Teatro in Lisbon in June 2008.The Theatre Conspiracy production of Tim’s most recent play, Diplomacy, premiered at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre in November 2006. He is also the author of the one-act newsroom comedies Night Desk (2001) and The Chronicle has Hart (2000). His short comedy The Reinvention of Minister Thorne is included in the Brave New Play Rites anthology (Anvil Press, 2006). A new one-act play, And this is this one, was recently produced by the Walking Fish Festival in Vancouver.As an arts writer and editor, Carlson has worked on staff at the Vancouver Sun and the Halifax Daily News and has also written regularly for the Georgia Straight, the Globe and Mail, and the Vancouver Review.Carlson was born in Edmonton, Alberta, and grew up on a cattle ranch near Medicine Hat. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia, earned a journalism degree at the University of King’s College, Halifax, and a BA in English from the University of Regina. Carlson is a member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada and the Playwrights Theatre Centre in Vancouver. He teaches writing in Simon Fraser University’s Summer Publishing workshop.

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“It’s a rare thing—the well-argued blast of political outrage.”
— Globe & Mail