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 a playwright, songwriter, journalist who co-founded Theatre Conspiracy and served as artistic producer from 2008 to 2022. He led the creation of Foreign Radical, which won the 2015 Jessie Award Critics Choice Innovation prize and a 2017 Edinburgh Fringe First Award. The script was recently published in Canadian Theatre Review. His play, Isolation Suite, was turned into an audiobook series in 2021 and he is currently writing The Dynamics, set to premiere in the 2024/’25 season.Carlson’s documentary play, Victim Impact, premiered at The Cultch in Vancouver in June 2018. He also co-created, wrote the music for, and performed in Tanya Marquardt’s Stray, seen at The Tank in New York and SummerWorks in Toronto in 2018, as well as Vancouver in 2019. He was researcher/ interviewer for Berlin-based Rimini Protokoll’s latest show, Top Secret International, seen at the 2017 Under the Radar Festival in New York as well as researcher/ dramaturg for Best Before (Rimini Protokoll, @ PuSh 2010) and 100% Vancouver (Rimini Protokoll / Theatre Replacement, @ PuSh 2011).The 2013 show Extraction, won the Rio Tinto Alcan Award, Canada’s largest prize for new play development. His play Omniscience(Talonbooks, 2007) was nominated for six Jessie Richardson theatre awards in 2005, including best production. Omniscience was translated in German in Theater der Zeit’s antholoTgy, 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.He founded Club PuSh with the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival in Vancouver and served as co-curator along with Veda Hille and Norman Armour from 2009 to 2016.As a journalist, he worked on staff at the Halifax Daily News, Vancouver Sun and Georgia Straight. He holds an English degree from University of Regina, a journalism degree from University of King’s College, Halifax, and a MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia.

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