A rare combination and tour de force, Mansel Robinson’s Rock ’n Rail: Spitting Slag and Ghost Trains is a double-whammy of poetry and theatre. The plays are in the voices of the workingman: to the tradition of Billy Bishop Goes to War, add poetry, politics and pathos. Received to acclaim on the Canadian Fringe tour, these two original and compelling plays are already on their way to becoming new Canadian classics of theatre and language.

Mansel Robinson’s plays have been produced across the country and include Colonial Tongues, Collateral Damage, The Heart As It Lived, Downsizing Democracy, Spitting Slag, Ghost Trains, and Street Wheat. Scorched Ice, a cold–war drama, was recently produced by Last Exit Theatre in Saskatoon. He has been nominated twice for Saskatchewan Book of the Year and is winner of the John V. Hicks Award and Geist Magazine&3146;s Award for Distance Writing. Robinson has been writer–in–residence at the Pierre Berton House in Dawson City, Yukon; Northern Light Theatre in Edmonton; at the University of Windsor; and at the Regina Public Library in 2005/06. Current projects include Bite the Hand, which was presented as a staged reading at the Saskatchewan Playwrights’ Centre’s 2005 Spring Festival of New Plays. He is also working on a satire about gangsters and academia. Originally from Chapleau, Northern Ontario, Robinson is based in Saskatoon.

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