Detaining Mr. TrotskyWinner of the Chalmers New Play Award in 1988.Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, returning to Petrograd from New York in April 1917, is arrested by British authorities in Halifax and sent to an internment camp at Amherst. His turbulent presence threatens the authority of the commandant and creates a crisis of loyalty for the young lieutenant who falls under his spell.Public LiesWho controls the way we see the world? John Grierson, first commissioner of the National Film Board of Canada, and Prime Minister Mackenzie King's "propaganda maestro" in the early 1940s, declared that "public lies must not be told"—but they sometimes were. Back in Canada in the fall of 1970, an elderly Grierson is confronted with unfinished business, both personal and political, by two of his wartime assistants, and is re-engaged in issues of media manipulation by the unfolding October Crisis.BorderlineWinner of the Herman Voaden New Canadian Play Award in 1999.In April 1994, nearly a million Rwandan Tutsis are massacred by the majority Hutu. In July, when the Tutsi-led Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) gains control of the capital, thousands of Hutu are prompted to flee across the border to UN refugee camps. A Canadian aid worker encounters her former student and lover who, as a prominent Hutu, is now in danger of Tutsi reprisal.The Dershowitz ProtocolWinner of the Ottawa Little Theatre New Play Contest in 2005.If the judicially sanctioned torture of suspected terrorists might actually forestall a repeat of 9/11, why not use it? In its starkest form, this is the question posed in his book, Why Terrorism Works, by Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz. The Dershowitz Protocol dramatizes the first actual use of "rigorous interrogation" of a ticking-bomb terror suspect by court-appointed US officials, under newly established Department of Justice rules.

Born in England in 1941, and educated at Downing College, Cambridge, Robert Fothergill came to Canada in 1963 to pursue graduate work at McMaster University and the University of Toronto. His PhD dissertation was published as Private Chronicles: a Study of English Diaries by Oxford University Press in 1974. After teaching for many years in the English Department of Atkinson College at York University, he joined the Department of Theatre in the Faculty of Fine Arts in 1994, serving as Chair for five years. An early play, Something To Do, won a prize in a one-act play competition at U of T in 1965, but for a number of years he was more involved in film, founding the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre in 1967, with Lorne Michaels and David Cronenberg, and making the controversial TV news simulation Countdown Canada in 1970. Peripheral involvement in theatre over the years has included old geezer roles in Theatre@York productions, as well as three recent visits to India to direct Canadian plays with students at the Universities of Baroda and Jaipur. He was reluctantly retired from York in 2006, but continues to teach there as though nothing had happened. He is married with two grown sons, and lives in Toronto.

Robert Fothergill's profile page

• Winner, Ottawa Little Theatre New Play Contest
• Winner, Herman Voaden New Canadian Play Award
• Winner, Chalmers New Play Award
• Short-listed, Chalmers New Play Award
• Short-listed, Dora Mavor Moor Award- Best New Play

 "Public Lies is not only thought-provoking and rivetingly contemporary, but often witty and insightful as well."—John Colbourn, Toronto Sun "Fothergill may have opened a new field for Canadian drama. If Grierson can be made the subject of a good play, what can't be done with our cultural history?" —Robert Fulford, The Globe and Mail

"Detaining Mr. Trotsky, Toronto Free Theatre's first offering of the new season, is that rare and precious commodity, a play of ideas." —Robert Crew, Toronto Star "…a well-crafted and exciting play, one of the best the Free has come up with in a number of years." —Ray Conlogue, The Globe and Mail "…a gripping story of political intrigue, bigotry, class elitism and personal conflict." —Rod Currie, The Canadian Press