Sharon Pollock is a playwright, actor, and director from Canada. Her work is highly influential and widely performed in Canada, and she is part of the development of Canadian Theatre in the 20th century. Her best-known plays include Blood Relations and Doc.
Pollock was born in New Brunswick to a physician and a nurse who were unhappily married. In her youth, Pollock was exposed to American musical theater, and took an early interest in drama at school. After getting married in school, Pollock became involved in Toronto theater. Her marriage was abusive, and Pollock even tried to kill her husband by poisoning him. After returning to her hometown, Pollock began making theater and writing her own plays in the late 1960s.
Pollock's plays include A Compulsory Option, Walsh, The Komagata Maru Incident, One Tiger to a Hill, Whiskey Six Cadenza, Fair Liberty's Call, End Dream, Generations, Blood Relations, and Doc. Blood Relations, an interpretation of the Lizzie Borden story, is her best-known play. In an interview first published in 2004, Pollock said of the play, "I believe the actual case is timeless because of our inability to accept or rationalize the contradiction between who Miss Borden seemed to be and what she must have done. It’s better to deny she did it than examine why she did it for that might tell us things we don’t want to know about ourselves, or so a jury of her peers, all men, decided. The use of an axe as the murder weapon has something to do with it as well. I suspect if Lizzie had poisoned papa and step-mama she would have been convicted and forgotten."
Based on historical events, Sharon Pollock's Blood Relations is a chilling tale of unsolved murder. Pollock stages the events surrounding the deaths of Andrew Borden and Abby Borden, believed to have been perpetrated by Lizzie Borden, their...
