Pandemic Remembered: Kevin Kerr’s <i>Unity (1918)</i> Remedied

Kevin Kerr’s Unity (1918) profiles a small town in Saskatchewan, Canada, navigating the 1918 “Spanish flu” pandemic. The play has been produced over 100 times and received the 2002 Governor General’s Award for English-language drama. While there has been a new surge of interest in the play since the COVID-19 pandemic, the existing scholarship on Kerr’s text has focused overwhelmingly on its status as a war play rather than its epidemiological core subject matter, as the action takes place in the last days of World War I and its aftermath. This article places the play instead within the frames of influenza scholarship and the medical humanities in an attempt to recover and animate the spectres of the Spanish flu pandemic and give voice to the ignored victims of the largest mass death in history. By emphasizing the bodily aspects of influenza and its attendant cultural challenges and behaviours, Kerr’s play offers a poetics of porous exchange that defies traditional distinctions between culture and biology. It does this by foregrounding and exploring the unique attributes of the 1918 pandemic, by charting new ground in the representation of illness and erotic and sexual expression, and by offering a hybrid dramaturgical structure influenced by the interface between theatrical form and virological contagion.