In order to realize these ideals it was necessary to choose good plays that had already been standardized and to train his actors directly in the Home Theatre. Mr. Aikins’ belief was that by developing in the people a love of good plays produced in a Canadian theatre under Canadian direction, the people sooner or later would demand the production of Canadian plays and that this demand would lead to the creation of plays on Canadian subjects by Canadian playwrights. That is to say, Mr. Aikins believed that the movement he started in the Home Theatre would at length result in the creating of Canadian Native and National Stage Drama. In 1921 Mr. Aikins produced on the stage of the Home Theatre an acted version of _The Trojan Women_ by the ancient Greek dramatist Euripides. In 1922 he produced his own Passion Play, _Victory in Defeat_, a beautifully staged pantomime of moving pictures against a sky of changing light, interpreted with the aid of a reader and expressive music—the first experiment of its kind attempted in Canada. The ‘Little Theatre’ movement has also achieved something for the appreciation of good Canadian plays in the cities of Winnipeg, Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, and Vancouver. At Hart House in Toronto, there has been considerable activity concerned with the production of Canadian plays. In April, 1921, Merrill Denison’s _Brothers in Arms_ was produced at that theatre; and in April 1922 another of his plays, _From Their Own Place_, was produced. These, with two others, were published in book form in 1923 under the title _The Unheroic North_. Denison’s plays are Canadian by virtue of the author’s parentage and family traditions (his mother being the late Flora McD. Denison), and by the plays themselves being on Canadian themes, with Canadian characters moving in Canadian surroundings. They are realistic satiric dramas of life and thought in Canadian ‘backwoods’ and rural settlements. The dramatist presents the life and speech and conduct of these characters with such broad realism that the plays themselves are a mordant satire on existence and society in isolated Canadian communities. But Denison’s plays are also a satire _within_ a satire. It is not life in certain Canadian communities that he is really satirizing, but an attitude of the Canadian people themselves. The people of Canada dearly love ‘high’ romance and spurious sentimentality. They find this spurious sentimentality in some Canadian fiction, and the romance in the poetic dramas of Mair, Mrs. Curzon, Wilfred Campbell, Dr. Dollard, Robert Norwood, and others. Boldly, therefore, and with evident sincerity, Merrill Denison conceived the idea of satirizing the lovers of spurious sentimentality by presenting them with plays which would be the antithesis of ‘high’ romance and affected sentimentality—with life so broadly or coarsely realistic that the people of Canada would _not_ like the life or the plays.