Fish and Dicks: Case Files from the Digby Neck & Islands Fish-Gutting Service & Detective Agency, by Kathy France, is a wonderful new addition to the canon of Nova Scotia plays celebrating place and people with humour, heart and song.

In this case it’s Brier Island at the end of Digby Neck in a brilliantly-twinned tale of a woman’s struggle with loss and the comic capers of two island salts who run the fish-gutting service and detective agency. There are original songs about home and island life that rival those of Jim Bennett and famous Cape Breton songwriters.

France’s Caravan Theatre company, based in Wolfville, staged “Fish and Dicks” over five soldout shows in Annapolis Royal and Wolfville over the last two weekends. Caravan plans to remount the show in the spring of 2025 and I highly recommend you go. (You’ll want to go to Brier Island too, it’s so beautifully evoked in this piece you can taste the salt, feel the fog and see all the flora and fauna.)

France draws on the bestselling, comedic book of the same name by Nova Scotia writers Jim Prime, who grew up on Long Island, and Ben Robicheau, who grew up on Brier Island. They invented Gurrey and Crime, a lively, teasing duo of senior citizens who are best buddies and idiot savant detectives solving cases that include busting up a gang of American “coke” smugglers (think soda pop) and damage to the Balancing Rock, that famous basalt pinnacle off Long Island.

France enfolds the boisterous comedy in a contemporary drama about Blanche, who has lived on Brier Island her whole life and raised two kids in a family home that goes back generations.

She is in a difficult place, she has not come to terms with her son’s death three years ago and her husband, a “come-from-away” from nearby Digby, wants to move to the mainland and sell her family home.

Blanche escapes inside a graphic novel that she draws and writes at her kitchen table. The stage is split between her kitchen and a derelict fishing shack where her novel’s characters, Gurrey and Grime, pull out fish guts as strands of wool from stuffed animals and solve crime. When the fictional world occasionally crosses over into Blanche’s real world it’s a lot of fun and the final plot twist shows why this happens.

France’s script is beautifully structured and balanced; Blanche’s story pulls at the heartstrings while the detectives’ antics are pure fun, laugh-out-loud comedy from bathroom jokes to word mispronunciations to good Maritime self-deprecating humour. If you think there’d be a lot of double entendre around the word “dicks,” you’re absolutely right.

The playwright paints a picture of island life through the weekly community podcast run by Blanche, her husband Will and their friend Bert – the dry-humoured weatherman always predicting fog. Here the comedy is up-to-date with commentary on the current provincial election, a shortage of doctors and people leaving Ontario like “rats on a ship.”

Caravan Theatre’s premiere production, directed by France, starred Thea Burton as Blanche in a rich, anchoring performance that held the emotional heart and warmth of the play, with excellent, high-spirited comedic portrayals of the detectives by Stephen Abbass as Grime and Joe Callaghan as Gurrey. Linda Levy Fisk easily handled multiple comic characters from a call-in neighbour anxious to get her clothes on the line to a glamourous, wise-cracking detective. Also starring were Alan Slipp as Blanche’s good-natured and loving husband Will and Jesse Potter as Bert with a dry delivery that added a lot to the show.

Potter is a musician and singer-songwriter who has fronted bands including Resisting Gravity, Winehardt and The Chimney Swifts. He wrote the music and lyrics to both The Ferry Song and Sing for the Islands, the final, rousing song that pulls at the heart strings.

Jim Prime’s daughter Catherine Prime is an artist and NSCAD graduate working out of San Diego and her illustrations were a beautiful, scene-setting backdrop to the Gurrey and Grime stage area, with video projection designed by Antonella Ponce. Scenic designer Richard Bennett’s set warmly depicted Blanche’s house in an interior of ochre walls with blue trim and let the fish shack be a more flexible, open-ended space as a set for fishing gear and crime-solving capers.

Some back story: France first met writer Jim Prime, nine years ago when she joined a writing group. Prime and Robicheau, his best friend, and for several years author of a column for Long and Brier Islands’ monthly Passages newsletter, began writing about Gurrey and Grime 15 years ago. The detectives’ funny misadventures were a big hit locally and in 2020 Moose House published a compilation of them with illustrations by Catherine Prime.

France found the book “hilarious and heart-warming,” she says in her program notes. “Prompted by me, Jim and Ben sent additional texts they had written, including recently published memoirs, and granted me permission to create a play based loosely on their collected body of work. My intention was to create a meaningful farce, exploring that art form and extending its possibilites through introducing themes of love, loss and leaving home.”

A couple of the songs feature new lyrics to old sea shanties as France once again demonstrates the creative power of taking one form and twinning it with another to build an expansive, comprehensive whole.

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