Room with Five Walls (The): The Trials of Victor Hoffman

Spring 2004

Paperback 128 pages

Drama

The Room With Five Walls is a two act, poetic drama that explores the failure of the mental health system in the late 1960s and provides insight into paranoid schizophrenia at its extreme. With an introduction by award-winning playwright Sharon Pollock, The Room With Five Walls is the story of Victor Hoffman, a farm boy who committed the first mass murder in Canada in 1967 when nine members of the Peterson family were shot near Shell Lake, Saskatchewan. The play is the internal voyage taken by Victor Hoffman, now in his 50s and stabilized by medication in a maximum security prison for the criminally insane.

When asked why he spared only one of the Peterson family, a child of four years old, Hoffman replied, I wouldn't hurt a human child." But what about the other question, the one that would have determined why a mentally ill boy didn't receive the help he needed? Through the "fifth wall" that is the entrance and exit to his past , Hoffman, through his 19 year old self, relives the events leading up to the murder in order to discover the questions that should have been asked at his trial and to come to terms with his own fate. The Room With Five Walls is Barclay's disturbing exploration into the internal forces that drove a quiet young man to commit one of the most senseless murders in Canadian history.