GREGORY J. REID
Herbert Whittaker's memoir of his life and work in the theatre in and around Montreal during the roaring twenties, dirty thirties, and world-warring forties is aptly titled. Although Whittaker is best known as having been a theatre critic with the Globe and Mail from 1949 to 1975, Setting the Stage covers the early, formative years of Whittaker's career as a critic with the Montreal Gazette (1937 to 1949) and as a director, thespian, and pioneer of English theatre in Montreal, while underscoring his work as a set designer. Whittaker's capacious and copiously detailed recollections are also clearly intended to set the stage for younger generations of theatre historians and researchers. Editor Jonathan Rittenhouse's afterward in this volume provides an immediate example of how the wealth of facts, descriptions, anecdotes, and observations that Whittaker supplied both encourages and requires a more distanced, abstracted perspective, as well as some theoretical reflection on the theatrical world view Whittaker inscribes.
Cover to cover, the book is a valuable research tool, providing a substantial index, a time-line chronology of productions, 48 illustrations (photographs, programs, and set designs), as substantial a set of "Notes" and "Selected Bibliography" as one is likely to find anywhere on the subject of English theatre in Quebec, Rittenhouse's "Afterward: A Contextual Commentary," the memoir itself, and Christopher Plumber's flourishing "Foreword." Whittaker tells a story replete with heroines, like Martha Allen, founder and artistic director of the Montreal Repertory Theatre and an occasional picaresque; pseudo-villains like the Shakespearean actor-manager Donald Wolfit; cameo appearances by the likes of John Gielgud, Greer Garson, Tallulah Bankhead, and Canadians John Colicos and Christopher Plummer; and an army of supernumeraries, each of whom is named and complimented for her or his contribution. This is theatre history as seen from the inside and, if we are to accept the humility of the narrator, largely from the bottom (which, though authentic and passionate, is often not the easiest perspective from which to maintain a clear view of the pattern of events). Some readers will find the significance of Setting the Stage easier to grasp by first consulting the extensive information that follows the memoir in this volume.
Whittaker writes flowing descriptive prose with no shortage of factual details. And he tells his story from the perspective of an engagé of English theatre in Montreal, as Plummer points out, "[a]s a journalist on the spot, Herbie covered everything there was to cover." Setting the Stage includes discussion of the ballet, French theatre, and regional summer theatre. In both his tone and his selection of content, Whittaker remains, as he had apparently been throughout his career, a gentlemen of the first order, which means that many a tale is told in a euphemistic and synecdochical fashion. I would certainly like to know more about the night Whittaker took the Russian "Baby Ballerina," Irina Baronova, to the Samovar Club to celebrate her birthday. And there must be a story behind the photograph of Wolfit in pajamas and dressing gown with a cigarette between his lips. The woman beside him has been cropped from the photograph and only her bejewelled hand (restraining? / holding him up?) remains in view. The caption reads: "The touring stage star Donald Wolfit–surprised by a flashbulb when arriving New Year's Night in Montreal (1947)." Though Whittaker's style is pronouncedly more like Henry James than Henry Miller, and his discretion does seem to dictate that if there is nothing good to say what remains is left unsaid, the memoir glancingly reveals instances of the underbelly of ‘ism's' (colonialism, ethnocentrism, classism, sexism, racism, and antisemitism) that have challenged the growth of Canadian theatre and, in the process, leaves no doubt that it is the passion for inclusion and cultural growth, as well as traditions of beauty and fine art, which have sustained Whittaker's vision.
Although the high praise of Plummer's effusive "Foreword" and the poignancy of Rittenhouse's "Introduction" illustrate the admiration, gratitude, and affection of those who have been and are close to him and because the core of this volume is an understated self-description of what might be considered the author's apprenticeship years, what does not come across fully is Whittaker's iconic status within Canadian theatre. Paradoxically, Jennifer Harvey and Richard Knowles's article "Herbert Whittaker, Reporting from the Front" in Establishing Our Boundaries, while eventually problematizing and deconstructing his liberal humanism and nationalism, substantiates and crystallizes an image of Whittaker as "something of a war hero [in the battle for Canadian culture], the dean of Canadian critics, and a founding father of the national theatre."
As Rittenhouse observes, "Setting the Stage speaks of a world no longer with us." But I came away from this volume struck by the continuity of the struggle to do theatre in Canada. Names change, critical consciousness and discourses expand and contract, but the obstacles and uncertainties seem eerily familiar across the century. Whittaker's description of a one-performance-only production on Mount Royal of King Lear in August 1953 (sponsored by les Festivals de Montréal), supplies the denouement of the memoir, reminding us that the theatre by its nature is both ephemeral and boundlessly hopeful. It should also remind us that even today, theatre, as a performed art, can only survive over time in such forms as the memoir and through the good graces of those willing to share their memories with us. A nod, then, to Setting the Stage. And as September 20, 2002 draws near, happy 92nd birthday to Herbert Whittaker.