JERRY WASSERMAN
Two comments by Sharon Pollock stand out for me in the interview that concludes Anne Nothof's new book. The first is part of a painstaking attempt by Pollock to define what it means to her to be a Canadian playwright: "I don't think 'Canadian.' I don't know what 'Canadian' is. I think it's a term the government has created to administer us bureaucratically" (170). The second describes her methodological approach to Moving Pictures, her 1999 play about Canadian silent film actress Nell Shipman: "I wasn't interested in writing a documentary. I wanted to find a way into this woman that provides a doorway to us" (174).
Pollock came along as part of a wave of post-Centennial playwrights intent on providing that doorway, showing us, to borrow John Coulter's metaphor for what the Abbey Theatre did for the Irish earlier in the century, "Canadian mugs in Canadian mirrors." Her conception of "us"—her audience and herself—remains a key factor in her plays, even as it has evolved and been subjected to changing critical perspectives. During thirty years of continuous playwriting, Pollock has variously been called a Canadian nationalist historiographer, a regionalist, and a feminist. She has also often been called (in the best sense, I think) a shit-disturber. Pollock is clearly one of Canada's seminal dramatists, and one of only a very few from the early 1970s still active in theatre today. A volume of her three latest plays will be published in 2003. She is certainly the only one who has run two regional theatres. Having recently turned 65 and undergone open-heart surgery, Pollock seems ripe for a major career retrospective and overdue for a book-length study. Sherrill Grace (University of British Columbia) is planning a biography, and at least two dissertations are under way. But for now, Nothof's very useful collection will have to suffice.
The book consists of eight critical essays, all but one previously published. Editor Nothof, Professor of English at Athabasca University and current President of the Association for Canadian Theatre Research, contributes a brief introduction, one essay, the interview with Pollock, and a bibliography. Arranged chronologically, beginning in 1979 with Malcolm Page's "Sharon Pollock: Committed Playwright," the first academic study of her work, the essays offer a selective archaeology of Pollock criticism through 1999. All her major plays are discussed except the three most recent: Moving Pictures, End Dream, and Angel's Trumpet. Partly because the chronological organization of the essays privileges the early plays, The Komagata Maru Incident receives the most frequent attention, followed by Walsh. Next are Blood Relations and Fair Liberty's Call, each of which has an essay devoted solely to it. The authors are all academics, the essays all essentially hermeneutic. Most approach the plays as dramatic literature. A companion volume devoted to Pollock's stagecraft would be welcome, though as yet hardly anything has been published in that area besides journalistic reviews.
Page's opening essay discusses Pollock's early plays A Compulsory Option and And Out Goes You, which remain little known and unpublished for good reason. He offers the first critical introductions to Walsh and The Komagata Maru Incident, establishing the terms of Pollock's political engagement. And he provides a fascinating glimpse, and a brutal analysis, of My Name Is Lisbeth, the original 1976 version of the play that had not yet become Blood Relations. Page finds the play "predictable" (21), "thin and tentative" (23), uninvolving, and apparently pointless—neither myth, psychological drama, legal case study, nor feminist tract. In short, he identifies many of the specific problems that Pollock would soon solve in transforming it into what would become her most popular play. One thing, he notes, didn't change: "We wonder ... why this strong woman of thirty-four has not found ways of breaking out of the prison long before" (22). This has always been an issue for me with Blood Relations. Its assumption that Lizzie has no choice other than to kill her parents or kill herself has become a critical truism. Susan Stratton repeats it in "Feminism and Metadrama: Role-Playing in Blood Relations" later in the volume. Stratton cites Strindberg's Miss Julie, insisting that Lizzie's "only options are Julie's—suicide—or murder" (70), ignoring Page's query as well as the more apposite dramatic precedent of Ibsen's Nora.
The next two essays in the volume, published in the mid-1980s, also survey Pollock's increasingly impressive body of work. The always astute Robert Nunn traces some of the patterns that have begun to take shape in the plays: "the force exerted by oppressive institutions on individuals, discrimination against minorities, the power of myth" (27). He notes "Pollock's interest in montage as a principle of composition" (29), and describes the through-line of Komagata Maru as "the slow return of the repressed" (30-31), observations that continue to apply even to Pollock's most current work. His perceptive reading of Blood Relations concludes by identifying another characteristic dramatic crux: "a struggle to the breaking point between personal integrity and a larger force that denies it" (37). Nunn provides the earliest commentary on One Tiger to a Hill and Generations (the first, for him, fails; the second "comes close to succeeding" (41)), and briefly examines the radio plays, including the important and still unpublished Sweet Land of Liberty. While he ignores its theme of vexed patriarchy, which recurs throughout the Pollock canon, his comment on "the pathos of the tormented spirit in extremity" (33) has particular resonance with some of the later characters, women mostly, in plays such as Doc, Getting It Straight, and Angel's Trumpet.
Diane Bessai's intelligent overview of Pollock's female characters, subtitled "A Study in Dramatic Process," takes note of the turn in Pollock's work towards an emphasis on women's experience. Bessai argues that, while Pollock "resists the ideological label of 'feminist,'" her growing interest in "feminine individuality" has accompanied an evolution in her plays from the exteriority of documentation to introspection regarding human relations (44). Bessai reads the women in Walsh and Komagata Maru as mere "devices to reveal the public conflicts of central male characters" (46). In One Tiger to a Hill, where women share centre stage, "personality is more a distraction than a reinforcement to the issues of the play" (53). Only with Blood Relations, Pollock's "antidocumentary" (57), does she manage to create a credible central female character and find a way "to move the audience emotionally and yet distance it intellectually" (56). Bessai offers an extensive and highly positive analysis of Whiskey Six Cadenza, a play criminally ignored since its 1983 premiere (Pollock notes in her interview, with some bitterness, that while it got the best reviews of any of her plays, it has never received a second production). The survey concludes with a discussion of Doc, Pollock's best play in my opinion, which Bessai doesn't much like: "It fails as a feminist play ... it refuses to be a social issue play"(65). Curiously, given the 1980s feminist principle that the personal is the political, Bessai makes no comment on the fact that the central male characters in both One Tiger to a Hill and Doc share the same name as Pollock's own father, Ev Chalmers. The important biographical information made public by John Hofsess in his 1980 profile of Pollock in (of all places!) Homemaker's Magazine is conspicuous by its absence from this entire volume, though the citation does appear in the bibliography.
A further glance at the bibliography reveals a preponderance of entries on Blood Relations, certainly the most discussed of Pollock's plays. Susan Stratton's essay is a good choice to represent this body of critical material. Stratton reads the play in the context of contemporary (1989) feminist theatre criticism, stressing the connections between feminism, "which rejects conventional social roles," and metadrama, which "subverts dramatic conventions by calling attention to them" (73). Like most of the best critics in the book, she makes note of theatre-historical intertexts (Strindberg, Pirandello; though, as mentioned, she fails to cite Ibsen's Doll's House or, in connection with Mr. Borden's killing of Lizzie's birds, Glaspell's Trifles). She also discusses a richly ambiguous scream at the moment of Mr. Borden's murder in a production of the play directed by Pollock herself, but the superscript leading to a key footnote is missing from the body of Stratton's text (one of the frequent copy-reading errors that mar this collection).
The last four essays date from 1995 or later, and all but one look at thematic connections among various plays. Anne Nothof's "Crossing Borders" rereads Walsh and The Komagata Maru Incident in light of the most recent history play, Fair Liberty's Call, to show how Pollock's "historiography is subversive and iconoclastic" (96). Nothof argues that all three plays reveal how history is constructed by the powerful to justify and sustain their own power, how borders in Canadian history have traditionally been imposed "in the interests of securing or protecting property" (80), and how public policy and individual choice are inextricably linked. Nothof offers some fascinating observations on the way Pollock herself takes liberties with "historical 'facts'," and cites a wide range of theatrical intertexts, from the 1897 Canadian melodrama When George the Third Was King to Mother Courage to Sergeant Musgrave's Dance. The last play is a reminder of the strong influence wielded by post-1956 British historiographic drama during Pollock's theatrical coming of age.
The theme of Pollock's historical deconstructions is picked up by Heidi Holder in her well-researched essay "Broken Toys," which goes over a lot of familiar ground in examining the revisionism of Walsh and Komagata Maru. Briefly noting the metatheatricality of Blood Relations, Saucy Jack, and Fair Liberty's Call, Holder concludes that "Pollock sees in the difficult distinction between fact and fiction an opportunity to present an audience not only with facts (and the problem of identifying them), but also with the significance and costs of our own desire to create meaning out of them, to find a coherent story or message in the fragments of history" (118). In the absence of any real theoretical frame, Holder's arguments remain at the level of observations. A similar problem afflicts Craig Walker's "Women and Madness," notable primarily for its unintentional revelation of the sheer dreadfulness of Egg. Walker looks at that unproduced play as well as Getting It Straight, Saucy Jack, and Fair Liberty's Call, tying the issues of women's madness and memory to the struggle over control of historical "truth" in the plays. This is certainly significant Pollock territory, but much of Walker's analysis lacks critical density.
Kathy Chung's concluding essay on the concepts of inheritance in Fair Liberty's Call illustrates the utility of a strong and tightly focused analytical lens. Despite a somewhat stilted style, Chung sharply illuminates the play by methodically examining the various legal, moral, and social forms of inheritance that run through it. In the process, she indirectly suggests why Fair Liberty's Call may be Pollock's paradigmatic work. Imagining an originary moment in the making of Canadian nationhood, the play touches on all Pollock's key issues: fatherhood and motherhood; race and gender; the relationship between personal and political (ir)responsibility; the problematics of what it means to be Canadian. Chung reveals Pollock's primary project to be imagining the future, showing how the meaning and values of the past are transmitted to the present, providing, in the playwright's own words, that "doorway to us" (174).
Sharon Pollock: Essays on Her Work offers a very good critical introduction to one of our most important playwrights. It gives easy access to a range of clear, informative, and unpretentious (if sometimes untheorized) studies of the plays, and a glance, via the interview, at Pollock's vivid personality and prickly-sharp intelligence. The title page indicates that this is the first volume in Guernica's "Writers Series." Let's hope it won't be the last.