ANTON WAGNER
Don Rubin's Canadian Theatre History: Selected Readings--a collection of 59 articles, essays, reviews, biographical sketches, manifestos and other cultural documents written by four dozen critics, historians, playwrights, actors, directors and cultural commentators--is an essential sourcebook documenting the development of English-Canadian theatre and drama from the early 1800s to the 1990s.
The struggle of Canadian theatre artists for creative self-expression forms the major through line linking the book's five chronological sections. Significantly, the first section, "The Annexation of Our Stage," takes its title from B.K. Sandwell's well-known 1911 essay protesting the total control of the Canadian professional stage by New York touring syndicates.
What was the effect of professional touring houses on Canadian audiences and artists? While Hector Charlesworth (1925) fondly recalls the great British, European and American stars who appeared in Toronto in the late 1800s, Samuel Morgan-Powell (1929) criticizes Canadian audiences for failing to create and support their own stars: "If [expatriate] Margaret Anglin attained a position of great distinction on the stage, she has had Canada to thank for absolutely nothing." On a lighter note, Ruth Harvey (1949), the daughter of theatre manager C.P. Walker, relates how a few months after Nazimova starred in an Ibsen repertory, Winnipeg playwrights flooded the Walker Theatre with Ibsen-inspired dramatic texts. "It is amazing how they can get so much of the gloom with none of the technique," Harvey quotes her actress-critic mother as commenting on these original, locally-written texts. "They all end now with a door slamming." Frederic Robson's 1908 essay criticizes the low artistic quality of American commercial theatre productions in Canadian touring houses, but can only suggest more rigorous critical and public response as a solution, since Canada's small and scattered population would make an indigenous Canadian stage and drama "impossible for many years."
If the theme of Section 1 is summarized by J.E. Middleton's assertion in his 1914 multi-volume history of Canada that, "There is no Canadian Drama. It is merely a branch of the American theatre, and, let it be said, a most profitable one," Section 2, "Stirrings of Independence, 1916-1929" traces the desire by indigenous artists and others to escape from that kind of vicarious, culturally and economically colonial theatre.
In 1928, Lawrence Mason, excited by the potential of Herman Voaden's work in Sarnia, postulated that high quality Little Theatre activity across Canada, "a movement of the people themselves, for their own liberation and betterment," would have major cultural implications, and constitute "a new renaissance, with Canada taking the lead in showing the world a whole nation vitally concerned with the great things of the mind and spirit." Voaden's own cultural manifestos of 1928 and 1929 indicate the artistic influence of the modernist European new stagecraft and the Group of Seven painters with their non-realist and metaphysical depiction of the Canadian environment. Other writers, including Harcourt Farmer (1919), Vincent Massey (1922) and Merrill Denison (1926) explore the relationship between playwrights, their stages and audiences necessary for indigenous drama to emerge. Other documents discuss emerging artistic activity that either died still-born or failed to realize its full potential. For instance, Denison's "Hart House Theatre" (1923) harshly criticizes the artistic conservatism of Canada's leading experimental theatre and "the lack of courage and vision and imagination of its controlling Board of Syndics."
One finds similar echoes of hope and frustration in Section 3, "Visions and Revisions, 1929-1945," a collective debate about the emerging Canadian theatre and drama. Two articles provide starkly contrasting British perspectives of theatre in the (Canadian) provinces. Following a cross-Canada tour in 1940, Maurice Colbourne explained to the New York Times that "we found theatre. But it was moribund." He attributed its deathbed state to the decline of theatre audiences, the disrepair of touring houses, competition with the pictures ("and the pictures have won"), and competition from amateur theatre groups for whom too often "self-expression is only a polite name for exhibitionism." Harley Granville-Barker, by contrast, had adjudicated for the amateur Dominion Drama Festival and in 1936 saw hopeful signs that "a Canadian national drama is waiting to be born."
John Coulter's "The Canadian Theatre and the Irish Exemplar" (1938) mediates between Granville-Barker's optimism and Colbourne's dismissiveness. Echoing Mason, Coulter affirmed his belief that "the most potent of all the theatre's activities is the expression of what is characteristic in the life of the community through plays written by, for and about the people of the community." He had seen such plays over many years at the Abbey Theatre. But he found no such plays similarly reflecting Canada at the DDF after moving to Toronto. Coulter's concern was shared by many theatre artists who did attempt to create dramatic forms that spoke to a Canadian reality. E. Cecil-Smith (1936) and Toby Gordon Ryan (1981) outline the attempts by the Canadian workers' theatre to give expression to the working class through theatre "so strong that it grasps the very guts of the life of the audience." Herman Voaden's 1932 Globe article on symphonic expressionism describes his multi-media symphonic playwriting and production style which--along with the workers' theatre--was one of the few stylistic alternatives to the prevalent realism in the Canadian stage productions in the 1930s.
Still, Merrill Denison's essay, "Nationalism and Drama" (1929), shows that by the end of the 20s, Denison, despairing of actually making a living in Canada as a playwright, was already anticipating his move to the United States. Theatre, he asserts, "flourishes only at the vortex of a culture" and Canada had no distinct culture. "Our culture is one of two kinds. Either it is colonial or American." It is also disconcerting to read David Gardner's 1975 account of adjudicating for the Dominion Drama Festival in Newfoundland in 1961 and discover that 23 years after Coulter's essay was written, the repertoire of that festival consisted entirely of British repertory. Coulter felt that the Abbey had excelled at showing "Irish mugs in Irish mirrors." As late as 1956, Mavor Moore was to comment, "We look in the mirror and there is nothing there."
Section 4, "Government Intervention, 1945-1967," documents public agitation by artists and cultural commentators to bring about federal government involvement in the arts, the establishment of the Massey Commission (1949-1951), and the subsequent growth of indigenous theatre. George Broderson (1947) perceives Canadian theatre as being "in the throes of birth" but far behind Canadian fiction, poetry and painting in development. Along with John Coulter (1945) and Herman Voaden (1946) he presents the case for government cultural intervention and arts subsidies: "if Canada is to become," in Voaden's words, "a cultural power, as important in the arts as she is now in trade and industrial production," she had to render the same state support to the other arts as she was to film and radio. A contrasting view is presented by Robertson Davies (1951) who argues against "giving artists money from the public purse except under the most unusual circumstances" as "the artist who gets nothing from his Government is not under his Government's thumb."
It is this kind of discourse and dialectic that suggests the importance of these documents in our cultural history. In "Theatre Needs More Than a Pat on the Head" (1951) Coulter strongly criticizes both Davies' conservative proposals and "the hard pre-Cambrian bosom of the Commission" for failing to recommend that the federal government provide the "risk capital" that could bring a Canadian national theatre and drama into being. Again, 23 years after Coulter, Tom Hendry in "The Masseys and the Masses" was still attacking the conservatism of the Massey Commission and its creation, the Canada Council for giving virtually all of its financial support to regional theatre institutions, and to the Stratford Festival which produced the classic international repertoire at the expense of Canadian creative artists.
Other contrasts between small, struggling indigenous theatre companies and the Stratford Festival are provided by Amelia Hall's "Rumours of a Festival" (1989), Mavor Moore's "Dora Mavor Moore and the New Play Society" (1994), and most strikingly, by Herbert Whittaker's "The Theatre" (1957) and Nathan Cohen's "Theatre Today: English Canada" (1959). Both Cohen and Whittaker express dissatisfaction over the marginal role the theatre continues to play in English Canada's public and cultural life. But while Whittaker perceived Stratford as the highest development in Canadian theatre, Cohen, referring to it as "that miracle which has been such a blight," fiercely attacked it for diverting artistic and financial resources from the emerging professional theatre. Cohen's later critique, "Stratford After Fifteen Years" (1968), recalls Denison's earlier criticism of Hart House Theatre in its attack on the Festival and its artistic leadership for "timidity, conservatism, fear, a hardening institutionalism [and] the life-in-death state that now seems to characterize it."
Tom Hendry's 1965 analysis of the existing regional theatre system written for the Tulane Drama Review concludes that a theatre modelled more on European than American patterns had arisen in Canada and that we would "continue to count on importing the largest percentage of our artistic leadership in theatre" before a generation of Canadian professionals could replace them. Mark Czarnecki (1985) traces this process of Canadianization since 1965, while Mavor Moore's 1979 article in CTR places the new theatrical ferment emerging in the 70s into national and international contexts.
The concluding section, "The Development of Self-Image, 1968-1995" documents the struggle of indigenous theatre artists, particularly playwrights, to fully assume their rightful place in the Canadian theatre structure. The section opens with the controversial 1971 Gaspé Manifesto, published here for the first time, calling for 50% Canadian content in subsidized Canadian theatres: "What the Canadian theatre needs now is a constant supply of new work, both from the novice and the established playwright, and in all forms and styles."
Ironically, Henrik Ibsen, the apparent model for a burst of bad local playwriting in turn-of-the-century Winnipeg, is used in John Palmer's 1977 play, Henrik Ibsen and the Necessity of Producing Norwegian Drama to satirize the continuing exclusion of the Canadian playwright from the country's cultural life and theatres. Peter Hay (1974), Michael Cook (1976) and Margaret Hollingsworth (1985) all substantiate Palmer's critique from different angles. Hay, a dramaturge and editor, criticizes the federal government for its lack of official and explicitly stated policies on culture, finding it absurd than in 1972-73 "the Tarragon Theatre received $7,000 to produce a season of six Canadian plays" while the Stratford Festival "was given in the same year $460,000." Cook notes that, as a playwright, "this year, I have high hopes of earning between $7,000 and 8,000. Cultural welfare." He also observes that "some of the best writers in this country" needed to write so much for television, radio and film to survive that "they would find it difficult, almost impossible to write" for the stage now. Hollingsworth, in "Why Don't We Write" attributes the insufficient representation of women playwrights in Canadian theatres to the fact that "hardly any women have made it to positions of power."
Three articles examine the cultural nationalism of the 1970s from a wider perspective. Don Rubin (1974) traces the roots of the movement to Centennial year and Expo '67. S.M. Crean (1976) again sounds the leitmotif of concern over US economic and cultural dominance "aborting Canadian initiative, capturing a part of our minds, and imposing an alien mythology." Alan Filewod's "National Theatre, National Obsession" (1990) strikes in a new direction by questioning the very concept of the nation state and of a national drama and theatre reflective of Canada's cultural diversity: "the rhetorical proposal of a national theatre in effect means the canonization of a theatre and drama that reflects the national ideals of the governing elite."
Three additional articles examine the English-Canadian theatre of the 1970s and 80s from a Toronto perspective. Ken Gass (1979) and Don Rubin (1983), surveying the original Toronto alternate theatres at the end of their first decade of existence, sound ominously like Denison and Cohen in their concerns about early potential remaining unfulfilled because of growing artistic and political conservatism caused, at least in part, by the increasing influence of boards of directors and their corporate mentality. "While overall production levels continued to rise," notes Rubin, "... experiment and social criticism, among other things began to disappear." By contrast, Patricia Keeney's "Living With Risk: Toronto's New Alternate Theatre" (1983) examines the experimental, imagistic, feminist and gay productions of the early 1980s, many of which were precursors to the great theatrical diversity of the 1990s. One misses these theatrical voices of the last decade in this collection.
The passionate expressions by artists of the 1970s and 80s of what indigenous theatre should be nevertheless provide signposts to possible new directions. George Ryga (1974, 1977) perceived theatre as giving "light , color and nobility to the quality of our lives ... We live with the myth of the superiority of others, and the inadequacy of ourselves ... the key to self-reliance is self-understanding." For Sharon Pollock (1982), "the best work is rooted in a strong specific: ... we Canadian playwrights are going to remain only immigrant playwrights until we form an organic and passionate relationship with ourselves and where we live." Michael Cook expresses a belief "in theatre as ritual, celebration, communion, theatre as the ultimate art of the people and as the progenitor of a myriad of revolutions." For Rick Salutin (1987), cultural nationalism, as expressed in a play like 1837, was not just about recovering one's past: "you're trying to create something, and you just grab anything you can to do it with for the sake of building something for the future."
Canadian Theatre History is a kind of living history resuscitating these voices, dreams and experiences of our critics, playwrights, directors and others over the past century. As Thompson Highway comments in "On Native Mythology" (1987), "the mythology of a people is the articulation of the dreamworld of that people; without that dreamlife being active in all its forms--from the most extreme beauty to the most horrific and black--the culture of that people is dead. It is a dead culture and it is, in effect, a dead people we speak of." These are the voices of our cultural elders explaining how our theatre and drama has developed and suggesting possible future directions.
It is regrettable that in the resuscitation of these voices, this important collection is marred by nearly two dozen errors in the transcription of the original source documents.