HEATHER JONES
This volume, subtitled "Feminist Drama," is the latest in the series initiated by Neil Carson. The two plays included here represent the feminist drama specifically as envisioned and made possible by Toronto's Nightwood Theatre. Rita Much's brief historical essay on the founding and development of Nightwood offers a fair and balanced overview of the only explicitly feminist theatre "institution" in Canada. The biographies of the authors and the editor at the end of the volume also provide useful background information. I'm not sure that the institutional memory that these women, Vingoe and Rubess especially, have of both contemporary Canada's feminist theatre and women in Canadian theatre generally is sufficiently appreciated in either the theatre or academic communities.
Rubess's Pope Joan, which was first produced by Nightwood Theatre at the Theatre Centre at the Poor Alex, Toronto, on September 6, 1984, offers a significant contrast to the portrait of Joan given in Caryl Churchill's canonical Top Girls. In both her introduction to the play and the work itself, Rubess shows her (new) historian's training by denying truth value to any one legendary treatment of the career of this woman, particularly of its possible end, unlike Churchill who focuses exclusively on the most horrendous one in order to underscore her feminist agenda. For Rubess, women's past is complex and while definitely oppressive, is not always rigorously so. The omnipresence of anachronism in the farcical "non-historical comedy" continually reminds us that the past is written into history-or not-in the present and that closure (truth) is not possible, especially when we are confronted with so many possible endings. The plot generally follows the life of Joan from child prodigy to Pope, highlighting certain incidents and individuals along the way. In the reading, theatrical and textual elements seem balanced, except in the character of Frumentius whose simplistic Freudian slips become a rather tedious trademark. The play's episodic structure and quick pacing frames and offsets the history lesson, no doubt contributing to the play's popularity which caused it to be held over for a week.
In their separate prefaces to Hooligans Kudelka and Vingoe emphasize the collaborative and improvisational elements in the development of both script and performance. Utilizing the diaries and writings of five remarkable people, the script is credited as having been "[w]ritten by Jan Kudelka and Mary Vingoe in collaboration with the company from an idea by Irene Pauzer," who played Isadora Duncan in the first production which opened March 1982 at the Theatre Centre, Toronto. The play intertwines the lives of dancer Isadora Duncan and her husband, Russian poet Sergei Esenin, Kathleen Bruce, "a Scottish sculptress," and her husband Captain Robert Falcon Scott (Scott of the Antarctic), and theatre designer/artist Edward Gordon Craig, who acts as a narrative voice in the play. The haunting lyricism of the text reinforces the fantastical elements in the record of their lives which intertwine to compose an intriguing portrait of the heyday of high modernism. A certain tragic force is at work here due to the representation of these lives as largely inadequate to encompass or express sufficiently the talents and ambitions of these anomalous individuals.
My sole quibbles are exclusively editorial: typographical errors abound. Also, there is an annoying inconsistency in typography showing emphasis- sometimes italics are used, sometimes bolding, sometimes bolding and underlining. Further, why are the only illustrations included portraits of the authors? Pleasant though these are, surely additional photographs of the original productions are available which could and should have been included. Such elements only serve to reinforce the cult of the author and the text at the expense of the dynamics of performance, and it is difficult enough to encourage students to visualize performance features without this added discouragement. While I am mainly presupposing a high school and/or university readership here, surely visual incentives would be helpful to the wider community as well. All this notwithstanding, these two works are most usefully paired in the volume for they show much of the stylistic and thematic diversity which made Nightwood the dynamic force it became in the early 1980s.