Paul Denham
Rex Deverell is a prolific playwright, having produced nearly fifty dramatic works - plays for children, musicals, political satires, historical documentaries, and scripts for television and radio. Don Perkins has wisely not attempted to represent the full range of Deverell's forms; instead he has selected four plays which illustrate what he defines in his introduction as Deverell's central concerns - is addressing of the interests of a specific audience, and his interest in the meaning of theatre for society. In particular he suggests that Ogie's statement about his dead wife in Afternoon of the Big Game - 'she's turned me toward others' - is one of the keys to Deverell's work.
Deverell has been identified with a single theatre, the Globe in Regina, since he became its playwright-in-residence in 1975. During the same period the Globe, under artistic director Ken Kramer, has dominated the Regina theatre scene to an extent unparallelled in other prairie cities. Deverell, writing for the Globe's audience, draws both subject-matter and allusions from the Saskatchewan scene, and has become one of the prairies' respected dramatic voices. Ironically he is a transplanted easterner. He grew up in Ontario, studied theology at McMaster and at New York's Union Theological Seminary, and served a Baptist congregation in Ontario before moving west in 1971.
How did the easterner become, not only the westerner, but accepted as one of the west's voices? Part of the answer may lie in Deverell's theology. At a symposium on Saskatchewan writing held at Fort San in June 1987, Deverell suggested that Saskatchewan theatre is in good shape because even the established theatres 'are close to being alternative theatres. In fact, one of the reasons that Saskatchewan is the jewel in the crown of the Dominion is that it has been an alternative society' (Kenneth G. Probert, Writing Saskatchewan: 20 Critical Essays [Regina: Canadian Plains Research Centre 1989], p 120). Saskatchewan-born writers don't talk like this; they are too aware of the dangers of sounding like naive provincials. This is the voice of the convert, the outsider who has found his true home and loves it perhaps even more intensely than those who have lived their whole lives there. Deverell's theology offered him a model of conversion and renewal which has been reproduced in his artistic life.
His theology has also, by his own account, offered him a vision of a coherent social order, one which helped him find congenial the CDF-NDP tradition in Saskatchewan. The CCF emerged from the Protestant Social Gospel of the early twentieth century, with its emphasis on such texts as 'Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me' (Matt. 25:40). Serving God means serving one's fellows, particularly the poor. Deverell imbibed Social Gospel ideas at Union Theological Seminary in the sixties, and Saskatchewan is one of the places where the Social Gospel is still a significant influence, and where there is a strong co-operative and social democratic tradition. No wonder, then, that Rex Deverell sees it as 'the jewel in the crown of the Dominion' - even when the modern NDP compromises its ideals; even when the Conservatives win.
This political-social-theological thread is manifest in various ways in the plays in Perkin's collection. Boiler Room Suite (1977) is one of Deverell's earliest plays for the Globe, as well as one of the most widely produced; it was recently remounted as an opera with music by Calgary composer Quenten Doolittle and taken on a tour of England. Two derelicts inhabit the basement of an abandoned hotel: Aggie is a former actress, and Sprugg a failed poet. They improvise scenes, argue about the meaning of life and their particular situations, and about whether the boiler room is an appropriate metaphor for heaven. 'I believe in a personal God' (Perkins 40), asserts Sprugg, but a few minutes later, he says, 'People have got to hold onto one another sometimes, Aggie! We are all we've got' (Perkins 43-44). The apparent contradiction is resolved at the end when Pete, the janitor who initially attempts to evict them, shares his lunch with Sprugg while Aggie sleeps. Contemporary liberation theology suggests that the voice of God is heard in the cry of the poor; that position is close to Deverell's in Boiler Room Suite. One of the characters in the later play Quartet for Three Actors quotes Sartre to the effect that hell is other people. Maybe, implies Deverell, but so is God.
Quartet for Three Actors (1987) is almost pure meta-theatre; it offers three actors trapped in a labyrinthine playhouse who conclude that they must 'act their way out.' Krull, dismissing experimental drama and plumping for realism, insists that 'the job of theatre is to examine life, not theatre. . . . I hate plays about actors' (Perkins 153). That would include, we presume, plays like Quartet for Three Actors. But Deverell's point is that theatre is not just about life; it is life in its requirement that we commit ourselves to the roles that are assigned to us. 'Once I worked in a small theatre in a small town that only ran plays for two weeks,' says Krull. 'On opening night they would put up the closing notice in the green room. It was like a sentence of death the day you're born' (Perkins 202). Fran, pondering her function as actress, wonders, 'Is there some other method of gaining eternal life?' (Perkins 177) The question remains unanswered, but the Biblical phrasing of the ancient notion that 'art is long' implies at least that theatre and religious belief tap into some of the same human desires and impulses. This isn't a Social Gospel play, but theological and metaphysical questions are never far from its concerns.
Beyond Batoche (1985), written for the centenary of the second North-west Rebellion, is meta-theatre of a quite different kind. Several people are trying to concoct a filmscript about Riel, and can't agree on how to present him - as 'the first Canadian socialist political leader,' as a commercial American-style hero, as a religious visionary, or even as a wishy washy prototype of Mackenzie King: 'Government when necessary but not necessarily government' (Perkins 80). 'Dumont is straightforward like that,' says Shane, the actor. 'I can do that. But with Riel - half the time I don't get it' (Perkins 108). In addition there is the difficulty of selling Riel as hero (and John A. Macdonald as villain) to a central Canadian audience, and of satisfying Yvonne, the modern Metis who becomes involved in the project.
The context in which best to understand Beyond Batoche is that created by Deverell's other regional historical documentaries such as Black Powder, his play about the Estevan coal-miners' strike of 1931, and Medicare!, about Saskatchewan's 1962 doctors' strike. All these plays indicate a commitment on Deverell's part to understanding his adopted region's history, and to showing his audience that history. Unfortunately, Black Powder, though well received in Estevan, Saskatoon, and Regina when it was produced in 1981, is a thoroughly unsatisfactory play except as agit-prop - or as melodrama. There are some good songs by Geoffrey Ursell, but the miners are good, the managers are bad, and that's it. As history that's probably pretty accurate, but as drama it doesn't work; there are no nuances, no ambiguities. Medicare! is in this regard at least a better play. Deverell's CCF sympathies are apparent, but he does allow for the possibility that the debate over medicare was not just a matter of good against evil but of different conceptions of good. The problem with Medicare! is that it is an example of what Paul Thompson meant when he spoke of plays that are 'handcuffed by history,' (Robert Wallace and Cynthia Zimmerman, The Work: Conversations with English-Canadian Playwrights [Toronto: Coach House 1982], p 240), dragged down by too many facts and speeches and too much information.
Beyond Batoche is not a historical documentary; it is a play about a failed attempt to make a documentary about one of the most puzzling and debated figures in prairie history. Matt, the writer, who envisions Riel as a religious mystic, is surprised to discover that he really has more sympathy with the centralist, racist vision of John A. Macdonald than with his own supposed version (or anyone else's) of Riel. So at the end of the play he begins writing the beginning of what we have just witnessed. Perhaps this is the only way to write about some kinds of history - to acknowledge that we can never get at their final truth. But at least, as Matt at last sees, the attempt can lead us to some knowledge of ourselves.
Afternoon of the Big Game (1988) is also overtly regional and political, and the most topical of the four plays in this volume. Three generations of Reginans watch a televised football game between the Saskatchewan Roughriders and the Toronto Argonauts, a game which is a modern metaphor for the east-west tension suggested by the Macdonald-Riel opposition in Beyond Batoche. Ogie, in his seventies, is an old-time socialist who quotes from the Regina Manifesto and is bitter and uncomprehending about the present political situation, in which Grant Devine's Conservatives have replaced the NDP. The Tories are the party of the middle-aged man, Bill and Floyd, who smugly dismiss socialist ideas as outdated. But Bill, whose job is to fire civil servants who don't have the proper Tory credentials, realizes from a chance remark of Floyd's that he too is to be fired. Diane, who is Bill's wife and Ogie's daughter, used to be a civil rights activist, but has become politically neutral since her marriage to Bill. During the course of the play her political commitments are revived. And Sharyl, Floyd's wife, admits her terrible secret: she voted NDP in the last election. She finally has enough of Floyd's empty rhetoric about level playing fields and putting the province back on its feet, clichés which parallel the emptiness of their marriage. Kevin, Diane's teenage son, just wants to cheer for the Roughriders, who eventually, against all the odds, do win the game.
Regina audiences responded warmly to the play since civil service firings after the election of 1982 was an intensely felt local issue, and the fortunes of the underdog Roughriders are always a subject of concern in Saskatchewan. Deverell's critique of the Tories is unmistakable, but the future is not clear; the Roughriders win, and Floyd is isolated and outnumbered, but the opposition is unfocused and demoralized. Ogie's quoting of the old CCF orthodoxy no longer stirs the heart, and there is a suggestion that the Social Gospel on which it was based, however admirable, is now a fact of history rather than a basis for renewed action. Diane suggests where her own sensitivity to social injustice, and by implication Saskatchewan's, came from:
You've seen Ogie. My mother was worse. She came on gentle, but she was like steel ... her outrage at social injustice ... you know the type. United Church Women. (Perkins 238)
This is the woman who, Ogie says, 'turned me towards others.' But
the play is otherwise silent on the connection between religion and politics.
Deverell does not offer a religious basis for a new political dispensation
in Saskatchewan.
Deverell has collaborated with such writers as Geoffrey Ursell and Rob Bryanton on a number of musicals, but although none of the plays in this volume is a musical, his musical interests are nevertheless apparent. The titles Boiler Room Suite and Quartet for Three Actors both imply musical structures, and, as already mentioned, Boiler Room Suite's operatic possibilities have been explored by Quenten Doolittle. And in a sense all these plays offer a kind of contrapuntal structure, with parallel themes elaborated and developed simultaneously: football and politics, the Riel of 1885 and the Riel of 1985, actor and character, theatre and life.
Deverell also values the play as a literary text, not only as point of departure for a performance; it is for this reason that he has expressed reservations about collective theatre (Probert 119-20). Plays, of course, are created to be played, and they gain their full life only in performance. But Perkins offers them as literary texts, and in that form they read pretty well. One of the difficulties of teaching Canadian drama is that many of the seminal works Paper Wheat, Les Canadiens, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe - however compelling in performance, lie limp and banal on the page. Deverell's plays are verbal: his characters argue and debate. They are distinguished from one another partly by their use of language. And his humour is primarily wit: 'Being a parent is an awesome responsibility.' says Sprugg in Boiler Room Suite. 'Children can hold it against you all their lives' (Perkins 37). Amen, Sprugg, amen.