Rota Herzberg Lister
When the Canadian Theatre Critics Association/Association des critiques de théâtre du Canada, one of the Canadian member organizations of the International Theatre Institute, hosted the parent body's twenty-first World Congress in Montreal and Toronto in June 1985, it provided its international and Canadian delegates with a detailed, multi-authored survey of the current state of theatre in Canada. The compilation's editor, Anton Wagner, is familiar to theatre scholars and practitioners in Canada through his several previous endeavours in comprehensiveness such as The Brock Bibliography of Published Canadian Plays in English, 1766-1978 (1980) and the four volumes of plays issued under the general title, Canada's Lost Plays (1978, 1979, 1980, 1982). We have come to expect from him thoroughness of research and documentation and a generally high level of accuracy. Contemporary Canadian Theatre: New World Visions does not disappoint us in these respects.
To reflect the initial readership intended for this occasional anthology of articles, a dozen of the contributors to this volume are or have been practising theatre critics in the Canadian media; the other two dozen surveyors of the terrain are theatre professionals and academic drama specialists. These thirty-six represent Canada from coast to coast.
An undertaking of this magnitude, elicited from such diverse members of the Canadian theatrical community, is bound to exhibit differences in approach and style. The majority of academic contributors have provided scholarly summaries of their assigned component of the theatrical mosaic, while the majority of critics and theatre professionals have opted for more journalistic approaches and personal styles. Among all of these, the most succinct and crisp presentation is Brian Arnott's twelve-page diagrammed discussion of the phases of Canadian theatre architecture, 'Performing Arts Buildings in Canada.' Who would have thought that this mundane edifice history, from the Frontier Era through Confederation to the later post-war multi-purpose phase of the present, could accommodate wit and irony such as his comment, 'educational institutions have run neck-and-neck with governments as the owners of the majority of our performing arts buildings. The educational institutional institutions are, however, winners by a long shot in the race to build the highest number of poor buildings'?
The articles have been clustered in five sections, labelled 'Government and Cultural Expression,' 'Theatre and Drama Across Canada,' 'The Electronic Media,' 'The Canadian Performing Arts Mosaic' and 'The Emergence of the Theatre Professional.' This sequencing again addresses itself to the primary readership, the international community of theatre professionals meeting in Canada for its twenty-first world congress. A number of these sections are complete, particularly sections four and five; several, however, not only exhibit strange gaps but also assemble under partly misleading titles somewhat incongruous explorations. The least well rationalized of these sections is the first: it ignores the increasing importance of private and corporate sponsorship, so clearly in evidence in the acknowledgements of the Stratford Shakespearean Festival or Toronto's Canadian Stage Company, as well as funding by the Beaverbrook/Sir James Dunn Foundation of the Playhouse in Fredericton, home of Theatre New Brunswick. It pays no attention whatever to the crucial publishing component of the field, so clearly proved by Simon & Pierre's 'rush' production of this very text as well as of numerous other important theatrical volumes. The recent history of revivals could scarcely have been accomplished without the diligent efforts of the Playwrights Union of Canada or Talonbooks in Vancouver, nor could academic Canadian drama courses have proliferated as they did over the past fifteen years.
Indeed, the entire section requires a different designation, such as 'Foundations of Theatrical Success' or something of that nature. That label would accommodate all of the present articles of section one, but I would adjust the sequence to begin, as Thomas Henry Huxley did in his popularization of Darwin, with the physical basis of life: 'Performing Arts Buildings in Canada,' 'The Regional Theatre System,' 'The Alternate Theatre Movement,' 'Writing the Land Alive: The Playwrights' Vision in English Canada,' 'Playwriting in Quebec' and 'The Performing Arts and Government Policy.' This revised sequence by no means underrates the results of the lobbying efforts of the Canadian Arts Council and its successors, in a strong presence of the Canadian artistic community through briefs and deliberations contributed to the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, 1949-51. It does not deny the breakthrough achieved in the establishment in 1957 of the 'arms-length' national funding agency, the Canada Council. It does, however, stress the primacy of the theatre and its creative as well as performing members.
Another anomaly in the arrangement of the parts of this grand survey is the strange imbalance one perceives in regional reports. The East is fully covered, province by province, while the equally active West is collectively summarized as 'The Prairie Provinces,' with a separate chapter on British Columbia. Shortage of competent personnel can hardly have been the problem: the drama departments of the Winnipeg Free Press and the Universities of Manitoba and Winnipeg could have supplied expert voices to represent the grandparent of Canadian regional theatres, the Manitoba Theatre Centre, and other lively ventures of that province, just as the Saskatchewan academic and journalistic cohort might have spoken with a centred voice on behalf of their community. Or the Atlantic Provinces might have been brought together under one heading, resembling the 'Ontario' piece signed by Audrey M. Ashley (Ottawa) and Boyd Neil (Toronto). Brian Brennan's eight pages on the Prairie theatrical boom leave out far too much of importance, such as the highly successful Edmonton Fringe Festival, begun in 1982, while Linda Peake's five pages on Prince Edward Island have a hard time going beyond the Charlottetown Festival. And whatever happened to Festival Lennoxville (1972-82) and the Blyth Festival (1976-), proud all-Canadian ventures? Was Richard Horenblas told specifically to stick to Stratford and Shaw?
The section on electronic media, justly acknowledging the importance of radio and television in providing incomes and outlets to our playwrights, actors, directors, designers and technicians during the lean years of the Depression, the War, and the subsequent period of restructuring, could have included some discussion of Canadian film making, which sometimes manages to go beyond dramatizations of The Tin Flute or Who Has Seen the Wind to filmic versions of famous Canadian plays such as John Herbert's Fortune and Men's Eyes (1971). The wide knowledge of Seth Feldman, Peter Harcourt or Martin Knelman could have been recruited for such a report.
On the whole, the illustrations are apt, though occasional gaffes such as the photograph (p 298) of two actresses at the dinner party in Caryl Churchill's Top Girls, captioned as 'Kate Trotter, Robin Craig and Claire Coulter' do appear. This is also true of the very thorough index, all thirty-three pages of it: Vancouver playwright Tom Grainger's appearance as 'Grainer, Tom' is obviously a typographical error; more serious is the careless checking evident in contributor R.H. Thomson's listing as 'Thomson, Richard H.' rather than the correct 'Thomson, Robert H.'
The twenty-one pages of general and subject bibliographies constitute a valuable research resource and clear evidence of the industry and scholarship not only of the editor and contributors but of theatre critics, scholars and playwrights all over Canada who have laboured with devotion for the past sixty years to make theatre a truly indigenous citizen of Canada. For that, we may well say 'Bravo' to all of us!