David Gardner
Most of us have looked with awe at the energy and determination with which the Drama Department of the University of Guelph has set out to become the academic centre of English-Canadian theatre studies. We note, in passing, the growth of its archival collections (Blyth Summer Theatre, Shaw Festival, Tarragon Theatre and ACTH/AHTC); the launching of the 'Records of Canadian Theatre' database; and the editorship of Canadian Drama/L'Art dramatique canadien, Canadian Theatre Review and the eagerly-awaited Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre. Now two Guelph professors have provided a pair of additional companion books for English-Canadian theatre studies. The first, Canadian Drama and the Critics, should be familiar to readers of Canadian Drama Vol 11, Spring 1985. Under the editorial supervision of Professor Conolly, senior students then at Guelph, with the assistance of several scholars across the country, assembled media reviews and authors' commentary pertaining to the thirty-one plays contained in the Perkyns, Plant and Wasserman anthologies. The new Talonbooks reprint has been supplemented with reviews for four additional and important dramas not included in the anthologies, rounding out the total to thirty-five plays. Primarily they cover the years between 1950 and 1984, with Perkyns' inclusion of Herman Voaden's Hill-Land (1934) providing the patina of a fifty-year span. With the exception of (Herbert) Whittaker's Theatre, drama criticism in Canada has not been assembled in this manner before. We can only hope that it is the first of many similar volumes.
While it is impossible to summarize the wealth and diversity of critical comment contained in Canadian Drama and the Critics, it is safe to say that even a casual perusal will provide a valuable perspective on Canadian attitudes and value judgements in our remarkable postwar era. Although frozen in time, most of the newspaper criticisms were written in the heat of the moment and this provides an immediacy to the writing that either awakens play-going memories or stimulates contemporary assessment of the plays as literature. We also rediscover perceptive but less familiar critics, like Vincent Tovell and Boyd Neil, whose by-lines today are sadly missed. Mistakes can slip through, of course. In mentioning the National Arts Centre production of The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (p 67), Neil Carson makes three effors in two lines: the year was 1969, not 1968; the play was never taped for CBC Television, but rather for CBC Radio; and it opened the NAC's main 969-seat Theatre, not its Studio space. Conolly, as editor, has trimmed the reviews with surgical finesse, added a useful index and even the occasional extra review (e.g. for Gwen Pharis Ringwood's Garage Sale). Unfortunately, in more than doubling the price (Canadian Drama offprints were available originally for only $6.00), Talonbooks has not been able to afford any illustrations. What a lost opportunity, not to include a production photograph to accompany each play! Except for the addition of a few sentences, Conolly's succinct and pithy Introduction remains virtually unchanged. His ringing cry for rigorous standards in criticism remains, 'to distinguish between the trite and the profound, the fuzzy and the precise, the derivative and the original' (p 7).
It is with some regret that one applies these critical yardsticks to the second book. With only 114 pages of text, it might not be expected that Benson and Conolly's English-Canadian Theatre would be a profound work. By omitting the francophone, Native and ethnic threads, it could only be a thinner weave. Presumably, the minuscule size was dictated by the Oxford 'Perspectives' format and by the hurried, Christmas stocking-stuffer timing of its release. Size has little to do with profundity but might help explain the gaps and omissions in this so-called 'single comprehensive survey' (p vii). Skipping through the decades, we discover nothing about the Royal Arctic Theatre, the Canadian Players or Performance Art. The lighter side is especially missed. There is no mention of minstrels, variety, vaudeville, cabaret, Theatresports, Murder Mystery Tours, the Second City and Yuk Yuk networks, or even famous troop shows, such as the Dumbells, to say nothing of such landmark contemporary comedies as B-Movie, The Play or Talking Dirty. Even the beginnings are fudged. We expect to be told at least when the first English-language garrison performances took place (1743-44 at Annapolis Royal, N.S., and 1759 at Louisbourg). Instead we are given a choice of 1768, 1774 or 1788 in Halifax. Further claims to be 'authoritative' (back cover) are damaged by annoying little mistakes. Reviewers Robert Crew and Rota Lister have pointed out half a dozen, to which I append the following: The Conquest of Canada; or the Siege of Quebec (p 4) has been performed in Philadelphia and New York, and possibly in Quebec (19 Oct 1786); parts of Ponteacb have been performed (p 4), in Toronto in 1977 as part of Robertson Davies's Pontiac and the Green Man); while the total text for Acadius has not survived (p 4) the Prologue and first two acts are extant in a précis; Simcoe Lee's first name should be Graves not George (p 21); The National Theatre School is colingual not bilingual (p 72); and Mermaid Theatre is located in Wolfville, N. S., not Halifax (p 108).
However, errors aside, this is also a meritorious attempt to combine two anglophone overviews in one book, the familiar 'Theatre in Canada' and 'Drama in Canada' encyclopedic entries. In this the authors have been most successful. The interleafing of theatre history and drama reads seamlessly, and the bias towards original drama in every age is clearly intended as a thematic spine for the book. The contemporary scene provides a logical happy ending, and although the writers limit their examination of modern plays to the relatively tried and true, they do bring lively insights to the sections labelled 'The Lessons of 1967: Herbert, Reaney, Ryga' and 'Three Alternate Playwrights: Freeman, Walker, French.' One might quibble with calling Colours in the Dark 'a classic of Canadian children's theatre that also appeals to adults' (p 76), saying that The Ecstasy of Rita Joe resembles Everyman (p 80), or the father and son conflict in Of the Fields, Lately being classified as Oedipal (p 94), but they are provocative ideas and invite us to re-examine the plays with new-washed eyes. However, the writing of contemporary history falters badly, particularly in the New Bearings section (p 103 ff) where not only mistakes appear but, in places, the research becomes recognizably derivative. The book sacrifices its scholarly credibility with its lack of endnotes, and a blanket tribute to the anonymous legion of scholars, critics, directors, etc., who have gone before (p vii) can be of little comfort when undigested lumps of material are borrowed without credit. I draw attention to a comparison between Tarragon Theatre and CentreStage (p 104), which derives from Bob White's 1987 article 'The Alternates: Coming of Age.' Also, the paragraph on multicultural companies (pp 110-111) appears to utilize, without acknowledgement, the meticulous research contained in Jeniva Berger's chapter in Contemporary Canadian Theatre: New World Visions (1985). Further groupings of ideas (pp 109, 111-112) are reminiscent of the 'Theatre, English-language: Contemporary' entry in The Canadian Encyclopedia (1985).
Because of its general familiarity, the colonial period is an easier task. The organization is commendable and the east-west progression chronologically sound, although I did wonder why the first visiting troupe in 1768 was held back until after WWI touring in the Prairies had been discussed (p 34). I particularly enjoyed the delightful segments on 19th century theatre morality (pp 5-6) and audience behaviour (pp 21-25), areas of favoured expertise for Conolly. While there was no need to worry about denigrating Victorian closet dramas as 'virtually unactable' (p 13), 'arid' and 'self-consciously literary' (p 14), it might have been useful to compare them with the European romantic models of the same period (Victor Hugo's Hernani, for example), to provide a more compassionate context. No one would disagree, as well, that such early Canadian political satires as The Fair Grit, Dolorsolatio and H.M.S. Parliament succeeded because they 'drew energy and authenticity from an involvement with local and national issues' (p 16), but I was sorry that the authors limited their examination of commercially successful, turn-of-the-century playwrights to W.A. Tremayne (p 14). We are long overdue an evaluation of expatriates like C.W. Bell, James Forbes, George V. Hobart and Willard Mack (the latter appears on p 29 as a touring attraction in Edmonton, but fails to be recognized as a Canadian.) It is the kind of fresh investigation one would have hoped might be possible from the goldmine of unseen research available to the editors of the forthcoming Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre. The writers, too, seem temperamentally at odds with the professional theatre practitioner, repeatedly accusing the British strolling players of the 18th and 19th centuries of 'exploiting' Canada and being a 'threat to the development of Canadian drama' (p 6).
They take a strong metaphoric stand against cultural domination, describing Canada as 'an occupied country,' theatrically speaking, with stage impresarios like Ambrose Small functioning as 'collaborators,' and other Canadians who fought against the domination designated as 'pockets of limited resistance' (p 32). When foreign touring collapses in the 1920s, we are told 'it was left to amateurs to fill the void. They did so with honour, but the country has lost a century and a half of opportunity to forge its own professional theatre identity' (p 32). Is this simply rhetorical overkill or the kind of fuzzy and imprecise thinking that Professor Conolly warns us to guard against? Canada did not become Canada until 1867 (some would even argue 1967), and it remained a formal part of the British Empire until 1931. Wilfred Campbell's 'slavish addiction to British culture' in 1909 (p 13) may be lamented but his loyalty is understandable. As historians we also must examine social situations from the perspective of the 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as from the golden vantage point of the 1970s and 1980s. When are we going to accept with some graciousness (and even humour) that we had a colonial past? Surely we cannot go on forever mustering Presbyterian passion against our British, French or multi-ethnic forefathers for wanting a taste of their own culture in a rural wilderness? Only the 19th-century garrisons and literary societies provided some vestige of urban sophistication and we have seen their occasional original poetic dramas already damned. Even the honourable amateurs and the 1980s' professionals have been known to draw their plays from the international marketplace. Of course, our reliance on imported theatre delayed 'the natural development of indigenous talent' (p 7) but I remain to be convinced that our tiny end-of-the-century population (5 million or so) had either the means or, more importantly, the will as yet, to create and support an indigenous arts industry (to say nothing of one-hundred years earlier in purely colonial times). The between-the-wars ripening of Canadian nationalism is an heroic story. But when we do arrive at this point in history, the authors are content to look at the plays produced with little or no real analysis of their subliminal central theme. We search in vain for details about the articles written, for example, on behalf of a national theatre or of the 1944 March on Ottawa that resulted in government action.
Although English-Canadian Theatre is lucid and readable, it succumbs too often to being a paper-and-paste collage of familiar information and easy attitudes. It serves as a popularly-priced introduction for undergraduates and general readers, but must be deemed a slight and disappointing scholarly work. All history is a labour of love and eclecticism, but this one seems short on love and long on the exploitation it derides. It is a volume too hurriedly prepared as a prelude to the Companion to Canadian Theatre, too hurriedly conceived to allow the extra attention to detail our theatre deserves, or the time required to chase down truly new material.