Larry McDonald
The story of collectively created documentary plays in English Canada during the 1970s is both complex and evanescent; it is a story complicated by virtue of being entangled in history and politics, and transitory by virtue of having left behind few published scripts - and these few provide only an approximate record of what is, in large measure, a 'performance' genre. Canadian theatre history is fortunate, then, that this story has been so well told by Alan Filewod in Collective Encounters.
The indigenous documentary tradition that emerged in the 1970s was, in Filewod's view, perhaps the most distinctive expression of the alternative theatre movement. In terms of both its tendency to dramatize regional concerns according to an ideology of political populism and its preference for a style of collective creation, documentary theatre gave exemplary articulation to the movement's 'repudiation of "colonial" structures of thought' and its search for 'authentic, indigenous Canadian dramatic forms.'
Filewod has managed to pull off the difficult trick of ranging widely over the history of the genre while at the same time organizing his account around the detailed analysis of six key plays and the companies that produced them: Theatre Passe Muraille's The Farm Show, Toronto Workshop Production's Ten Lost Years, Globe Theatre's No. 1 Hard, 25th Street Theatre's Paper Wheat, the Mummers Troupe's Buchans: A Mining Town, and Catalyst Theatre's It's About Time. After an introductory chapter that surveys the evolution of documentary theatre in Canada, each succeeding chapter begins by tracing the theoretical predispositions and historical development of a company's work on documentary theatre, and ends with the detailed analysis of a representative play.
Filewod categorizes the documentary as much in terms of performance style as he does in terms of its content. Thus the documentary not only 'incorporates actual material directly,' but it must convince the audience that the material is real and true by finding ways to authenticate it, typically 'by the internal conventions of the performance.' One of the strengths of the book is the way it demonstrates just how different are the authenticating performance styles of the six companies. These different styles derive in part from the variety of influences at work: Piscator (a general influence); Ewan MacColl and Joan Littlewood (Luscombe/TWP); Peter Cheeseman (Kramer-Deverell/Globe Theatre, and Whalen-Tucker/Open Circle Theatre); Roger Planchon (Thompson/TPM, and Brookes/Mummers Troupe); and J.L. Moreno, Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal (Catalyst Theatre). Difference may also be accounted for in part by the range of possible relationships between actors and documentary material: the actors in The Farm Show, for example, re-presented personal experiences and observations; the actors in Ten Lost Years worked with 'literary' material (Barry Broadfoot's book of recorded memories); and the actors at the Globe found themselves dramatizing 'data' on the grain industry for No. 1 Hard. Filewod confirms the tremendous variety in this genre by pointing to stylistic affinities that stretch from Christmas pageants to Marxist agitprops. Besides conveying a nice sense of the physicality of presentational performance, Filewod is everywhere concerned to demonstrate how, in the absence of governing narrative structures of the traditional kind, the plays cohere around alternative 'performance structures.'
Mostly, Collective Encounters celebrates the achievements of the plays under discussion. If it establishes a criterion that none of the plays quite satisfies, it is Filewod's consistently applied test for critical intelligence. He notes Thompson's preference for form over analysis, and seems almost to surprise himself with the conclusion that Luscombe's Ten Lost Years constitutes a moral rather than an ideological critique (a characterization he also applies to No. 1 Hard). In fact, what is true of the Mummers' Buchans is generally true of Canadian documentaries: their approach to the material is often emotional at the expense of objective analysis. It should be emphasized that Filewod is a generous critic, content to judge a play according to its aims (including the need to be theatrical and entertain); his concern is really descriptive. He concluded that the Canadian documentary 'authenticates experience rather than ideology or polemical inquiry'; 'it does not try to explain the significance of the matter it documents in an intellectual scheme, but rather suggests the significance of a shared historical experience by transforming it into art.' The documentary is 'ultimately a moralistic genre.'
Alan Filewod brings to the study of documentary theatre not only his considerable resources as an academic theatre historian, but also the practical knowledge gained during a misspent youth as actor and dramaturge. Just as important, when dealing with a genre so centrally concerned with matters political, he brings a welcome sophistication to the ideological analysis of the plays. The result is a study that is scholarly in its history of origins, influences, theories, performance styles, and cultural politics, and at the same time uniquely informed about the complex and various processes that go into the collective creation of scripts based on documentary materials. Collective Encounters is a book that will be invaluable not only to teachers, scholars and students, but also to anyone involved with future productions of the scripts it so marvelously illuminates - or indeed to anyone interested in further exploring and developing the possibilities of the documentary genre.