MICHAEL PETERMAN

The past decade has seen the emergence of two opposing reactions to the plays of Robertson Davies. On the one hand, within the theatre itself there has been very little interest shown in bringing those plays to the stage. I know of few productions since the 1977 failure of Pontiac and the Green Man. Moreover, those wishing to read the plays - there have been nearly twenty in all - will find scarcely a script in print, despite the current international attention Davies is receiving as a novelist. On the other hand, beginning with Patricia Morley's 1977 monograph, scholarly attention to Davies's drama has, if anything, been accelerating. In 1981 Eugene Benson edited a special issue of Canadian Drama devoted entirely to Davies while Judith Skelton Grant collected Davies's journalistic pieces about Canadian theatre in The Well-Tempered Critic. Most significantly, culminating what has clearly been the work of a decade itself, Susan Stone-Blackburn has produced a full-scale, well-researched study of Davies's drama. Its thoroughness suggests that it will likely remain the book on the subject for years to come.

Robertson Davies, Playtvright is a study from which one learns a great deal. Having corresponded extensively with Davies himself and with others involved in various ways with his work (Donald Davis, Martin Hunter, Herbert Whittaker, Tony Van Bridge), Stone-Blackburn offers not only a wealth of details about the writing of the plays and their important productions but also extensive and thoughtful analysis of their subject matter. One learns, for instance, that Davies wrote his first play The 7hree Gypsies while at Oxford and that Benoni, written originally for Sybil Thorndike, was aired on the BBC in 1952, two years before Davies revised it under the title A Jig for the Gypsy for Toronto's Crest Theatre. One follows in detail the problems that plagued both Davies's sole Broadway venture - he adapted Leaven of Malice for the New York Theatre Guild in 1960 - and the cumbersome University of Toronto Sesquicentennial production of (the still unpublished) Pontiac and the Green Man in 1977. One learns as well why Stone-Blackburn values so highly the only Davies play yet to be performed, General Confession (1957). In this study of Casanova, Davies, writes Stone-Blackburn, is "dazzlingly successful at creating a theatre experience out of what is essentially a man's soul-searching ... " (142). Weighing the changes Davies makes from the events described in Casanova's Memoirs to the cleverly structured play, she argues that General Confession is not only Davies's "dramatic masterpiece" but also may be the neglected masterpiece of Canadian theatre"(1 5 1).

Stone-Blackburn's critical study is at once an analysis of Davies's individual plays and a sympathetic interpretation of his theatre career as a whole. Emphasizing Davies's great love for the theatre, she argues that "Canadian drama" ("the youngest and least widely recognized of Canada's literary arts"[411) and Robertson Davies, playwright, came of age together"(10). To Stone-Blackburn, Davies is "a fine playwright" who, in the "sporadically fruitful, not always blissful, union between [himself] and Canadian theatrical conditions," suffered disappointments sufficient to redirect his energies away from his deepest and most enduring passion(5). The effect of the Crest Theatre's decision not to produce General Confession and the failure on Broadway of Love and Libel "was to reduce the flame of Davies's passion for playwrighting to a wavering flicker" after 1960 (171). Such disappointment came in the wake of what Stone-Blackburn considers his best plays - Overlaid, At My Heart's Core, A Masque of Aesop, Hunting Stuart and General Confession - and led Davies to shift his considerable theatrical talents to the more controllable genre of the novel.

Taste being what it is, and opportunities to see Davies's plays being infrequent, it is easy enough to argue with Stone-Blackburn's hit parade. I for instance think more highly of A Jig for the Gypsy than the gimmicky Hunting Stuart and would find it difficult to include A Masque of Aesop on my list. Of greater critical significance, however, is the business of how Stone-Blackburn situates herself vis-à-vis the opinions and attitudes of Robertson Davies. There is of course great value in having the playwright's view of his experience, especially when he has so precise a memory for detail and seems to delight in various forrns of self-commentary. The study is greatly enriched by such imput. But where, one is inclined to ask, does such influence stop? Stone-Blackburn at one point observes that Davies is "evidently his own best critic"(152). The cliché has an arresting effect for, if the critic actually believes this, then he is, despite attempts at objectivity, in danger of functioning more as the author's spokesman, if not his acolyte, than as a sufficiently-distanced critical voice.

What troubles me most about Robertson Davies, Playwright is precisely this sense of the author having listened too sympathetically to "the master." To say this is not to ignore Robertson Davies's significant contibutions to theatre and theatre commentary in Canada. Stone-Blackburn details the many-faceted efforts of his career - the whole extent of his "passion" - very effectively. The problem lies rather in trying to understand why, given such passion, energy, technical skills, knowledge and output, Robertson Davies has produced so few plays of enduring stage-life. Can we blame it on Canada's philistine culture? Has he been victimized by writing so often for "specific production requirements"?(221) "Are Davies's plays too intellectual or do they oversimplify?"(223) Is he too persistently didactic? Has he haggled too much with others involved in his plays or, as seems to be the case with Tyrone Guthrie, been too adulatory, too much the acolyte? Does he effectively interrelate and balance the satiric and romantic elements typical of his approach? Questions abound, but answers sufficient to explain the enigma are in short supply. Perhaps they lie in Davies himself, in the way that he has treasured a particular and limited view of theatre and has, furthermore, made the act of treasuring that view a lifelong passion and form of self-justification. In World of Wonders and in certain of his essays, he makes us feel and see the importance of that treasuring. On stage, however, what he has created has too often not realized his conception of possibilities; too often he has not given life to his passion.

Contemptuous of "modern" tendencies in theatre and of realism on stage, he has tried to embody what he conceives to be the vital communal dreams of his fellows in comic form. The failure of the play lies, I would argue, far less in the limits of Davies's audience than in the limits of the plays themselves. And these limitations have something to do with the melodramatic theatrical paraphernalia he so admires and with the cogency of the communal dreams themselves. Davies is not nearly as convincing about the primacy and integrity of self in his plays as he is in his fiction, particularly the novels that begin with Fifth Business.

While sensitive to certain problems in the plays, Stone-Blackburn seems often to function as Davies's apologist. Hers is a struggle to rationalize why such "a fine playwright", such "a master of his craft"(39), should have been so extensively misunderstood and, in recent years, so conspicuously ignored, especially by theatre people. Critical reaction to Davies's plays over the years has been mixed, ranging, as in the case of his most ambitious play, Question Time, "from qualified admiration to total condemnation" (202). Stone-Blackburn ably documents the passion and tenacity that mark Davies's playwriting career and makes clear how central wholeness of self and its lesser partner selfishness are to his plays. She is, however, less convincing when it comes to carrying off her largely positive assessment of those plays. It is not enough to label critics of Davies's plays as dissentors or to rely on the strategy of arguing with his critics, as in her attempt to celebrate the "misunderstood" virtues of Question Time. It is in this area, upon which so much depends, that Robertson Davies, Playwright seems weakest.