Linda M. Peake
Margaret Hollingsworth is one of this country's most underrated writers. Nevertheless, she has proven to be one of Canada's most talented women playwrights with a dozen stage plays, many radio plays and short stories to her credit. Her plays have also been produced in England; some have aired on radio in England, West Germany, New Zealand and Australia. In Canada however (but for the New Play Centre and the Belfry Theatre in British Columbia which have workshopped and premiered most of her plays) she has been met with reluctance and the number of productions hardly justifies her reputation. Few, with the exception of Ever Loving, have received more than a first production. Even the most cursory reading of Willful Acts makes one question the unwillingness to produce her work. Ann Saddlemyer's excellent introduction to this volume of five major plays provides fine evidence of the first-rate quality and importance of Hollingsworth's plays.
Her unrestrained approach to form and structure is refreshing. She disregards many theatrical conventions and turns others to her advantage. In all her plays there exist a sharp sense of characterization, crisp dialogue and an orchestration of events that is intricately woven and deftly unravelled. She writes about women and their relationships, exploring the subtleties, never the obvious. Each woman is attempting to come to terms with herself and her environment. Each, in reaching an emotional limit, comes to realize that nothing will change unless she alone takes action. A few, like Alli in Alli Alli Oh, choose not to act but to escape. All these women possess and are frequently motivated by a profound sense of dislocation, a need to find a place to which one can belong and feel at home. Many, like the playwright herself, are immigrants who are seeking their place in a foreign environment.
Ever Loving (which has received numerous productions from coast to coast and was nominated for a Chalmers Award in 1984) has earned its rightful place in this volume. Here the theme of immigration is deliberately explored as we follow the lives of three war brides who immigrate to Canada to live with their husbands. As though in counterbalance to the war brides' sense of dislocation, Mother Country (first produced by Tarragon Theatre in 1980 and regrettably not included in Willful Acts) explores the need to feel at home in a familiar and familial environment.
Islands is the most realistic play in this collection. Although it premiered at the New Play Centre in 1983 it was not seen with its companion piece Alli Alli Oh until mounted as an independent production at Tarragon's Extra Space in 1986. Whereas the earlier play shows the dissolution of the relationship between Alli and Muriel, Islands brings the return of Alli to Muriel's island farm. Both women refuse to deal with the real world. Alli elects to escape into a protective madness, in her own words 'cold storage', while Muriel elects the self-sufficient isolation of her 'roughly furnished' farm. The primary concern of the play is with Muriel's growing independence from Alli and from her own mother who is visiting. Muriel and Rose are able to come to terms with themselves and the choices they have made more readily than Alli although at the end of Islands there is a sense that she too will move on and begin to define herself.
Hollingsworth concerns herself with the thought process of her characters and thus creates scripts full of layers and intricacies. There is a surreal level to many plays - she compares her own work to Magic Realism - yet all are firmly rooted in reality. In The Apple in the Eye and Diving it is the surrealism that successfully allows the characters' stream of thought and feeling to speak to the audience. Gemma in The Apple in the Eye begins to free herself from a sense of dislocation within her own marriage. Through the metaphor of an apple comes a flood of words, images and ideas revealing Gemma's inner thoughts and feelings. 'If I were to cut through the apple of my mind with a very sharp knife it would fall apart in two neat halves'. While one half contemplates 'arcane amusements' the other 'comes to life'. We are acquainted with her husband Martin mainly through her internal monologue during a Sunday afternoon ritual representative of the isolation she feels. 'Before we were married you spent Sundays in bed. You had bagels and lox and football and popcorn, and now you have me as well. Nothing's changed'. The apple continues to roll about and wither until Gemma arrives at the realization that until she acts nothing will change. Diving, even more completely a stream of consciousness monologue, imposes a surrealistic, imaginative inner world upon us through the metaphor of diving in order that we may understand Viveca's innermost thoughts.
Unquestionably the tour de force in this collection is War Babies, Hollingsworth's most recent and accomplished play. It is more than just a play about having late babies. It explores the uncertain and shifting quality of the 1980s. A couple in their forties, Esme (a playwright) and Colin (a war correspondent) await the birth of their child and a visit from Esme's first husband, her best friend (now his wife) and her grown son. Superficially it is a middle-class subject with familiar characters yet it transcends this through structural ingenuity and the multiple focus through which we view the characters. Much of War Babies is a play-within-a-play that Esme has created. Carefully orchestrated scenes blend the real and imagined, past and present, public and private lives of this couple and their fictional doubles. This is a complex but rewarding work. Rich in irony and humour it is, nevertheless, a disturbing play. But the best theatre disturbs and provokes a fresh view of established values.
Hollingsworth's plays are becoming more socially aware as well as more political. Women on the Wire, a radio play aired on CBC in 1986, is about a transplanted Canadian who joins in protest of the Cruise missiles at the women's peace camp on England's Greenham Common. The Green Line, which may receive a Stratford production in 1987, is set in the Middle East. Its title refers to the division of Christian and Muslim Beirut. The content of her work may be changing but it is keeping time with her evolution as a unique voice in Canadian drama. Willful Acts attests to this. In Margaret Hollingsworth we have a playwright who not only writes intelligent and provocative plays but who is no less afraid to challenge her own craft than she is to challenge her audiences.