"THE LIVING SOUL OF MAN': BERTRAM BROOKER AND EXPRESSIONIST THEATRE

Sherrill E. Grace

In 1935 and 1936, Herman Voaden produced two expressionistic plays by Bertram Brooker, Within and The Dragon. These two plays provide interesting insight into avant-garde theatre in Canada in the thirties and reveal yet another artistic side of the versatile Brooker. Furthermore, these plays demonstrate Brooker's familiarity with contemporary European theatre and with mysticism, and they can be usefully compared with plays by Evreinov and Andreev.

En 1935 et 1936 respectivement, Herman Voaden a mis en scène deux pièces expressionistique, Within et The Dragon, de Bertram Brooker. Ces deux pièces fournissent une vue interessante au théâtre avant-garde au Canada pendant cette période et révélant encore un autre aspect artistique de Brooker qui a eu des talents tellement variés. De plus, ces pièces demontrent son connaissance du théâtre européen et du mysticisme, et on peut, donc, les comparer utilement à l'œuvre de Evreinov et Andreev.

 
Neither the puppet nor the motion picture has a vortex. We of the theatre are the sole possessors of it - of the art of the living soul of man swirling out into a visible, plastic medium of revelation. (Roy Mitchell, Yearbook of the Arts in Canada, 1928-29)

In addition to so many other activities for which Bertram Brooker is certainly better known, he was also deeply interested in the theatre. It was an interest that seems to have begun very early and continued almost to the end of his life, and it led him to include essays on the drama by Merrill Denison and Carroll Aikins in his Yearbook of the Arts in Canada, 1928-29. That Brooker was highly critical of his contributors' disparaging and dismissive tone we know from a 1930 letter that he wrote to his friend, Herman Voaden,¹ but he carried his belief in the potential for a lively Canadian drama far beyond the 'nay-saying' of some of his contemporaries by writing many plays, two of which - Within and The Dragon - are very interesting contributions to experimental Canadian theatre in the thirties.

To examine these two plays by Brooker is, in fact, to explore the Canadian avant-garde between the wars.² Brooker, his thinking, his art, and his drama, awkward as they may seem now and bizarre as they seemed to many at the time, were not aberrations in a void, but part of an interesting and vital art scene that included Lawren Harris, Arthur Lismer, William Arthur Deacon, Roy Mitchell, Carroll Aikins, Lowrie Warrener, Ernest MacMillan, and many others. Certainly, for theatre historians in Canada, one of the most important players in this scene was Herman Voaden, and it is thanks to Voaden's productions of Within (1935) and The Dragon (1936) that we have an idea of how these could be staged and received. But Brooker should not be placed only within a Canadian context. He, like Voaden, Harris, Mitchell and the others should also be seen against international developments in the arts during the first quarter of this century. Clearly, to illuminate this context is an enormous task, but it is one I would like to initiate here. After a brief discussion of biography and the Brooker papers, and a preliminary look at his 'Philosophy,' I would like to discuss these two plays and suggest a part of the broader context for their consideration. My hope is that others will continue this work which may lead, in time, to a general study of Brooker or a collection of interdisciplinary studies of his work.

When Roy Mitchell wrote so eloquently of the theatre as a vortex - as 'the art of the living soul of man swirling out into a visible, plastic medium of revelation' - he might have been thinking specifically of Herman Voaden or, indeed, of Bertram Brooker who in his philosophy, painting (certainly in the abstract canvases prior to 1933), some of his poetry and fiction, and these two plays sought to express the vital energy experienced in the wholeness of the universe. Brooker was himself a vortex of energy 'through which, and into which, ideas [were] constantly rushing.' ³ In large part because of this incredible energy, he is also extremely difficult to summarize or even to evaluate fairly. He was without doubt a successful business man; he was even more certainly a brilliant painter. But he was, as well, a creative writer - of novels, numerous short stories and poems (a few of which have merit), and of many plays and play fragments, most of which are best forgotten. Comparatively little of this writing was ever published during his lifetime, and he left a great deal of material in varying manuscript stages when he died.

Bertram Richard Brooker was born in Croydon, Surrey in England in 1888.⁴ His formal education ended when he was only thirteen, which is remarkable and illuminating in view of the fact that he became an extremely widely read and self-taught man with eclectic interests. His diaries suggest that he began his first novel when he was nine, and he was writing, directing, and acting in his own and other amateur productions at least as early as 1910. The Brooker family emigrated to Canada, settling in Portage la Prairie in 1905, but the year seems to have been a momentous one for the young Brooker in other ways as well. According to a manuscript entitled 'The World and I - A Voyage of Self-Exploration' (Box 6:2), one of his many attempts to explain his life and thought, he continued to be haunted by the tragic death of a girl whom he had left behind him in England. Brooker blamed his failure to answer her letters, although he was seriously ill with typhoid, as the cause of her death. The shock of his illness coupled with this tragedy and his subsequent sense of guilt seem to have occasioned some type of illumination that influenced him for the rest of his life and may have contributed to his interest in mysticism.⁵ In 1910 Brooker returned to England via New York. That he attended the theatre in both places is certain, but what he saw or why he made this trip is not yet known. In a manuscript called 'Years' (8:4) which has biographical notes from the period 1905 to 1910-11 he does not provide details of his activities, but he does mention having seen O'Neill senior in The Count of Monte Cristo and having read Thus Spake Zarathustra and Edward Gordon Craig's The Art of the Theatre in 1908. (This was first published in English in 1905.)

During these years (1905-14), Brooker worked for the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, took night courses, and married Mary Aurilla - 'Rill' -Porter (1913), with whom he owned and operated a movie theatre in Neepawa. He worked in journalism and advertising as well, wrote film scripts and criticism, and was already drawing by this time.⁶ After the war, when he had served in the Royal Canadian Engineers, Brooker worked on newspapers in Portage la Prairie, Winnipeg, and Regina. He moved to Toronto in 1921 where he worked on the Globe and became owner and editor of Marketing (an advertising and marketing trade journal) and immediately plunged into the artistic life of the city. He was soon a member of The Arts and Letters Club (joining some time prior to 1927) and probably the Canadian Theosophical Society, which had three thriving lodges in Toronto in the twenties.⁷ Through these connections he formed close acquaintance with men such as William Arthur Deacon, Roy Mitchell, Carroll Aikins, Lawren Harris, Fred Housser, and Charles Comfort, who did a fine sketch of Brooker in 1929.⁸ Brooker's biography during these years is beyond the narrow scope of this paper, but it is a story that should be told if only because his path intersected with those of so many other important figures of the day. According to Herman Voaden, who spent long enjoyable evenings with the Brookers discussing art, reading from work-in-progress, or listening to the hockey broadcasts, Brooker was 'an intense, excitable, immensely gifted artist.' ⁹

Brooker died in 1955 and although he produced less - in literature and painting - during the forties, he continued to be active at least until 1950. The story of his career as a painter is outlined in Dennis Reid's fine monograph, Bertram Brooker (1973). In Reid's opinion, Brooker experienced two extremely creative periods, from 1927-30 and from 1934-37, but he was often discouraged by public reception of his work and, in the last analysis, seriously hampered as an artist by the demands of business life.¹⁰ These periods of creative activity, particularly the second, coincide exactly with Brooker's main literary achievements. As far as this study is concerned, the most interesting parts of the Brooker Collection at The University of Manitoba are the plays and the drafts of quasi-autobiographical and philosophical prose works, some of which appear to have been the beginnings of novels, stories or even plays. Much of my sense of Brooker's mystical and philosophical context comes from some of these documents, fragmentary as they are, from his personal library, and from a few published pieces.

It would seem that only a few of his plays were ever performed. In addition to Within and The Dragon, Voaden produced A Cosmopolitan Christmas as part of the 1938 Christmas dinner entertainment at The Arts and Letters Club. In 1939 one act from his futuristic satire The Storks (parodying Aristophanes' The Birds) was staged at the Club, and his realistic The Dead Should Sleep, about a murdered wife and an obsessed daughter, was entered in the Central Ontario Region of the Dominion Drama Festival.¹¹ Michelle Lacombe mentions a play called 'The Pacifist, a Play of the Next War' which was also performed by the Club, but I have not yet found a copy and nothing by this name appears in the Brooker Collection.¹² The plays in the Collection, like the fiction and poetry for that matter, range widely from biblical subjects (Job and Barabbas), a rather dated piece on motherhood, several comic skits and murder mysteries, one rather interesting Pirandellian-style treatment of the Garden of Eden called simply, 'Male and Female,' and few realist dramas dealing with love triangles, and two unusual quasi-dramatic fragments, 'The Measure of Gordon Craig' and 'Experience.'

Without doubt Brooker is best known for his paintings and his novel, Think of the Earth, published by Jonathan Cape in 1936 and winner of the first Governor-General's Award for fiction that year. It is a highly improbable story of love, mystery, and murder in a small Manitoba community and its chief importance today is the light it sheds on Brooker's religious thinking. The hero, an English wanderer and mystic (a fictionalized version of Brooker himself ?), experiences a miraculous illumination that allows him to understand the nature of evil and the essential non-material oneness of life. Tavistock describes this miracle as within him, here and now, and explains that, 'It wasn't like a light, but it was as though I had been blind all my life - and suddenly saw the earth for the first time.' ¹³ He published two other novels, a detective 'pot-boiler' The Tangled Miracle (1936) and The Robber (1949), a story about Barabbas which was later dramatized for radio in 1950 and 1951.¹⁴ Only three of his poems were published during his lifetime (in Canadian Forum, 1930), but in Sounds Assembling Birk Sproxton has gathered together several of his best poems and excerpts from some of his published and unpublished essays, thus providing a more complete sense of Brooker's abilities. As an essayist he wrote widely on modern art, always defending modernism against bigoted attacks - for example, 'Nudes and Prudes' - and championing Canadian artists. His interest in mysticism is apparent in articles on e.e. cummings and R.M. Bucke, both published in the Canadian Forum during 1930 and reprinted in Sounds Assembling.

Perhaps the most significant of his publications were his two Yearbook[s] of the Arts in Canada for 1928-29 and 1936. In 'When We Awake', the introduction to the 1928-29 volume, Brooker appeals to Canadians for support for their own art and culture. He analyses the problems facing the artist in this country and in a contemporary world obsessed with science and mechanization; then, in highly theosophical sounding terms, he stresses his belief that great art, like religion, expresses the 'unity of being' and 'the mystery of the whole of life.' ¹⁵ In his introduction to the second Yearbook, entitled 'Art and Society,' he develops his non-representational concept of art, and this essay, together with the final chapters of Think of the Earth, provides the best published evidence of Brooker's philosophy, which is mystical, holistic, and quite self-consciously anti-utilitarian and anti-rationalist:

The universe is not good. It is perfect, but it is not good. Perfection lies beyond good and evil.... The universe was not made for man - for a part of itself. It was made whole and is perfect always, and yet is ever changing - creating a new harmony, a new perfection, at every moment. ¹⁶

For Brooker, the senses break up our awareness of the wholeness and unity of life, which cannot be grasped with the mind or the body alone, but must be intuited through vision and creative imagination.

In their biography of William Arthur Deacon, Clara Thomas and John Lennox claim that Brooker was a member of the Canadian Theosophical Society as early as 1921. Precisely when and where (whether Winnipeg or Toronto) he joined the group, or even if he actually did, is not clear from his own records. Brooker referred to himself as an 'ultimatist' and claimed that there were only three 'ultimatists': Edward Gordon Craig, Olive Schreiner, and himself. His library included many works on philosophy, mysticism, art and aesthetics, as well as a wide range of literature. Some of the more interesting philosophers and mystics were Bergson, Boehme, Santayana, Swedenborg, Ouspensky, and Hugh I'Anson Fausset ¹⁷(though the manuscripts show that he was familiar with Ortega y Gasset, Hermann Keyserling, and Bucke's Cosmic Consciousness). The writers of greatest importance to him were without doubt Blake and Whitman, though he owned several volumes of Dostoevsky, Strindberg, Ibsen, and O'Neill, and had first editions of Finnegan's Wake (1939) and Under the Volcano (1947).

As anyone familiar with Theosophy or Malcolm Lowry will realize, Brooker's reading alone suggests that he was interested in a spiritualist, Heraclitean, and anti-Cartesian (specifically, for Brooker, non-dualistic) view of man and his universe. In a short typescript called 'Biography of a Mind' dated 19 March 193 0 (7:1), he provides a decidedly phenomenological interpretation of the self and consciousness in which he stresses the oneness of all things (as he does in his Yearbook introductions and Think of the Earth) and the reality of process and change - ideas of primary importance to men like Bergson and Ortega. In an earlier typescript, 'A Plan of Life,' 29 February 1924 (1:16), he praises nature at length and comments upon the need for flexibility and progress in the development of consciousness; 'the secret,' he writes, echoing Ouspensky among others 'must lie ... in perpetual movement in harmony, which is the equivalent of rest.' He summarizes these views on reality and vision in the Blakean conclusion to the didactic allegorical play fragment, Experience: A Drama in Six Acts, dated 29 May 1929 (2:2) and an obvious precursor to The Dragon: 'all things coalesce and sharpen / and married [sic] contraries.' ¹⁸ But if Brooker was a mystic, he was also (as were many Theosophists) an optimist who believed that a correct understanding of and living with the world would lead to a better evolving human consciousness and world; this Ortega-like ideal he called 'Becoming-as-Ethics.' In the pursuit of this evolving consciousness and the expression of this spiritual awareness of oneness and harmony, art played a strategic role, and Brooker shared this view of art with other Canadians, such as Roy Mitchell (a copy of whose Creative Theatre he owned) and Lawren Harris, as well as with Europeans like his self-styled fellow 'ultimatist,' Edward Gordon Craig and the Blaue Reiter painter, Franz Marc, who (like Harris) believed that art was 'the boldest departure from nature and naturalism, the bridge to the world of the spirit.' ¹⁹

Before turning to Craig who leads us directly to Brooker's use of the theatre, some mention should be made of Olive Schreiner and her privileged position in Brooker's trio of 'ultimatists' By the term 'ultimatism,' Brooker seems to have meant not only a non-Christian belief in 'spiritism,' but also a passionate revolt against materialism in philosophy and life and against realism in art. Whatever other qualities Brooker applauded in Schreiner and Craig, he perceived them as anti-realists who were 'responsive to natural phenomena which bear the secrets of Ultimate unity in their forms, rhythms and relationships.' ²⁰

Olive Schreiner (1855-1920), born on a South African farm into a strict Wesleyan family, began to doubt Christianity as a child and to replace a Christian God with a love of nature. Later in life she claimed that at five years of age she was suddenly aware of 'the unity of all things, and that they were alive, and that [she] was a part of them..' ²¹ Schreiner's socialism and feminism, her opposition to Rhodes and Kruger, were the practical concerns of a nature imbued with mysticism and deeply torn between her longing for moral evolution through love and mutual human respect and the realities of politics and sexuality. By chance she discovered Herbert Spencer's book, First Principles, when she was sixteen, and he helped her ' to believe in a unity underlying all nature.' ²² Her essentially mystical perception of the world must have been reinforced during her sojourn in England in the 1880s when she became very close friends with Havelock Ellis and the socialist, writer, Whitmanite, and Theosophist, Edward Carpenter.²³ Brooker owned a copy of Carpenter's Love's Coming of Age, so Carpenter may well be one of the links between Schreiner and himself, as well as a source for Brooker's ideas about love and the inner life.

Schreiner is particularly well known for two books, The Story of an African Farm (1883) and Women and Labour (1911), but it is African Farm that was more likely to have moved Brooker. The novel cannot be quickly summarized; it is a beautiful, complex (not always successful) mixture of realistic fiction about three children growing up in harsh circumstances on a South African farm and lengthy passages of quasi- allegorical, lyrical mysticism. The realistic pole of the novel lies with the heroine, Lyndall, whose ideals are crushed by a sexist world. The mystical pole, however, rests firmly on the farmhand, Waldo, who is usually seen as Schreiner's spokesman. It is Waldo who suffers alienation from Christianity before realizing that 'Nature' is 'the flowing vestment of an unchanging reality.' ²⁴ And it is Waldo who conceives of existence as a great tree of which we are all a part: 'Not a chance jumble; a living thing, a One' (SAF, 153). Nevertheless, the novel ends tragically because, despite their understanding, illumination, strength, and vision, Waldo and Lyndall cannot withstand the forces of human ignorance, brutality, and materialism arrayed against them. Schreiner concludes on a dark note of wasted nobility and lost potential. Certainly, in his life and work, Brooker explored Schreiner's polarization between the demands of the flesh and practical reality on the one hand and the desire for an idealized expression of spiritual illumination on the other. It is a tension that defines the man and the artist.

In 'The Measure of Gordon Craig' (2:1), which may have been begun as early as 1912,²⁵ Brooker's spokesman praises Craig as no less than 'the greatest man alive in the world today.' The comment itself is utterly serious, despite the rather satirical portrait of the four writers whose conversation constitutes this play fragment, and it suggests the high esteem in which Brooker held Craig and the degree to which Craig probably influenced Brooker's thinking about the theatre. In notes to a draft of this work, Brooker himself lists fifteen points in praise of Craig, including among them the British theorist's anti-realist and spiritual conception of the stage. Craig's own views are reasonably well known and although his ecstatic rhetoric is a strain to read today, he was an influential figure in the development of a thoroughly modern non-representational and expressionistic use of the theatre.²⁶ He too was influenced by Whitman and believed in the essential spirituality and unity of theatrical expression. In his writings, as well as in his drawings of stage sets, he stressed simplicity and abstraction, the use of strong verticals to express a spirituality that dwarfs mere mortals, a dramatic use of lighting to create chiaroscuro and a strategic use of stairs; there were, said Craig, 'no more lovely things than ... flights of steps.' ²⁷ He called for 'Über-Marionettes' instead of traditional actors in order to guard against the evils of representation: 'Do away with the actor, and you do away with the means by which a debased stage-realism is produced and flourishes' (On the Art of the Theatre, p 81). But these strongly expressed views were not intended as attacks on actors per se so much as criticism of a highly realistic acting style; Craig wanted a stylized, almost somnambulistic - hence puppetlike - style of acting.

As Brooker noted in 'The Achievement of Gordon Craig,' Craig placed great emphasis upon the mystical and expressive qualities of movement and the dramatic power of silence within the set; for example, to explain his 1906 'Study for Movement,' Craig wondered whether it would be better to strip away a snow storm and even discard the symbolic gestures of the man fighting the elements in order to concentrate upon the movements of some intangible material which would suggest the movements which the soul of man makes battling against the soul of nature' (Towards, p 48). Brooker reiterates this view in 'The Achievement of Gordon Craig' when he has his Craig supporter insist that 'art ... is the material expression of the immaterial soul.' Craig was one of the first Europeans, and perhaps the most influential, to articulate a symbolic and expressionistic aesthetic for the theatre, and Canadians like Mitchell, Voaden, and Brooker are following in his footsteps. It was, however, the Czech dramatist Paul Kornfeld, later Reinhardt's dramaturg, who in 1913 gave this type of theatre its characteristically expressionist name - Seelendrama or drama of the soul. Abstraction, motion, and the expression of the soul are the basic constituents of Brooker's aesthetic, whether in painting or literature, and his best work displays these qualities.

As I have demonstrated, several of his essays and manuscripts explore this aesthetic, but another fine statement of his view is the poem 'Emergence,' where he calls for a new vision that avoids 'the sin of imitation' to concentrate upon the inner essences of objects, movement and the self:

let us forget, for instance, street-cars
and when one plunges
redly rushing out of a subway
[... ]
let us see headlongness
pouring itself rectangularly
and feel the jarring roar
as the drums of our blood are felt
beating the incredible swift, inevitable march
that is our whole formless forward-going.²⁸

Brooker's disregard for grammatical rules and punctuation, and his construction of adverbs from adjectives ('redly rushing,' 'rectangularly'), although not striking in the context of Joyce, the Expressionists, and Dadaists, or imagists like Pound and Williams, nevertheless illustrate his awareness of the need to shatter conventional realist forms in order to express the inner forces of life. The formal parallels between this poem and paintings like Sounds Assembling or his two expressionistic plays are striking.

Both Within and The Dragon were produced by Herman Voaden on the stage of the Toronto Central Highschool of Commerce in 1935 and 1936 respectively, and in Voaden's words, 'the two plays he wrote for the Workshop [were] milestones in Canadian expressionistic theatre writing.' ²⁹Within: A Drama of Mind in Revolt is the more purely expressionistic of the two. It is a short one-act play set in the 'interior of the human brain.' ³⁰ The man whose mind we enter as the play begins is dreaming of the woman he loves but suspects of betraying him. As the dream develops, his agitation increases until, in a frenzy, he almost murders her. The dream (if it remains one, which is unclear from this script) ends abruptly with the forces of the mind in revolt smashing the Will. This highly erotic and violent scenario is framed by the voices of the Author and an Angel in a manner reminiscent of Pirandello and Evreinov. In response to the Angel's disorientation, the Author explains that they 'are only ideas that have entered his ... mind to observe it' (W, p 3); they have been drawn by his 'dream.' But the Angel, troubled by his loss of freedom, continues to question the Author: 'Is this one of the chambers of hell?''And these strange forms - what are they?' 'And what is under this dome?' The Will lurks invisible under the dome, which will be smashed at the climax, the 'strange forms' are 'the organs of the senses,' and the man's mind is a hell because the senses and Reason insist upon measuring and labelling experience. 'Because of the counting,' the Author explains, 'we shut ourselves out of eternity - which is all around us in a colossal moment - now!' (W, p 2).

Suddenly the light increases and the voice of Instinct announces that She is coming. At this point the senses, nerves, Reason and Will all begin to speak, supported by a chorus of voices which repeats the words of the principals. As anger and passion increase, Instinct and Reason begin to battle for control of the Will with an Antiphonal Chorus echoing their words in an emotional crescendo. Under the sway of the doubts of Reason, Will succumbs to hate and jealousy and urges the body to rise up and kill the escaping woman. But Instinct calls for revolt: 'Smash this empty shell. Destroy forever this whispering myth of the will. Strike!' (W, p 14). The dream play ends in a destructive frenzy with the Author running on stage calling for the curtain.

If Brooker had ended his play on that note, he would have created an extremely interesting portrayal of man's delusion and self-destruction, but he felt the need of an epilogue which would explain the play and balance the opening frame, and it is on the final remarks of the Author and Angel that the drama flounders. Not content to have shown man's violence and helplessness, Brooker's Angel announces that man's misunderstanding of himself equals his misunderstanding of God, who is a flowing power, not a controlling will. The play ends in darkness with a light shining on the 'lifted face of the angel' and the chorus chanting 'For ever and ever and ever.' Brooker has used expressionist means to portray his 'ultimatist' belief in a vision of spiritual harmony and unity that lies beyond the rational limits of human understanding.

In an early fragment of the play dated 7 November 1927, Brooker calls for dancers, revolving discs in bright red light, and 'brain-figures' on cords. Instinct and Reason are enthroned at the top of the dome (or brain); everything is in darkness at the beginning while the Author and Angel speak. Although there is a plot line, it is of virtually no consequence and there are no speaking parts written for the man and his lover, Eleanor, who do not even appear on the stage. The entire play, including the set, employs Craig's concepts of abstraction, motion, and puppetlike acting in order to express warring inner forces; it is these forces which we see on the stage acting out the drama 'within.'

Actual stage directions are sparse, and Voaden says nothing specific about his production of the play, but Lawrence Mason in the Globe praised the 'choral speaking, massed groups, sculptural poses, shadow effects, contrasting voice-timbres' which held the audience 'quite spell-bound.' ³¹ Clearly, Voaden's application of his 'symphonic expressionism' to the play seemed to suit it well. Its extreme abstraction, using forces within an unnamed man, its hybrid subject-matter combining themes of passion, betrayal and violence with a kind of mystical moralizing, both of which recall many German expressionist plays and films, and its focus on instinct and the inner turmoil of man all indicate Brooker's interest in and knowledge of contemporary European theatre; Strindberg, Wedekind, even Kokoschka (surely no favourite of Brooker's) come to mind.

But the most important parallel is the one Mason mentioned in his review: Nikolai Evreinov's The Theatre of the Soul: A One-Act Monodrama with Prologue (1912). Evreinov left the Soviet Union in 1925, and his monodramas were well known in the West by 1930 so, although there is as yet no factual evidence that Brooker knew Evreinov's plays, there is a good chance that he could have seen or read about them.³² Evreinov is in every way a proto-expressionist, but his decidedly satiric use of the stage marks him as closer to Pirandello than to the heavier-handed Germans. His comic, satiric touch also distinguishes The Theatre of the Soul from Within, for in Evreinov's play a pompous professor introduces the bathetic little drama to be played out within the tripartite soul of a man, by means of a diagram of the heart. When the rational aspect of the soul - played by S¹ -and the emotional aspect - S² - erupt into a wild argument over the relative merits of wife and mistress, S² strangles S¹ before committing suicide. This suicide is portrayed as a farce: 'an enormous, gaping hole appears in the heart [the setting for the play], out of which roll red ribbons.'³³ The stage is then left to S³ - the subconscious - who picks up his bags and walks off. What this brief comparison with Evreinov highlights is the similarity in setting and the relative moral seriousness of Brooker's play. He could be light and satirical, as so many of his manuscripts indicate, but when he chose to use the stage experimentally he departed from Evreinov's type of theatre in order to implement the ideas of Craig and to express his 'ultimatist' vision.

The second Brooker one-act play produced by Voaden in his Play Workshop was The Dragon: A Parable of Illusion and Disillusion (1936). Voaden found this play 'even more impressive' than Within, very likely because in structure and staging it was highly expressionistic. Reviews by Augustus Bridle, Lawrence Mason, and W. S. Milne describe it as 'a series of transcendental scenes ending in a tremendous death-mask projection,' with dramatic lighting, impressive crowd movements, and a 'ruly brilliant use of moveable masking curtains' (perhaps derived from Craig's designs or work by Reinhardt).³⁴ However, the actual text suggests that Brooker was using expressionist techniques of abstraction, expression of inner forces, scenic structure reminiscent of expressionist Stationen, and highly stylized speech and movement, in order to create an allegory. The moralizing already present in the frame of Within is accentuated here until it controls and dominates the play. Unfortunately, the thinking behind the play seems incoherent and inadequately expressed, so that one could be deeply impressed by the spectacle, but confused by the actual message. In other words, the expressionism may have worked in production, but the allegory does not.

The play, which Brooker called 'Divisions' in other drafts, calls for eight quasi-allegorical figures: the Stage Manager, the Dragon Slayer, the Great Mother, the Questioner, the Answerer, Good, Evil, and Adam, but Adam does not appear.³⁵ These speakers are supported by two choruses, one on stage, one off. The play is built upon two metaphors: that the world is a stage and that the Stage Manager is mankind thinking up or dreaming the pernicious myths to be enacted. He enters dressed in ordinary clothes, carrying a script, and calls for light. He orders the construction of a world complete with 'The Great Beast,' masked figures of Good and Evil, a Dragon Slayer and, of course, 'a colossal figure of Death, wrapped in a cloak, blacker than night and deeper' (Dragon, p 2). When the Questioner asks what these shapes are, the Stage Manager claims they are his 'Stage Properties,' not Visions but 'Divisions! For all my dreams divide. To see-to think-to dream is but to split the unity of Act into a myriad possibles' (Dragon, p 3). A mighty battle between the Beast and the Dragon Slayer follows until time, 'he helpless beating of man's thought against the unseverable, eternal flow of being'(Dragon, p 6), is conceived. The Great Mother enters, followed by Good and Evil who fight, playing out the Stage Manager's prediction that 'all my dreams divide. And you two, shuttling through the world ... shall breed divisions still more dolorous' (Dragon, p 8).

At this point, Death is revealed behind the masking curtains. According to Brooker's instructions, he is tall, wrapped in black, 'with a grinning skull ... lit cadaverously from one side with a green light.' His appearance is accompanied by off-stage singing from the St Matthew Passion, which is used at several points in the play. When the Dragon Slayer fails to defeat Death, the stage is plunged into darkness and the Stage Manager rushes in exclaiming that 'the power is shut off' and calling for candles. However, the Chorus is not comforted. They turn on the Stage Manager as the 'father of lies' and drive him from his own stage. After this, the play ends quickly and ecstatically with the Dragon Slayer telling the chorus to extinguish their candles and climb out 'of this flickering world of myths and shadows':

DRAGON SLAYER: Put out your candles now, and let the one light ascend through you - and you will see the impossible. You will see that the Many are One - and the One the Many - the one great spirit of undivided humanity divine. And you will rise like the sun - single and glorious - in heaven - you will ascend - as one man. (Dragon, p 13)

The stage darkens, the Chorus repeats 'Ascend!' and the light 'dawns and grows' while the Chorus off-stage sings one of the most explicitly Christian passages from the Passion.

This final message should already be familiar, for it is the 'ultimatist' vision that Brooker was expounding in his Yearbook introductions, several essays and poems, and in Think of the Earth. What is dissatisfying here, apart from the preaching, is the uncomfortable conflation of mysticism and Christian doctrine and the jarring discrepancy in rhetoric: 'you will arise like the sun ... you will ascend as one man' says Brooker; '0 Father, let Thy will be done' writes Bach. Although a Heraclitean world view in which consciousness is always in the process of becoming and human beings and the universe evolve continuously without Cartesian dichotomies is both consistent and capable of clear articulation, it loses its impact as a vision of reality when it is conflated with the hierarchical paternalism of Bach's text. Moreover, Brooker demythologized human and divine will in Within, so that the message here seems to contradict the main point of the earlier play. This use of the St Matthew Passion may be less of a puzzle, however, given Brooker's extreme admiration for Craig who struggled for years with plans to stage the St Matthew Passion, considering it to be ideal theatre.

Many expressionist plays fail when they attempt to move beyond the expression of troubled inner worlds of dream or thought toward some quasi-mystical vision of reality or human significance.³⁶ And yet most of these plays incorporate a symbolic or an outright allegorical element; Strindberg's To Damascus and A Dream Play are certainly key influences in the development of this type of expressionist theatre. But Brooker's Dragon, with its theatrum mundi metaphor, has some quite close parallels with two Russian plays which were popular in avant-garde circles in the twenties: Leonid Andreev's The Life of Man (1906) and The Black Maskers (1908), translated into English in 1925. Both plays are highly symbolic soul dramas depicting man, his illusions, his quest for truth and happiness, and his final defeat, and both use a number of highly expressionistic techniques to make an essentially allegorical statement. The Life of Man is interesting in connection with Brooker because of its central figure, The Being in Grey, who stands on stage throughout holding the slowly guttering candle of man's life, and speaks the Prologue and final words. Although externalized in this way and suggestive of death (the portrayal of Death with his candles in Fritz Lang's film Der Müde Tod [1921 ] comes to mind as well), this Being in Grey is a force within man, and the flaring up and dying out of light expresses the growth and death of the spirit. The use of light and dark, of candles, and the figure of Death, who is seldom seen but is always present in The Dragon, may well owe something to Andreev's play.

The Black Maskers, though a much more complex and challenging work, is even closer to Brooker's Dragon in theme and philosophical import. Andreev appears to have seen human tragedy in terms of dichotomies, and The Black Maskers is a kind of parable of man's failure to understand the divisions within his own soul and the deceptive limitations of his mind and senses which lead him to madness and death.³⁷ The hero of the play, Lorenzo, orders a masked ball, which Andreev uses to externalize his inner fears, doubts, confusion, and hatred, and he dies in his burning castle calling out to God. For all its power - and some of the more expressionist scenes are extremely fine - the play falters in its final attempt to reconcile man's illusions with a Christian eschatology. The straining after affirmation is only somewhat less contrived than the finale of The Dragon because Andreev's play is longer and has more room to develop.

Writing in the University of Toronto Quarterly for 1936-37, W.S. Milne praised The Dragon as 'the finest expressionistic writing in Canadian drama so far.' ³⁸ Although I cannot agree with Milne - Voaden's Murder Pattern of the same year is far superior - it is gratifying to realize that critics like Milne, Mason, and Bridle appreciated these attempts at avant-garde theatre in Canada in the thirties and were willing to call it by its name. In general, however, there seems to have been a deep resistance to non-representational art in this country, whether in painting where expressionism continues to be referred to as impessionism,³⁹ or in theatre where Herman Voaden pioneered the move to a non-realistic, presentational theatre of 'symphonic expressionism.' These two Brooker plays cannot be separated from Voaden who produced them and for whose Workshop they were polished. At the same time, as I have tried to show, Brooker's plays grow quite naturally out of his own thinking which leaned much more to the theosophical and symbolic than to the deeply pessimistic expressionism of O'Neill, against whose influence he recommended doses of Whitman to the younger Voaden.⁴⁰ Furthermore, Brooker was thoroughly conversant with modernism in its many guises, and his own work must be seen as a late flowering of that plant.

His strongest affinities overall are with the symbolic and lyrical aspects of expressionism and particularly with a proto-expressionist like Craig. It was Craig who pointed the way to a non-realistic, spiritual art of the theatre; it was Strindberg and the Germans and Russians with their monodramas, Seelendrama, and Kammerspiele who provided the working models for the plays examined here. Quite fortuitously, Voaden provided a type of Kammerspielhaus for Brooker's chamber plays through his Workshop, and Brooker was surrounded by a number of like-minded artists in Toronto between the wars, artists who, like Harris, rejected surfaces for an 'inner-seeing' that would express not only man's soul but also the divinity flowing through all things.

What these artists were creating was a Canadian modernism that would challenge the conventions of a conservative and largely inattentive public. Despite their varying degrees of mysticism and nationalism, all agreed that a stultifying, reductionist realism should go. For the theatre, this meant, in Roy Mitchell's words, joy, creation, modernity, and originality, and he concluded his essay for Brooker's first Yearbook with a challenge to true creativity:

Thus we may get a theatre of suggestion, of implication, of noble persuasion, of indices to inner forces ... We might learn to think of our figures in a play as souls driving down into manifestation of the powers of souls, vortices which, with ever so little knowledge, we might make do undreamed of things. ('Motion and the Actor,' p 194)

The optimism and sense of mission was high, and it is sad to remember that the dream was so slow to be realized, the energy of that vortex dissipated by war and personal vicissitudes. But if Brooker had done nothing more than these two plays, he would have made his contribution to a period in our literary and theatre history that we have only begun to appreciate.

Notes

"THE LIVING SOUL OF MAN': BERTRAM BROOKER AND EXPRESSIONIST THEATRE

Sherrill E. Grace

1 The contributions in question are MERRILL DENISON'S 'Nationalism and Drama' and CARROLL AIKINS' 'The Amateur Theatre in Canada.' Brooker's criticisms are in an unpublished letter to Herman Voaden, dated 22 February 1930, in the Voaden Collection at York. I would like to extend special thanks to Herman Voaden for permission to quote from his unpublished materials and for his advice on other details and to Victor Brooker and Dr Richard Bennett, Head of Special Collections at The University of Manitoba where the Brooker Collection is housed, for permission to quote from Brooker materials. The archivists at Manitoba and York have been most helpful; without them, of course, and without a research grant from The University of British Columbia, this paper would not have been possible. I would also like to thank Anton Wagner for his help in locating material from the Voaden Collection. The original version of this paper was presented at a session of the Association for Canadian Theatre History/Association d'histoire du théâtre au Canada at the 1984 Learned Societies Conference. Within and The Dragon are soon to be published for the first time in Canadian Drama/L'Art dramatique canadien.
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2 In Sounds Assembling: The Poetry of Bertram Brooker Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 1980, p 13, editor BIRK SPROXTON notes Brooker's contribution to modernism in Canada and the interrelation of the arts at that time.
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3 EZRA POUND describing the vortex in 'Vorticism,' Gaudier-Brzeska New York: New Directions, 1960, p 106
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4 Except where otherwise indicated, the biographical information in the following paragraphs is drawn from the 'Biographical Sketch' in the Register of the Bertram Brooker Collection, compiled by RICHARD E. BENNETT Winnipeg: The University of Manitoba, 1981. The Brooker Collection consists of ten boxes of material including twelve folders of correspondence, diaries, many unpublished literary works, such as novels, stories, poems, and essays, and over thirty plays in varying degrees of completion and draft form. There are, as well, articles on art and on advertising (often under his various pseudonyms, e.g. 'Richard Surrey,' 'Philips E. Spain'), some reviews and photographs, and Brooker's personal library of approximately three hundred titles. References to the Collection are followed by box and folder number. For other information on Brooker, see Sounds Assembling and DENNIS REID'S monograph, Bertram Brooker Ottawa: The National Gallery of Canada, 1973.
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5 My source for this information is the manuscripts, especially a diary-type manuscript called 'Years' (8:4), in which he describes the violent dreams and hallucinations of his illness, and a kind of apologia called 'The World and I - A Voyage of Self-Exploration' (6:2).
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6 SPROXTON, p 7
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7 For an excellent study of Theosophy in Canada, see MICHELLE LACOMBE, 'Theosophy and the Canadian Idealist Tradition: A Preliminary Exploration,' Journal of Canadian Studies 17(2) (Summer, 1982), pp 100-18. Lacombe implies that Brooker was a Theosophist which, considering many of his friends, he may well have been. DENNIS REID, pp 7-8, avoids claiming this and traces Brooker's interest in abstract painting and the spiritual in art to Kandinsky. Reid includes a photograph of a group of Arts and Letters Club members taken c1927 which shows Brooker, Jackson, Denison, MacDonald, Harris, Housser, and Lismer sitting around a table.
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8 The sketch is included in CLARA THOMAS and JOHN LENNOX, William Arthur Deacon: A Canadian Literary Life Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982, and Lismer's amusing sketch 'The Brooker Quartetttttte!' (c1930) captures Brooker's diverse interests and energy; see DENNIS REID, p 16.
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9 VOADEN discusses Brooker and his two Workshop plays in an unpublished typescript, 'Symphonic Expressionism: A Canadian adventure in the direction of a more musical and expressive theatre,' p 75.
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10 These points are made by REID, p 21, and they are true for his literary work as well as his painting.
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11 I am grateful to Hunter Bishop, Archivist of the Arts and Letters Club, for verifying these dates for Brooker performances. W.S. MILNE mentioned The Dead Should Sleep in 'Letters in Canada' drama review in the University of Toronto Quarterly (1939), p 307. Milne criticized the play as 'bathetic.' A longer version of this play called 'Cassandra - A Tragedy in Four Acts' (2:6), suggests the classical echoes of the main family situation and parallels with O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra (1931). In its one-act version, The Dead resembles RINGWOOD'S Still Stands the House (1939), but Ringwood's is the better play.
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12 LACOMBE, p 110. There is no play entitled 'A Cosmopolitan Christmas' in the manuscripts, although there are similar sounding short pieces.
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13 Think of the Earth London: Jonathan Cape, 1936, p 281. This remark by Tavistock closely resembles remarks by the young hero in OLIVE SCHREINER'S The Story of an African Farm, which is discussed below.
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14 SPROXTON, p 8
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15 'When We Awake: A General Introduction' to Yearbook of the Arts in Canada, 1928-29 Toronto: Macmillan, 1929, pp 3-17. After listing the obstacles facing artists in Canada, Brooker concludes that until we can stop seeing 'ourselves as exiles and everybody else as foreigners' we will not create a national culture.
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16 Yearbook of the Arts in Canada, 1936 Toronto: Macmillan, 1936, p xxvii
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17 HUGH I'ANSON FAUSSET was an English mystic and Theosophist who wrote several books, including a spiritual biography called A Modern Prelude (1933), on these subjects. Brooker owned a copy of The Proving of Psyche London: Jonathan Cape, 1929. For an idea of Brooker's intellectual context, compare the following remark from The Proving Psyche with Brooker's 'Art and Society' in the 1936 Yearbook: 'Great art is redemptive because it transcends the opposition of good and evil; in it we experience the world of "becoming" as a creative activity, and realize that ethics and aesthetics are one' (p 41).
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18 This play fragment appears to be an early attempt at the theme used later in The Dragon. In notes for the play, Brooker describes the black and white colour scheme (suggestive of Craig designs), the use of masks and the overall style: 'The whole thing to be written in the Tree of Death style -broken rhythms - fourth-dimensional feeling - even in the mouths of the humans.' Some of the Stage Manager's lines are the same as in the later play, and a huge, omnipresent, silent figure of Death, is already called for. The actual dialogue is very preachy and flat, with Brooker expounding his views on reality, measurement, the illusions of good and evil, and so on.
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19 Quoted in Rudolf Gopas by JIM and MARY BARR New Plymouth, N.Z.: Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, 1982, p 22
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20 'When We Awake,' pp 11-12. See also 'Art and Society.'
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21 From a letter written in 1892, quoted in RUTH FIRST and ANN SCOTT, Olive Schreiner London: Andre Deutsch, 1980, p 54
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22 Quoted in JOYCE AVRECH BERKMAN, Olive Schreiner: Feminism on the Frontier Montreal: Eden Press, 1979, p 77
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23 See discussions of Carpenter in LACOMBE and in FIRST and SCOTT.
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24 The Story of an African Farm Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1971, p 150. African Farm was originally published in 1883, and is hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text.
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25 It is often impossible to date Brooker's work with accuracy, but this twelve-page manuscript has a section of notes attached and these bear the date 10/5/12. The play itself is set in 1912.
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26 In his 1911 'Introduction' to On the Art of the Theatre London: Heinemann, 1914, p xiv, ALEXANDER HEVESI claims that Craig should be credited for almost all the successes of the German theatre in the previous decade and that a 'whole new generation' of Hungarians is under his influence. Brooker owned a first edition (1911) of On the Art of the Theatre, not to be confused with The Art of the Theatre (1905) which Brooker read in 1908. In Continental Stagecraft, originally published in 1922, KENNETH MACGOWAN also acknowledges the importance of Craig in the development of a modern spiritual, expressionist theatre. For a well illustrated and balanced discussion of Craig, see CHRISTOPHER INNES, Edward Gordon Craig Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
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27 Towards a New Theatre New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969, p 41. This was originally published in 1913.
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28 SPROXTON, p 33. Several of the poems in Sounds Assembling, such as 'Mêlée Fantasque,' 'breakfast' and 'fear,' are expressionistic. Others are quite realistic and stylistically conventional, and this desire to work in both modes (realist and abstract) characterizes Brooker's painting, fiction, and dramatic efforts.
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29 'Symphonic Expressionism' p 70, where Voaden also notes Brooker's split between 'high realism' and abstraction
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30 Within, p 1 of a fifteen-page typescript from the Voaden Collection which appears to have been the Workshop script. All quotations are from the York typescript. The Brooker Collection holds two fragments (2:2), both dated 1927, in which Brooker is planning this play. The Angel and Author are there from the start, as is the abstract and expressionist style, but the play began as a more explicit, sexually violent scenario.
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31 LAWRENCE MASON, 'The Play Workshop,' The Globe, 30 March 1935
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32 Life as Theatre: Five Modern Plays by Nikolai Evreinov, trans and ed by CHRISTOPHER COLLINS Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973, p xvi. For discussion of expressionism in the plays of Evreinov and Leonid Andreev, see J.L. STYAN, Modern Drama in Theory and Practice, III, Expressionism and Epic Theatre Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp 89-91, and VLADIMIR MARKOV, 'Russian Expressionism' in Expressionism as an International Literary Phenomenon, ed ULRICH WEISSTEIN Paris: Didier, 1973, pp 315-27.
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33 Evreinov, p 31
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34 See AUGUSTUS BRIDLE, 'Play Workshop does Four Shows in Night,' Toronto Star, 14 March 1936; LAWRENCE MASON, The Globe, 31 March 1936; W.S. MILNE, 'At the Theatre,' Saturday Night, 21 March 1936. Photographs of these productions would be useful indicators of how these plays were staged, but to date I have not located any.
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35 The Dragon: A Parable of Illusion and Disillusion, is a thirteen-page typescript in the Voaden Collection. There is no copy at Manitoba, but there is a 'homemade notebook' of verse and drama citing both plays and suggesting that Brooker may have thought of publishing a collection.
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36 For example, HASENCLEVER's Die Menschen (1918), SORGE'S Der Bettler (1912), even KAISER'S Von Morgens bis Mitternachts (1917)
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37 Plays by Leonid Andreyeff, trans by CLARENCE L. MEADER and FRED NEWTON SCOTT, and introduced by V.V. BUSYANIN. In 'My Diary,' published shortly before Andreev wrote The Black Maskers, he writes: 'The castle is the soul; the lord of the castle is man; the strange black maskers are the powers whose field of action is the soul of man, and whose mysterious nature he can never fathom' p xxii.
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38 'Letters in Canada: 1936', University of Toronto Quarterly VI (1936-37), p 376
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39 See THOMAS and LENNOX, p 175. COMFORT'S essay, 'The Painter and his Model,' Open House, ed WILLIAM ARTHUR DEACON Ottawa: Graphic Publishers Ltd., 1931, was a defense of Picasso and expressionism. It is interesting to note that the expressionist qualities of Harris and Lismer still go unmentioned by most commentators, and that Canada's two finest expressionist painters, Samuel Borenstein (1908-69) and Maxwell Bates (1906-80), have only begun to receive the attention they deserve. For example, see WILLIAM KUHNS and LÉO ROSSHANDLER, Sam Borenstein Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1978. As recently as 1983, DAVID BURNETT and MARILYN SCHIFF could suggest that the extremely vibrant neo-Expressionism in this country is 'naive, a sort of baseless stylism' because it lacks a European political and social history, as if 'destruction, anxiety, and violence' (qualities cited by Burnett and Schiff) are somehow foreign to the Canadian psyche. See Contemporary Canadian Art Edmonton: Alberta, 1983, p 285.
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40 See SHERRILL GRACE, '"A Northern Quality": Herman Voaden's Canadian Expressionism,' Canadian Drama/L'Art dramatique canadien 8(i) (1982), pp 1-14, and ANTON WAGNER, '"A Country of the Soul": Herman Voaden and Lowrie Warrener and the Writing of Symphony,' Canadian Drama/L'Art dramatique canadien 9(ii) (1983), pp 203-19. In a letter to LeMoine Fitzgerald, 17 October 1930, Brooker describes his unmerciful mauling of Voaden's and Warrener's expressionist Symphony, and he says he has convinced Voaden to change references to expressionism in his 'Introduction' to Six Canadian Plays Toronto: Copp Clark, 1930. Whitman, says Brooker, is a better guide than O'Neill. A look at Voaden's 'Introduction', however, shows how determined Voaden was to pursue his expressionist idea.
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