Eugene Benson
Although it is my task to review only the drama entries in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, I cannot resist praising William Toye for the monumental enterprise which he has discharged so well. This is the first volume of the Oxford Companions to be devoted exclusively to Canadian literature and its 843 pages provide months of enjoyable and rewarding reading. With some exceptions the entries are not merely catalogues of biographical and bibliographical material but are miniature essays offering critical insights and interpretive materials that will undoubtedly provide new bearings on the literatures of English Canada and Québec. This is also the first Oxford Companion to devote so much space to Canadian drama; I counted about ninety entries. One has only to compare the entries here with those in Norah Story's Oxford Companion to Canadian History and Literature (1967) and the Supplement (1973) to see how Canadian drama has forced its way in the last fifteen years into the consciousness of our literary historians.
At the heart of the drama entries are four major pieces, two by Professors Leonard Conolly and Richard Plant on drama in English and two by Professors Louise Forsyth and James Noonan on drama in Quebec. All four are excellent overviews; Noonan's 8000-word entry covering the period from 1948 to 1981 constitutes as concise and intelligent a guide to modern Quebec drama as one could wish. These pieces are complemented by a number of generic entries relating to collective creations, regional drama (under the regional literatures of the various provinces), translations, and children's drama in both English and French, the latter by Professors Joyce Doolittle and Hélène Beauchamp. While Sheila Egoff in the 1975 edition of The Republic of Childhood was able to refer to only six Canadian plays and musicals for children, Professor Doolittle describes more than forty published works and refers to numerous others that have received successful productions.
There are also (and this is a departure from Story's Companion) biographical/critical entries on Canadian dramatists. There are long entries on the more established of our playwrights - Coulter, Davies, Ringwood, Reaney, Gélinas, Tremblay et al - but less well-known dramatists like Stephen Petch, Ted Allan, Leon Rooke, Bryan Wade, and Wilfred Watson receive notices. My favourite among these lesser luminaries is someone rejoicing in the name Hyacinthe-Poirer Leblanc de Marconnay who, according to Professor Leonard Doucette, concludes his play Le Soldat with a letter from a dying soldier to his beloved asking her to take care of his old mother - and his dog.
As one might expect, the many entries on drama vary in quality. Professor David Hayne's entry on Fréchette, for example, is a disappointing biographical/bibliographical note that makes no attempt to analyse, even briefly, any of Fréchette's novels or plays; Professor Donald Smith, on the other hand, manages, in fewer words, to tell us a great deal about Françoise Loranger and the development of her dramatic oeuvre. I was taken aback by Professor Ann Wilson's assertion that John Murrell's language 'tends to lack subtlety'; when I first read his Memoir in typescript it was the range and richness of his language (among other considerations) which led me to recommend that the play be given its premiere at the Guelph Spring Festival in 1977. (The name 'Siobhan' is also misspelled in this entry.)
Certain entries are provocative in that their findings are contradicted by those of other entries in the same area. For example, Louise Forsyth writes: 'It would be impossible to overestimate the importance of Legault and the Compagnons in the development of drama in Québec.' But when James Noonan points out that Legault's company 'performed only one Canadian play during its entire career (1937- 52),' we might speculate that Legault's importance has been exaggerated and that his insistence on an international repertoire actually hindered the development of an indigenous Quebec theatre. Richard Plant, to cite another example, writes that James Reaney 'vaulted into pre-eminence among English-Canadian playwrights with the Donnelly trilogy' and praises his 'idiosyncratic genius.' James Noonan, who wrote the main entry on Reaney, is more wary, pointing to the lack of development in plot and character in Reaney's plays and to their 'lack of emotional depth.' Such critical differences invite one to ask why Reaney's plays are rarely played outside Canada and why, when they are revived, they seem so contrived in their academicism and theatrical fussiness.
But if, in general, one can praise the very high quality of the drama entries in this Companion, one must draw attention to a crucial editorial decision that drastically reduces the value of this volume to those concerned with promoting Canadian drama. That editorial decision to exclude entries on Canadian theatre was, we think, quite wrong, for it overrides the fact that drama and theatre are inseparable, and it reinforces the vicious and persistent academic tendency to treat drama in vacuo, divorced from its roots and nurture in the theatre. Drama as a genre is distinguished from poetry and fiction because it is inextricably limited to performance; it is because that distinction is so often ignored - or not understood - that we get so many studies of dramatists that are irremedially vitiated by a methodology alien to the genre.
It is a demonstrable fact that the majority of the significant Canadian playwrights of the last twenty years have been promoted by the alternate theatre and not the establishment. But in this Companion there is no 'Alternate Theatre' entry and no individual entries on such influential theatres as Theatre Passe Muraille, Saskatoon's Twenty-Fifth Street Theatre, Tarragon Theatre or Tamahnous. There are no entries on such important directors as Paul Thompson, Bill Glassco, or George Luscombe, no entries on the history and manner of Canadian theatre set design, lighting, acting styles. There are no entries on garrison theatre or military theatricals or touring companies, no entries on Canadian radio or television drama, no entries on the Hart House theatre, Sidney Risk's Everyman Theatre, or the New Play Society, Toronto, which produced so many new Canadian plays. There are no entries on the Stratford Festival, the Shaw Festival, or the Charlottetown Festival and there are no entries on Tyrone Guthrie (there is an entry on one Norman Guthrie!) or John Hirsch, and actors like Julia Arthur, Raymond Massey and William Hutt are totally ignored. I could go on and on listing inexcusable omissions.
A simple and ineluctable conclusion emerges from a perusal of The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature and that is the urgent need to bring out A Companion to Canadian Drama and Theatre or An Encyclopaedia of Canadian Drama and Theatre. We have the scholars, we have the materials, and we have a strong case to make in obtaining SSHRC and foundation funding. If we begin now to make plans for this essential Canadian scholarly project, I am willing to schedule my time so that in the Spring of 1990 I can review this new Companion or Encyclopaedia which will do us all honour.