J.A. Euringer
The jacket informs you that within there is recounted '... the absorbing inside story of Canada's most prestigious theatre in crisis.' Well, if you can put aside your critical faculties for a couple of hours and want to escape with a fast-moving, breezy adventure-romance based on recent developments at the Stratford Festival, you will probably enjoy Martin Knelman's A Stratford Tempest. I certainly found it entertaining, compelling and even at times just sufficiently naughty in tone for a can't-put-down couple of hours. As a based-on-truth adventure, for those who like their adventure candied with the caramel of simulated truth, it is right up there with the best of them.
However, whatever Mr Knelman's intentions may have been, this is neither a serious historical recounting nor an unbiased analysis of the Phillips-Hirsch turnover at Stratford. Mr Knelman does not even bother to document his sources for the reconstructed private conversations that are the mainstay of his book. Of course it does not take much imagination to make good guesses as to who the source must have been in many cases - but without a documentation of sources it is impossible to separate with any confidence Mr Knelman's bias from the bias of his sources. It would certainly be as important to know who is absent as a source from any given reconstructed dialogue as it would be to know who contributed.
Two examples should suffice: 'Axeworthy [Lloyd Axeworthy, Minister of Employment and Immigration] remembered how, as a political science professor in Winnipeg, he had watched professors from Michigan bring in their American friends when teaching posts came open, by-passing equally well-qualified Canadians. He wondered whether ...' Is this a fanciful reconstruction, or is Mr Knelman really privy to Mr Axeworthy's innermost thoughts?
Stevens [Peter Stevens, Executive Director of the Festival] left Canada for England on May 17 1981. A day or two before that, clearing out the answering machine on his telephone, he came across an old message. He heard the voice of Robert Hicks, phoning from Ottawa on November 7, to say that things were going very well indeed with Axeworthy's office. Suddenly Stevens was struck by the comedy of it all. Alone in the study of his Stratford house, he began to roar with laughter. Oh?
The book is equally-heavily larded with Knelman's own theatrical-critical
commentary - which is not without value in its own right - but which also
casts its own cloud on the objectivity of the book; for example, it may
be a legitimate and valuable opinion that the 1978 season did not
take off until just before the intermission of A Midsummer Night's Dream
when Maggie Smith did something 'daring' (in the interpretation of
the Bottom scene that Knelman describes as 'pure Romance') but it is hardly
a fact. In a critic's review this type of commentary would be quite appropriate.
In what purports to be the 'Inside story' it becomes part of the general
handful of sand.
Over and above the gossipy breeze of the book, which, as I have commented, has its own rather naughty scintillation, the book does whet the appetite with enough factual material to make one long for a more reliable and objective 'recounting of the inside story' before Mr Knelman's version takes on the incontravertible veracity of legend.