Anton Wagner
'The basis of all criticism', Nathan Cohen once observed, 'is comparison'. Without the opportunity of judging local, national and international productions of the same or similar work, the critic, Cohen went on to state, would be writing in a critical vacuum. Until recently, the critical evaluation of Canadian dramatic literature has been complicated by the lack of published texts and access to unpublished manuscripts, insufficient knowledge of the theatrical and larger cultural context out of which a dramatist's work emerged and insufficient biographical information relevant to the interpretation of a writer's overall dramatic opus. This critical and factual vacuum has been particularly detrimental to the understanding of dramatists active before the 1970s. When Geraldine Anthony's John Coulter was published in the Twayne World Authors series in 1976, for example, only Coulter's Riel trilogy was still in print out of dozens of scripts written during six decades of work in the theatre, radio and television. Geraldine Anthony's Gwen Pharis Ringwood, published in the same series last year, is of greater value than her study of John Coulter precisely because we can compare her critical evaluations with Ringwood's dramas published in anthologies and periodicals. With the publication of Ringwood's Collected Plays by Borealis Press in 1982, the dramatic works of an English-Canadian playwright and a critical evaluation of those plays will be available for the first time in two companion volumes.
Anthony's Gwen Pharis Ringwood carefully traces the influence of Ringwood's family and prairie environment on her writing, her work with theatre pioneer Elizabeth Sterling Haynes, Frederick Koch and the Carolina Playmakers in the 1930s and Robert Gard and the Alberta Folklore and Local History Project in the 1940s. Chapters on Ringwood's musicals, plays of social protest, children's plays and novels and short stories analyze Ringwood's writing to the present and underline her overall humanitarian poetic vision. A chronology from 1910 to 1981 and a selected bibliography of primary and secondary sources provide an additional overview of Ringwood's life and work.
Anthony's evaluation of Ringwood's writing is frequently perceptive and poetic. She judges Ringwood's comedy-farce Widger's Way as 'a commentary on human weaknesses' and describes The Rainmaker as 'variations on a theme, as pearls on a string, with the people as protagonists and the drought as antagonist'. Still Stands the House is described as 'a tiny gem gathering within it a reflection of the human spirit'. Anthony's discussion of Ringwood's novels Younger Brother and the unpublished Pascal suggests that important insights into Ringwood's world vision and dramatic works can be gained from her fiction.
One can question Anthony's repeated comparisons between Ringwood's dramas and the paintings of the Group of Seven and Emily Carr and the 'affinities' of Ringwood's works with non-Canadian dramatists. Ringwood's fine 1975 The Lodge has 'affinities', we are told, with no less than Chekhov's Cherry Orchard, Hellman's Autumn Garden, Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Lorca's Blood Wedding and The House of Bernarda Alba.
I would also question Anthony's reading of Still Stands the House as an Aristotelian tragedy, her failure to distinguish clearly between Ringwood's minor and major works, her unqualified statement that Ringwood's early female characters 'play the traditional roles of housewife and mother ', and her classification of the radio play The Wall and, the 1979 Mirage as 'musicals'. Ringwood was not asked to write Mirage by the Association for Canadian Theatre History, as Anthony states, but was commissioned at Tom Kerr's suggestion by the University of Saskatchewan under the auspices of the Saskatchewan Department of Continuing Education. Tom Kerr's directorial contribution to that production was also much greater than Anthony acknowledges. Despite these points of contention, Anthony's Gwen Pharis Ringwood is a solid introduction to and evaluation of one of Canada's major 20th century dramatists.