With this issue The Editors introduce FORUM, a section in which correspondence from our readers will be printed. As well as letters such as this one from Herman Voaden, we shall publish essays that are too short for inclusion as regular articles, information about important new projects, and commentary on significant issues relating to Canadian theatre history.
I am pleased to have my play Murder Pattern included in Alexander Leggatt's study of the work of Merrill Denison, Robertson Davies and James Reaney ('Playwrights in a Landscape: The Changing Image of Rural Ontario', Theatre History in Canada/Histoire du Théâtre au Canada, Fall 1980). But I could wish that, as with them, he had based his comments on a knowledge of several of my plays, and not solely on Murder Pattern, which was a departure from the main stream of my experiments and not a typical 'symphonic' play.
Above all, I was at a disadvantage because while he had seen, and in one case had taken part in, productions of their plays, he based his judgment of Murder Pattern on a reading only. This was unfortunate. Few of us can judge an opera from reading its libretto and score. Only in performance do music, words and setting come together as a living work of art. To a lesser extent this is true of plays, and particularly of these plays in which I searched for a new theatre language employing combinations of the arts. Reviews of the productions gave as much attention to the impact of the visual and musical statement as to the dialogue and story. The text was no more than half what the audience saw and heard. My immediate project is to re-create the visual and musical scenarios to make it possible for those actually involved in today's theatre and for critics and historians to evaluate accurately these experiments in terms of today's total theatre experimentation.
I should appreciate it if Professor Leggatt would make an in-depth study of at least the first four plays - the climate and environment in which they were written, the sources and influences which led me to write them, and the considerable body of contemporary critical comment on them, an important yardstick, surely, in reassessing them. Two of these plays were available when he prepared his article: Wilderness on which Rocks is based (Boréal, 1978) and Earth Song (Playwrights Co-op, 1976). Hill-land was available in manuscript in the Metropolitan Toronto Library.
Also available was Stage Voices (Doubleday, 1978), in which I outlined my basic commitment to an innovative, rather than a realistic, Canadian theatre. I was influenced in my reading, play-going and acting by the plays of Yeats and Synge, the symbolic drama of Maeterlinck, the post-war German expressionistic plays, and the early dramas of Eugene O'Neill such as The Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape, The Great God Brown, and Strange Interlude. I was devoted to dance, music and opera. My search for new directions in the theatre quickened with seeing the Diaghilev Ballet, Max Reinhardt's productions, and Wagner's music dramas in the summer of 1928. On my return I saw the hope for a new kind of Canadian theatre in subject and design in the paintings of the Group of Seven. The challenge to create this new theatre is stated in the introduction to Six Canadian Plays (Copp Clark, 1930; reprinted in Canadian Theatre Review 28, Fall 1980). Farthest from my mind was the desire to be a playwright of rural Ontario.
In Stage Voices I defended my right to attempt to capture the spirit of a region in a freer form of theatre. To restate Professor Leggatt's final paragraph, the tragedy of the protagonist in Murder Pattern was to me a source of 'imaginative nourishment'. I am surprised to have the play included with others as 'a drama of frustration'. For me the enveloping non-realistic elements provided 'that balance of engagement and detachment' that I needed to tell the story so that it made a total and true statement about a region I loved.
Professor Leggatt supports his harsh judgment of the text of a musically and visually oriented presentation he has not seen by the claim that I was ignoring the actor. 'Without the actor, there is no theatre'. I hope he will ask to see the draft of my own account of my search for a new theatre language, Symphonic Expressionism. Reading this, he will see that the issues he has raised about the validity of these experiments are not new. They were the focal point of the discussion of the plays in the ten-year period, 1932-1942. On the one hand were the critics who were actor-oriented - Ernest Dale and B.K. Sandwell; on the other were those who wrote about music and painting as well as theatre - Lawrence Mason, Augustus Bridle, Edward Wodson, Pearl McCarthy and Hector Charlesworth. Professor Leggatt is obviously on the side of the former. But I hope that, like them, he will be open-minded about this and other experiments in the arts.
Professor Leggatt links the charge that I neglected the actor to my belief that a new Canadian theatre could be inspired by the paintings of the Group of Seven 'in which there are no human figures'. But the only play directly inspired by these artists was Wilderness, from which I abstracted the symphonic play Rocks. Wilderness is a realistic play for actors. Earth Song is a play for actors. The role of Eve, the heroine, is a challenging one by any standards. It was played by Pam Haney who was professionally trained in England. She was the leading actress in the Sarnia Drama League and spent a summer with the John Holden Players in Bala.
In Hill-land and Murder Pattern I introduced the 'theatrical device' of choric voices and actors which Professor Leggatt calls part of my 'vision of drama of the future' which is now 'dated'. The Greek choruses, the early plays of Eugene O'Neill, and, in Europe that year productions of André Obey's Le Viol de Lucrece by the Compagnie des Quinze, Tyrone Guthrie's production of Thornton Wilder's Pullman Car Hiawatha and the Kurt Jooss ballet The Green Table influenced the writing of both plays. Are these now dated? It is interesting that B.K. Sandwell called Eugene O'Neill one of those 'lesser dramatists' who 'deficient in verbal power, have found it necessary to cover up that deficiency by resorting to other and less inspiring mechanisms'.
Is the device 'dated' in T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, or, to take a more recent example, in Michel Tremblay's Les Belles Soeurs? In an article in the Canadian Theatre Review, 25 (Winter 1980), 'Herman Voaden and the Test of Time', Alan Field, who played the First Earth Voice in Murder Pattern, compares the production he remembers with a Victoria production of Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. 'Like Voaden, Ondaatje uses narrators who interpret meanings and moods, or serve as transitional devices, behind which the actors re-group. Staging is stylistic, there is much music and singing by the players ... the essential point of this comparison ... is that the Ondaatje play did not evoke from its audience anything like the emotional playback, the thrill and electrifying response that Murder Pattern achieved.'
Time will make a final judgment on these plays. I am encouraged by the inclusion of Wilderness and Murder Pattern in The Developing Mosaic (CTR, 1980), by the keen interest of theatre historians and university teachers of drama, and by the warm response of students to whom I have talked about my symphonic expressionism, shown slides of the productions, and read scenes from the plays. This suggests not only a relevance to contemporary multi-media forms of theatre but, equally important to me, an interest in the idealism and intensely spiritual values of these plays which mirrored my 'daily response to life's exultations'. They have nothing to do with 'The Changing Image of Rural Ontario'.