Mary Jane Miller
In the early and mid-seventies our Alternate Theatres often looked at social and political problems through stage metaphors lifted from foreign popular cultures in plays like Mr Bones, Charles Manson: AKA Jesus Christ, Vampyr, and Richard Third Time. Using lenses borrowed from ancestors and friends, we focused on their crises rather than our own. In fact only one play in English, seldom performed, rarely read - Ryga's Captives of the Faceless Drummer - suggested that we had, in October 1970, an acute crisis of our own.
However, as the second, bigger shock wave of the Parti Quebecois victory on 15 November, 1976 rolled across the country, Rick Salutin sat down to rethink the second act of the play on which he was then working, a play about hockey's most famous team, les Canadiens. Here was a stage metaphor drawn from our own popular culture. Hockey could be seen as a game, a ritual, a drama; as a surrogate battlefield; as scenarios about Quebec against the rest and the true north against the Yankee interlopers. More important, it was the one-in-a-thousand chance for the talented teenage boys at a dead end in their jobs, towns, and lives, and an escape for their families for a couple of hours on a Saturday night. For the country at large, it was perceived as one of our few chances to play in the big leagues against the United States, Europe, and the USSR. It was our game, our chance to excel.
The subsequent success of the play, in two substantially different versions, may be attributed to several things. First, Les Canadiens does capture the traditions, the skills, and the ambience of hockey, and as such it brings into the theatres all kinds of people who would not normally head for a play on a Saturday night. Secondly, it is a challenging play about our current crisis and its roots, using an accessible and versatile metaphor for the birth, growth and maturation of a political process in Quebec, and perhaps in the rest of Canada.
Salutin's first version of Les Canadiens, referred to as the Centaur script in this paper, opened at the Centaur Theatre in Montreal on 10 February 1977, barely three months after René Levesque's startling victory in the provincial election. It was director Guy Sprung who had the original idea for a play about les Canadiens. His subsequent work on the manuscript, with his actors, and with designer Astrid Janson, helped to shape and tighten the first drafts. Maurice Podbrey, the artistic director of Centaur Theatre, was responsible for bringing about the happy collusion of Rick Salutin as playwright and Ken Dryden as his chief resource.
The second version, eventually published by Talonbooks in 1977, and designated Talon script in this study, was first produced by George Luscombe at Toronto Workshop Productions on 20 October 1977. It was this version that won for Salutin the Chalmers Award of 1977. I owe thanks to George Luscombe, to Ken Dryden, who provided valuable insights into the preparation of both versions, and particularly to the generosity of Rick Salutin who lent me the Centaur script and discussed at length the various productions. From these conversations I have been able to reconstruct in part the development of the script through its various stages.
In my discussion of the play I will also refer briefly to two other productions which reflect the play's potential for varied interpretation. The first version of the play to go on tour was mounted by Theatre Passe Muraille in the 1978-79 season. In the same year a more elaborate production, sponsored in part by the Ford Motor Company, was directed by John Neville at the Neptune Theatre in Halifax. I saw the Theatre Passe Muraille version and was given access to reviews, pictures, and an actor's working script for the Neptune production. Both the Neptune Theatre and the Theatre Passe Muraille productions reflect an apolitical view of the play. To quote from the programme notes of Miles Potter, director of the TPM production: 'Politics? Not really. National Unity? No, thank you, not today. No, this play is about hockey and the greatest hockey team in the world.' According to the script of Neptune's actor William Wallace, the players' anti-separatist address to the audience found in the final Talon version was cut extensively,1 much of the French in the last scenes was changed to accented English, the Kids became the team itself in the last scene, and the production ended on an upbeat note with two of the marching songs. Clearly, director John Neville's rewriting of the play's ending changed both the play's political message and its final dramatic effect.
The plot of the published version of the play is quite straightforward. In Act I, Salutin shows us the defeat of the French on the Plains of Abraham. As Wolfe, mortally wounded, recreates Benjamin West's familiar tableau on one side of the stage, a dying Francophone tosses his rifle and his cause to his son. The rifle is a hockey stick. From then on, as the 1837 rebellion is defeated, as Macdonald hangs Riel, as the World War I conscription crisis turns into post-war prosperity and resurgent nationalism, in a parallel structure which symbolizes the shaping of Quebecois consciousness, the game of hockey also develops. First a scrawny French kid invents the puck and then goal pads. People start paying money to see the game. Teams are formed, then leagues. The English buy out the French. Stars are created, and fans become fanatics. Eventually one team emerges as the focus of all the dreams of a frustrated and exploited people - les Canadiens. Finally, when Rocket Richard, the hero of the forties and fifties, is prevented by Clarence Campbell from winning a new scoring title or leading his team to the playoffs, a massive though futile riot occurs.
In Act II, hockey of the 1970's is contrasted to that of an earlier period. At the same time, the Montreal players speculate on the outcome of the provincial election being held that day, 15 November 1976. In a very funny, sharply satirical language lesson, Anglophone players try and fail to master French. Their instructor, the only woman in the cast, who up to now has represented the reluctant but ever more avid fan, is torn between contempt for their bumbling efforts and admiration for them as hockey players. Dave Kirk, the central figure of Act II, begins to seek his roots in hockey's great past. Then, in a nightmare, he seeks his own identity as an Anglophone but is overwhelmed by encounters with Lise Payette, Pauline Julienne, Mme Benoit, a hostile press and a team which deserts him.
Later, as he and the others play out the game with their usual élan, they discover to their confusion that the fans in the Forum are no longer watching their heroes re-enact the inevitable superiority of the Quebecois people over all other contenders. Instead, all eyes are on the scoreboard where the election results appear as they are announced.
The play ends with the implication that the 'torch' of Canadien nationalism, symbolized by the hockey stick, has passed into the hands of the Parti Quebecois. Francophones are no longer content to live out fantasies of control over their own lives through les Canadiens. Instead, the action has moved from the Forum to political action at the Paul Sauvé Arena, leaving Kirk and his bicultural team no longer the number one myth of French Canada and its hopes.
But as the play also reminds us, they are still 'number one on the ice' (Talon p 177). Despite the fact that the Centaur and Talon versions of the play differ in structure and focus, each version of the play is about hockey: its traditions and its place in our popular culture;2 about the drive to win and about the best team in the history of the sport. Both versions are also about Quebec. However, the Centaur script is written with an Anglophone Quebec audience in mind, exploring additional themes such as feminism, economic colonization, and the history of the sport. In contrast, the later version concentrates more on explaining to the rest of the country how and why 15 November 1976 happened.
As well as claiming a central place in our popular culture as a shaper of the Canadian identity, hockey is superbly theatrical. When hockey is well played it is swift, graceful, dangerous, easy to follow, full of controlled violence and enormous skill. The scoreboard, like a chorus, sums up the action, tells us the time left, who scored the goals, who broke the rules, how other teams are doing. At the Montreal Forum, the voice-over announcements are bilingual; the organ also keeps up a running, often wry, commentary on the action; the fans show signs exhorting their team to greater effort; and all of it is channeled into living rooms across the country. From the run-down arenas where brawls between rival fans are common, to the signs, cheers, trumpets, monitors and cameras of the major leagues, crowd and team continuously interact. At times, thanks to radio and television, it seems as if the NHL is to Canada what the CPR was in the nineteenth century, the great Unifier.
Act I of the Centaur script was largely the product of Salutin's own research and writing. It is headed 'Victory not Survival', but is called 'The Past' in the Centaur program and 'Survival' in the Talon script. Act II was originally titled 'The Day of A Game This Season' in the first production, and simply 'The Day of the Game' in Talon. Although the final script changes in Act II in basic ways, Ken Dryden's contributions to this half of the play remain in both versions. Dryden told me he originated the details in the scenes between the older and younger players, the goalie's nightmare, the language lesson, Scotty Bowman's pep talk, the players' experience of the game with St Louis on the night of 15 November (and its aftermath), and the last scene where the star player meets the rag tag kids in a game of street hockey.
The Centaur production's treatment of the hockey motif itself differed significantly from that at Toronto Workshop Productions in two ways. First, the Centaur actors were not on skates. However, they did have a real 'puck', a ball to manipulate throughout. Secondly, in Act II they represented real players whose playing styles were familiar to the audience: Lafleur, Shutt, Bouchard. The combination of real prop and real character presented major obstacles to the actors. George Luscombe, on the other hand, overcoming the initial (and justifiable) fears of his actors, persuaded them to do most of the play on rollerskates or on skateboards, and to mime the puck. Thus the speed and skill of the actors on the skates, swooping down the ramps 3 (which Janson, the designer of both productions, had added), and the fact that they could appear to be excellent stick handlers, since they had no puck to worry about, lent credibility to the stage metaphor. In addition, they no longer represented specific members of the current team, reflecting a major change in emphasis at Toronto Workshop Productions. Maurice Richard wryly commented that he preferred Act I to Act II of Luscombe's production (the only production he saw) because he 'didn't like politics in a play about hockey'.
Yet both in conversation and in the introductions to the Talon script, Salutin and Dryden emphasize that Act I is about 'the myth of les Canadiens, standardbearers of the Quebec spirit; and Act II [is] the demythologization of les Canadiens and their replacement by the reality of "just a hockey team" ' (p 21). This explains the basic changes in the Talon script, particularly the shift from a character based on and named Ken Dryden, who is a goalie and a super-star, to a fictional forward called Dave Kirk who is a less introspective, more naive figure, in whose expanded nightmares 'our' Anglo myths fight it out with 'theirs'. Talon also has a language lesson in which other fictionalized players represent some sharply observed stereotypes of 'Maudits Anglais' attitudes. And yet the play's message about myths and their place in our political maturity does not follow the clean line of argument emphasized by Salutin and Dryden, and this argument is even less direct in Talon than in Centaur. There is no question whatever that, overall, Talon is by far the better play. On occasion, however, I think Centaur offers certain insights or gains specific effects missing from the later version. Quotations from the unpublished Centaur script will demonstrate the differences between the two.
Both scripts use the interplay of mythologies as a structural device. Wolfe's image of himself and his battle, dying in careful painterly pose while quoting Gray's elegy, sets the imperialism motif, which is picked up by MacRae's lines from the 1914 war, 'To you from failing hands we throw the torch', lines written in both languages on the walls of the Canadiens' dressing room in the Forum. But in this play the 'torch' is a rifle, first in the hands of rebels in 1837, then in the Riel Rebellion, then in the FLQ troubles of the 1960's. Yet it is also a hockey stick passed from 'The Kid' to Vezina to Morenz to Richard. Lord Stanley, in a scene cut from the Talon script, offers his cup for his little sons and heirs to win. But it is the poor kid from the frozen ponds of Quebec, using the Eaton's catalogues he is delivering to invent goal pads, who refines the game into its present form. He wins the cup. He then reappears; first as the young Morenz, then, in turn, the hungry child, Jacques Plante, the obsessed Rocket, the successful Beliveau, and the retired Henri Richard, now a tavern owner.
In both scripts, the Orange Ontario myths about Montreal, which is seen as Catholic, incomprehensible, sensual, sinful and citified by Howie Morenz, the Kid from WASP Ontario, are disarmed and neutralized by the Canadiens as a team. Their legendary grace, speed, nerve and excellence are matched by his, and his identity is subsumed so successfully that a Quebec fan is convinced he must be Swiss; he cannot be an Anglo from Stratford, Ontario! As the play continues through the thirties and forties, theatrical flair, volatility and loyal teamwork meet and match the clumsy, slow, aggressive style of the English team which is specified only in the Centaur script as the Toronto Maple Leafs.
As the play progresses, the hockey myth which serves as a metaphor for a sense of Canadian identity as an essential prerequisite to a drive for economic independence becomes instead a commodity for sale. In Act I of both scripts, the English buy the team from the French owner, Dandurand. Then Clarence Campbell, President of the NHL, represents six owners 'who will not allow their merchandise to be maimed and broken' by Rocket Richard's attacks (p 108). However, Centaur overstresses the economic colonialism, the exploitation of players by owners, and the co-opting of the hockey heroes into bourgeois dreams. For example, it contains a scene with a retired Dickie Moore in his equipment rental agency who hands out pink slips firing workers even as he remembers the applause when he was a Canadien. In Talon, the points are made much more economically, primarily on the scoreboard, and in a scene where Kirk refuses outright to put on a team blazer and sell himself.
In Centaur, Salutin also gives us tableaux of three of the now legendary moments in hockey in which the complex interplay of team and fans develops the political metaphor further. One of the play's most startling and moving moments is the death of Morenz, as the audience follows the actor playing the reporter from the boiler room beneath the stands into the absolute silence of the completely packed arena. The fans are gathered in tribute both to the death of a legend and to the passing of the innocent adolescence of a sport.
A second linking scene is cut from the later script. In Centaur, after Campbell and Richard have faced each other, the Canadiens emerge from their dressing room into a tear-gas filled, completely deserted Forum. There is no game. There are no fans. Talon replaces this scene with a moment where Rocket simply stands alone on the ice, then goes to sit with the crowd as the riot begins.
In the third reprise, at the end of Act II, the final version has worked through various changes in the scripts to these stage directions (p 170):
The Canadiens lower their sticks and look at them. They are no longer weapons handed down to them since 1759.
CROWD: singing the following lines over and over
A partir d'aujourd'hui, demain nous appartient,
Un pays aujourd'hui si vraiment on y tient. . . .
The Canadiens retreat from the ice. Only KIRK stays on.
The CROWD surges onto the ice and takes over. The ice turns into a battle field once again where, this time, the French celebrate victory.
The time clock reads 11:00 p.m. The celebration has wound down.
KIRK is still standing on the ice. He is surrounded by a WOMAN and two Quebecois.
The political and dramatic thrust of Centaur is weakened by a lot of extraneous hockey history. Act I is stitched together by a sportswriter, Red O'Bourke, whose narrative is no longer needed in the tightened later version. On the other hand, the spine of Act I, the hockey hero who develops from 'The Kid' to a shadowy Vezina to the naive but brilliant Morenz to the adult obsessions of Rocket Richard is common to both. In both scripts, Rocket is pre-revolution Quebec, obsessed with excellence, with battle, with being the Rocket no matter what the injuries, the penalties or the slanders. However, in Centaur his antagonist in a crucial fight is specified as Ted Lindsay, and the referee as Red Storey. The rage that leads to his suspension is triggered by a contrived insult to a barely sketched-in wife. In Talon this fight with a now nameless opponent is triggered by a name, 'fuckin' frog', which is far more effective as a symbol. It is also the unexpected climax to a very entertaining series of apparently harmless comic exchanges, capped by the Leafs puzzled line, 'Sometimes I think you're playing a different game from the rest of us' (p 106).
There are also several significant differences between the scripts in the buildup to the climax of Act I. In both versions, through his soliloquy and through his dialogue with Campbell, the actor playing Rocket carries the burden of building to the intense explosion of the riot. But the riot scenes did not work, either as specified in the stage directions of the early script or in the variation actually seen in the Centaur production, where the actors attempted to embody 'the riot-cum-street festival' (Salutin's phrase) with the smashing of a pile of Campbell's tomato soup cans. In the final version, the stage directions now leave it (wisely, I think) to the director to find a full-blooded climax.4
One of the most striking changes between the earlier and later versions is the fact that Talon is set entirely in the Forum. In the early version there are scenes in Henri Richard's bar, the subway, up on the mountain, in a war plant, and even in Ken Dryden's bedroom, where he takes a pre-game nap. The result is that in Talon the hockey focus is sharpened by the unity of the place. Although the Plains of Abraham are superimposed by stage business on the Forum, which shrinks to become a skating rink, then expands to become a hockey arena, the stage space always retains the identity of the Forum. As needed, scenes shift from dressing rooms to ticket lineup, from the cheap seats to the boxes. This cathedral of hockey (an image made explicit in Centaur but abandoned in Talon) is also a gallery of heroes, a classroom, a place to meet old pros or the media, or chat to the doorkeepers, Jake and Jacques. It is a place where men seek a holy grail. But above all, it is an arena in the Roman sense, providing circuses when there is no bread, action for those without political power. It is both theatre and spectacle. At times it becomes a haven enclosing adoring fans, who in a thrust theatre are also the audience themselves. Finally it is also a true forum, a place for debate.
The decision to concentrate all of the action in one place strengthens the throughline of the play's narrative and makes the scene doubly moving when Kirk, after a last meeting with the female figure who personifies Quebec, finally leaves the Forum still trying to sort out the implications of her penultimate line, 'Now we do it ourselves' (p 173). Outside the Forum, whose symbolic function has been changed irrevocably by events portrayed in Act II, he comes upon a group of little 'Kids' under a street light, still acting out the old dream in a game of street hockey.
Talon has also been refocused in other ways. Salutin has gone on to create a more coherent and much more interesting female character. The stage directions say that 'she is and is not the same' throughout (p 43), although, when asked, Rick Salutin could not say how she was not the same, nor can I. Indeed, the consistency of the character and her development is vital to the play's coherence, both in terms of narrative structure and in its political emphasis.
She is Quebec. In the beginning, she is both the victim and the revenge of the cradle, the Q-Bec My Love of half a dozen films, from the naive romantic figure of the Patron's daughter in Quelques Arpents de Neige to Mouffe, the knowing innocent in Jusqu'au Coeur. But eventually this woman gets involved. She retrieves the heritage, then becomes its guardian. What she is not is woman as virgin, mother or whore. Instead she seems to be a cousin of the working class pragmatist found in Tremblay's plays and dozens of téléromans. In the expanded nightmare of Talon she becomes a Mme Benoit who eats Anglos for dinner, a Pauline Julienne who drowns their songs, and a Lise Payette who pins them to the walls of the television studios.
The Woman's relationship to hockey and les Canadiens is the play's chief metaphor for the growth of political awareness in Quebec. In Act I she begins with survival as her basic value, and a gut hatred of war in all its forms, hockey included. Eventually, she comes around. The early version contained a small scene (its impact considerably diffused in Talon, because it is both less detailed and intercut with other scenes) in which the child, Jacques Plante, and his mother, who obviously feigns reluctance, have to listen to a 1930's hockey broadcast through the floorboards of their bedroom because they are too poor to own a radio. Even as she admits that she has become a fan, she tells her son, 'You still want to play hockey for le club de hockey Canadien, you'd better learn English, my son.' Yet, just like the English worker, she cannot afford a ticket to the game. In Act II of the final version she has become the bright, personable French language instructor to the English players, hostile as a separatiste, but star-struck as a fan. She is a bridge which divides. As a woman, she is also, perforce, a spectator of this game, rather than a player, who at long last participates in a vote which changes the rules of the game. She has anger but not hatred, and great self-confidence. It is also worth noting that in the last scene, where the myth of les Canadiens is reduced from a symbol of Quebecois aspirations merely to a game, Quebec has moved on and so has she. She has no part to play.
In Act I of Talon, Salutin develops a considerable dramatic tension between this woman, who is Quebec the powerless spectator, and the evolving Canadien developing and mastering his game. The character of Rocket intensified this ambivalence, since he embodied Francophone Canada even while, as a character, he refused his symbolic function. In the revised Act II, it is the Anglo-Canadian who takes over her former role as he searches for roots and for symbols of identity. He has joined the team, but we watch him lose his symbolic function. The symbols are changing even as, through his teacher and the events she helps to create, he comes to understand them. Throughout the play the Woman is the pivot: observer, sceptic, survivor, powerless in a sexist Quebec. Eventually she becomes a supporter, then an instructor and finally a separatiste. She is the antagonist of the drama, the protagonist of the political metaphor, adding coherence and excitement to both.
But of all the changes in structure, theme and emphasis between the two scripts, Salutin identifies as the most important what he terms in his Introduction 'a move away from the "documentary" style to a more traditionally "dramatic mode": unity around a central character and his "problem" ' (Talon, p 22). It is true that in Act II Henri Richard does appear briefly and Scotty Bowman gives a very funny pep talk. But the team itself has been replaced by nameless players. Most of the specific details have been generalized. In consequence, the total dramatic effect is quite different.
The term 'documentary drama' covers a spectrum ranging from lightly fictionalized fact to fiction just barely touching fact. Both forms can serve one of two contrasting purposes: to demythologize history or to build a legend. Les Canadiens also uses characters and events immediately familiar to its audience. The political and social 'facts' as perceived and re-enacted in both versions of the play can be verified by the experience of the spectator. The given fact that the people of Quebec 'stood up' and what it means to a Montrealer in February 1977, or to a Torontonian audience nine months later, or to a Francophone from Welland, Ontario in January 1979 is as varied, as specific, as individual as each one of the thousands of people who have seen the play. What it felt like to be a Canadien playing in the Forum that night as portrayed in the play is derived from someone who was there, Ken Dryden. Everyone knows who won the election. In the understated dialogue of the final version:
SECOND QUEBECOIS: On a gagné tout! Tout le monde a gagné! To Kirk Gagné!
KIRK: Oui. Gagné. Quatre à deux dans le match (p 171).
Those basic facts, the events and the reactions to them, are not changed in the transformation from the first to the second script. They form the narrative spine of Act II in both. But in Talon the tone is different, less immediate, more reflective and certainly more highly stylized, particularly in the extended battle of new against outdated myths that now form Kirk's pre-game nightmare. Indeed the most striking change is the new focus which the character of Kirk gives to the play. Kirk is not really defined as a superstar like Dryden. He is a forward, with all the connotations of offense, scoring, checking, speed, and mobility. Dryden is, of course, a goalie - armoured, masked, the anchor, the beleaguered target, and often the saviour of a game. To change a goalie to a forward is to change the political analogy.
Neither the character of Ken Dryden nor the more anecdotal structure of the first version of the play could sustain what became Kirk's nightmare in the Talon script. However, the second version of the nightmare seems to weaken the play on two counts. First, aesthetically, it is diffuse in impact, neither truly funny nor fully grotesque. Indeed, it seems to be heavily overstated. Secondly, politically, it proceeds to wipe out the old images, flash in new ones and then reiterate one of the oldest clichés of them all, that English Canada has no mythology.
By the play's own line of argument, that should be a sign of political maturity, yet Kirk's desperation and panic signal that it is not. Dryden's nightmare in Centaur, a goalie's nightmare which is the product of a pre-game nap, was simpler. Guy Lapointe and 'all the guys' desert him. He cannot get their attention. The fans, refusing to help, tie him to the net. His last line in the original sequence is 'this is my dream. I chose to be a Canadien. It was a free choice - go on.' 'Shoot' is the next word in Centaur. It is crossed out and 'vote' is written over it. Talon alters the last lines to read, 'I give up. I'm ready. No, I won't give up. I am what I am. Go on shoot! ... Go on vote! Go on shoot! Go on vote! ...' (p 151). All in all, the whole first sequence makes the point more cleanly, more credibly and with fewer contradictions than the complex collage of Payette, Julienne, media, and Benoit.
Another problem in Talon is that Kirk is an Everyman figure, not a familiar hockey star. In a sense, this makes it easier to identify with his fumbles and his good will. However, the difficulty is that Kirk as a fully fictional character is simply less interesting than the character in the early version based on Ken Dryden. Morenz and Rocket are memorable in both scripts. But Salutin did not intend Kirk to be a hero, a star, as Dryden arguably must be even if he is fictionalized. Kirk as a Canadien makes the team more ordinary and less a team of superstars carrying the burden of a people's hopes before the Parti Quebecois vote is even counted, thereby undercutting the full dramatic potential of the climax. Kirk is reaction, not action. A victim of doubts, muddle and nostalgia, full of good intentions and commitment to the game, trying to figure out the new rules, he is quite clearly someone who could be a part of the audience. Kirk's nightmare is 'who am I?' Dryden's had been of being abandoned by his team. Kirk's is the classic fear of an adolescent; oddly enough Dryden's the adult fear haunting a deeply divided nation. Kirk's nightmare serves the play's thesis and its altered focus very well, but not quite so well its dramatic conflicts.
Act I in both scripts is ambivalent about the burden and the glory of French Canadian nationalism which team after team of les Canadiens inherits. Perhaps it is possible for a powerful myth to disarm political action. But through the character of the Woman the play strongly suggests that Quebec has had to work through a phase in which her own sense of identity and self-worth was defined and strengthened through this hockey team. Thus the tradition of les Canadiens has been in some ways a weapon, a way of coping. The inference in both scripts is clear. National myths based on observable truths, though not necessarily on facts, whether they coalesce around dispossessed outlaws in Sherwood Forest or outnumbered pilots on the summer skies of 1940, or, for that matter, five Stanley Cups in a row, are indispensable to a sense of nationhood and thus to responsible political action. Neither version supports the quotations from Brecht's Galileo which Salutin uses in his introduction: 'Unhappy is the nation that has no heroes', the motto for Act I; and 'Unhappy is the nation that needs a hero', the motto for Act II (p 21).
There is no question that the play does throw into sharp relief the clash between myth as a prerequisite for a sense of national identity and the capacity of myth to emasculate or even replace effective political action. Indeed, Salutin demonstrates that myths can do damage. Small-town Ontario myths about wicked Montreal nearly prevent Morenz from becoming a Canadien. Other Anglophone and Francophone myths cut Richard off from Campbell, Beliveau's past from his present, the language teacher from her students, Kirk from his adopted home, and even les Canadiens from their straightforward role as a hockey team. But, as he also demonstrates, myths can keep people alive until they are ready to fight. In the 1930's the Woman knows that les Canadiens are the best because they are French. Both scripts contain these lines:
KIRK: Bitterly. Yeah. You won.
FIRST QUEBECOIS: No man. We won.
KIRK: Yeah. (Talon p 171)
In theory, the Parti Quebecois victory should signify an end to the usefulness of les Canadiens as the most important personification of Francophone dreams of national pride, and so it may for the Quebecois fans. Yet les Canadiens still function as a symbol of national identity for the rest of the country. Consider two other, not unrelated observations which Ken Dryden made to me. One, that the play in its revised form has continued to have impact for Quebec Anglophones. It still helps them to know where they are and how they got there. Two, that in his experience, the rest of the country, who after all 'won' in 1759, still see the Canadiens as more than a very special team.5 (When the National Hockey League lost the Challenge Cup to the USSR, sportswriters in both languages reacted to that defeat with their last line of defence: 'O.K. O.K., but if we had put the Canadiens on the ice, it would have been another Story.') Does this then mean that Francophone Quebec has outgrown this myth or rather the need for it, as signified by the Woman's disappearance from the last scene, and that the rest of the country has not?
The second act of the play refers to but does not move to the Paul Sauvé arena. Without a doubt, as the play says, political action and a real crisis both came to maturity that night. But was that night truly devoid of myth? Do video replays of Levesque moved to tears by 'à partir d'auhourd'hui' demythologize those moments or build up a new nationalist myth to replace the old one? By his references to Brecht's Galileo in the Talon Introduction Salutin suggests that political maturity depends on a nation's capacity to outgrow its need for heroes and myths. However, the Introduction is much more polemic than the play itself. Les Canadiens traces the development of a game, a team and a national ideal which, as the play demonstrates, was the focus of a vital phase in the growth of political awareness and of self-confidence. Only when mindless riot and political violence were replaced by the collective and conscious act of voting to change the order of things did les Canadiens become just another team, but still the world's best. The play also implies that when the rest of Canada reaches that point les Canadiens will cease to be one of Canada's chief focuses of national pride, and that we too will move on to more effective political action.
Nevertheless, the play itself ends with other aspects of the dream still being enacted under the street lights by children with names in both languages playing first against each other and then against the Russians. Once again the myth of our game with our rules and our players as the world's best, played all the way from street level to satellite hook-up, sustains the Anglophone in the midst of stress, changes and an uncertain future. The game goes on and the final score on Anglophone against Francophone, Canada against the rest of the world, is not yet in.
In a wonderfully appropriate open ending we see a play within a play within a play, a fragment of a game of shinny, narrated as if on television by a bunch of kids who suddenly collide with the play's reality, an actual instantly recognisable hockey star. In this scene, the past, the present, and the future meet; specators and players meld. Narrator and actor, camera and subject, make-believe and child fuse and then separate. But throughout the sequence, the game at its very best is always present. Here is the slightly less didactic, more relaxed version of the scene from the Centaur script:
SEB: Lafleur is tearing down the wing. He flies into the corner. They jam at it. Lafleur still has it. It's glued to his stick. He's looking for Shutt Passes to Shutt.
LUCE: It comes out to Shutt. Shutt shoots! Shit -
MIKE: He hit the post!
SEB: Don't feel bad Shutt. We'll get you another shot.
MIKE: Now Lemaire has it. He whirls at the blue line. He feeds it over to Lafleur -
SEB: Lafleur passes neatly onto Shutt's stick -
LUCE: (Winding up). Shutt winds up. He - No! He passes it back to Lafleur.
SEB: Lafleur's got it. He shoots. He scores!
SEB and LUCE: (Hugging). Yayyyyy -
MIKE: (Becoming a Russian). But here come the Russians again -
(The other two reverse roles).
SEB: Aha- the Russians.
LUCE: The Russians are coming -
MIKE: It's Yakushev bringing it up the right side. He fires a rinkwide pass to - (Switching roles) Kharlamov. Kharlamov takes it and cuts in on goal - (Drops it back).
SEB: He leaves a drop pass for Maltsev. Maltsev fires a wicked drive -
RAY: Dryden stops him!
LUCE: It's loose in front of the net. (Becoming Yakushev). Yakushev bangs at it -
RAY: Dryden steers it to the corner.
MIKE: Kharlamov has it again. He stickhandles neatly through the Montreal defence.
He blasts it -
RAY: Ooooo - Dryden got a piece of it -
SEB: They're all around the net.
MIKE: They whack at it -
LUCE: Where's the puck -
RAY: And Dryden comes up with it. He's got it (Flings it up to show he's got it. It bounces away toward Ken.) Nobody knows how he did it. They're giving him a standing ovation. His teammates swarm around him - (They revert to Canadiens again).
SEB: Kenny baby -
LUCE: Kenny -
MIKE: Hey where's the puck?
LUCE: Where is it?
SEB: (To Ken). Hey mister, will you throw us the -
(They recognize Ken. They are in awe. He is embarrassed. Then,)
KEN: Who's still number one on the ice - anywhere in the world?
ALL: Les Canadiens -
ORGAN: "Les Canadiens -"
KEN: Fantastic!
NOTES
1 Rick Salutin, 'with an
assist by Ken Dryden', Les Canadiens Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1977,
p 168. Page numbers refer to this text. The Centaur script has no consistent
pagination. It is simply a mimeographed final draft of the working script.
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2 It is also a favourite
metaphor for political cartoonists, notably Aislin and MacPherson.
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3 See the photographs in
Les Canadiens Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1977.
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4 Luscombe at Toronto Workshop
Productions chose to use stereophonic sound to build a gathering mob. Lights
travelled, dates flashed on the scoreboard and riot poured out of the fragmented
dark; then as the War Measures Act was proclaimed, the house came up to
reveal four hockey players, in the audience, guns trained.
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5 Eric Peterson in the
Introduction put it this way: 'You root all winter against the Montreal
Canadiens because they're French' (although my family would say,
'because they aren't from Ontario,' which is a significantly different
perspective worth noting), 'and then comes the Stanley Cup playoffs and
you root for them because they're Canadian' (p 24).
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