Fantasies of Origin: Staging the Birth of the Canadian Stage more

CTR M4 Spring 2003 Celebrating Canadian Plays and Playwrights Edited by Ric Knowles Dedicated to the Memory of Timothy Findiey (1930-2002) 26 ichael Lewis MacLennan reading at the Canadian Plays and Playwrights Conference d Festival, 2002. OTO: RICHARD BAIN, COURTESY THE STRATFORD FESTIVAL CONTENTS Where Were You in '52? Canadian theatre, making money and damning cities on the eve of the Stratford Festival. JERRY WASSERMAN I I Fantasies of Origin Staging the birth of the Canadian stage in Tempest Tost and The Drawer Boy; or, thinking local, acting global. ELLEN MACKAY 21 Ironic Images Sharon Pollock's Stratford productions and the role of the large institution. ANNE NOTHOF How Passionate Are You? Canadian plays at Stratford, economics, audiences and Canadian theatre today. SHARON POLLOCK in conversation with SHERRILL GRACE 33 Judith Thompson's Ghosts The revenants that haunt the plays of one of Canada's leading playwrights. CLAUDIA BARNETT R.H.Thompson reading at the Canadian Plays and Playwrights Conference and Festival, 2002. PHOTO: RICHARD BAIN, COUR- TESYTHE STRATFORD FESTIVAL 16 Canadian Theatre, the State and Industrial Development It's not about Nation any more; it's about political economy. The myth of the LIP grants and the origins of contemporary Canadian theatre. MICHAEL McKINNIE CANAD IAN THEATRE REVIEW HHHT Judith Thompson reading at the Canadian Plays and Playwrights Conference and Festival, 2002. PHOTO: RICHARD bain. courtesy thf STRaTFoKU FESTIVAL SCRIPT 54 I inif il Ei\ Findley's last play tor the fiojTheatre ot the Sttalford miiii Tom Hendry reading at the Canadian Plays and Playwrights Conference and Festival, 2002. PHOTO: RICHARD BAiN. courtesy I ke 5tratford FESTIVAL SPRING 2003 1 CONTENTS, continued 38 Language and Racism Wendy Lill's The Occupation of Heather Rose and the anatomy of racism. JACQUELINE PETROPOULOS 42 Wrestling with Regionalism The region, the provinces and the Playwrights Atlantic Resource Centre; or, thinking regionally and funding provincially. BRUCE BARTON 47 Translation and Adaptation A panel discussion of the complexities of translating and adapting for the stage. GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE, BILL GLASSCO, CONNI MASSING, JASON SHER- MAN and JUDITH THOMP- SON VIEWS AND REVIEWS 72 Performing Canada: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre by Alan Filewod Reviewed by Wendy Philpott 75 Getting Out of the Script Stack: An Introduction Commentary by Rachel Ditor 76 Chronic by Linda Griffiths Directed by Simon Heath, Factory Theatre, 2003 Reviewed by Andrew Houston Yvette Nolan reading at the Canadian Plays and Playwrights Conference and Festival, 2002. PHOTO: RICHARD SAIN, COURTESY THE STRATFORD FESTIVAL CAN AD IAN THEATRE REVIEW NUMBER 114 Editorial Committee Editor Editorial Advisory Board Review Editor Editorial Assistant Editorial Secretary Advertising Coordinator Cover Design Production/Layout Artist Copy Editor Founding Editors Publisher Founding Publisher Reid Gilbert Ric Knowfes Harry Lane Djanet Sears Ann Wilson Ric Knowles Lorraine Camerlain Jenny Munday Margaret-Gail Osachoff Andrew Houston Jesse Stewart Phyllis Reynen Audrey Greenwood Audrey Greenwood David Knight Ned Morgan Don Rubin Ross Stuart Stephen Mezei University of Toronto Press Joseph Green The Canada Council Le Conseil des Arcs for the Arcs da Canada ONTARIO ARTS COUNCIL CONSEIL DES ARTS DE L'ONTAHIO CTR gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. 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ISSN 0315-0836 PRINTED IN CANADA at University of Toronto Press Incorporated. V\fe acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada, through the Publications Assistance Program (PAP), toward our mailing costs. PAP Registration No. 08181 Publications Mail Agreement number 40600510, Toronto, Ontario. Published quarterly. Periodicals postage paid at Buffalo, NY. US Postmaster: Send address changes to U of T Press Inc., 2250 Military Road, Tonawanda, NY 14150-6000 US Periodicals Registration Number 006628 Canada Post: Send address changes to University of Toronto Press Incorporated, 5201 Dufferin Street, Toronto, ON M3H 5T8. 2 CTR 114 Fantasies of Origin: Staging the Birth of the Canadian Stage Staging the birth of the Canadian stage in TempestTost and The Drawer Boy; or, thinking local, acting global. by ELLEN MACKAY close of the Festival's sixth season, decries it as "anti-artis- tic," the "cultural equivalent of the Canadian National Exhibition Grandstand Show" (235). The analogy is fraught, and worth pausing over. To Cohen, what affines one spectacle with the other is their shared promotion of foreign and, in his words, "dull" entertainments under the false rubric of national achieve- ment (235) - musty versions of Shakespeare in Stratford's case, Bob Hope, for example,, in case of the Grandstand Show. But at the same time, Cohen condemns the State Fair culture of the CNE by insinuating as part of the sting of his comparison the rustic quality of the Exhibition - the kind of pungently agrarian atmosphere that feels to him "anti- artistic," but that would seem also to represent the antithe- sis of Stratford's old-country, highbrow mission of artistic "pilgrimage" (Forsyth, 200).] Which is to say that, allu- sively at least, Cohen collapses the two sides of an increas- ingly entrenched cultural dispute. For it takes only the briefest examination of Rubin's "selected readings" on the matter to see that post-war conceptualizations of Anglo- Canadian drama repetitiously stake their claims on either side of Cohen's equation: some advocate the adoption of a Shakespearean tradition whose transnational and transhis- torical prestige would lay an impressive groundwork for the emergence of a national stage, while others demand the theatrical representation of authentic and fiercely local- ized Canadianness, unflavoured, as it were, by foreign influence. Most recognize the vexed but seemingly insu- perable polarity of the debate as it congeals into a clash between imported' culture and indigenous nature.2 For when pressed to define Canadianness divested of the influences of England and the United States, those engaged in this act of commumty-imagining quite consis- tently point back to the land itself. Examples of this habit of thought are numerous; sometimes unabashedly roman- tic, sometimes dreary In his musings On Being Canadian, for instance, Vincent Massey understands the national spirit, epitomized in the painting style of the Group of Seven, as a kind of ravishment by the land - according to his version of the group's nationalist epiphany, "they sur- rendered themselves to their own environment, striving to uncover its secret. The inevitable happened. The Canadian /n the period that Don Rubin characterizes by the eventual necessity of "Government Interventions" - that is, 1945 to 1967 - the Anglo-Canadian stage is repeatedly defined as something unformed, primitive and justifiably neglected (131). George Broderson, in a fevered succession of metaphors, calls it a "national impotence," the "Cinderella of the arts," and an "undernourished, puling infant" (147); to Nathan Cohen, it is a thing that has "never counted in the life of English-language Canada, [n]or is it likely to in the reasonably foreseeable future" (228). Even to those jnore inclined to see the glass as half-full, there is no denying the apparent barrenness of Anglo-Canada's theatre culture; Mavor Moore, for instance, describes it in the mid-fifties as a "tabula rasa," "propitious[ly]" awaiting inscriptions of "considerable consequence," but currently blank nonetheless (238). It is thus the paradox of Rubin's post-war readings in Canadian Theatre History (of which the foregoing are all examples), that they are largely dedicated to bemoaning the lack of a Canadian theatre to historicize. Reading these selections, one gets the impression of a posse of academics impatient for a discipline in which to profess expertise. Conventional wisdom would call this placing the cart before the horse. This misalignment is writ large in the story of Canadian theatre, for the unusual historical priority of English Canada's debates on a national dramaturgy over the emergence of its drama is the stuff the Stratford Festival is made on. That is, the fact that Canada produces restless dramatic critics before it produces a dramatic cor- pus foments, as the inaugural exemplar of a national stage, a Festival that is ambitiously classical, highly professional- ized and, as Rubin writes in the first issue of CTR,, "clearly not Canadian" in its content ("Creeping" 322). The result is a familiar controversy. Despite Tyrone Guthrie's assur- ances that "a distinctively Canadian flavour" will be sought in Stratford's productions (213), the Festival is mar- shalled as evidence of Canada's settler colony mentality, and proves the catalyst to a vision of cultural nationalism that increasingly disdains established, imported, and espe- cially English models. Perhaps the most acerbic critic of Stratford's national impact is Nathan Cohen, who, at the SPRING 2003 11 landscape took possession of them" (qtd. in Moore, 247). On the other hand, Mavor Moore acknowledges that the "vigorous" demands of the landscape have promoted an "athletic" and "strong-silent" national character "too prac- tical" and top labouring for such a lapse in self-possession (240). Interestingly, Tyrone Guthrie's is one of the voices raised against this brand of stoic reserve; he argues that "Canadian artists, if they are to thrive, must express what the Canadian climate, the Canadian soil and their fellow Canadians have made of them" (214). Either way - which is to say, in rhapsodic expression or Protestant suppression - Canadian identity is a topographical matter; Alexander Legatt writes that at the mid-century, "Canadians identi- fied their country more easily with its landscape than with anything man had made" (236). (I would add that this con- flation of the nature of Canada with Canadian nature is an ongoing tendency; my own anecdotal experience of visit- ing the Canadian pavilion at Epcot Center - that theme park of distilled nationalities - consisted of being ushered in to an DvlAX theatre by a man dressed, as a Mountie and a woman dressed as a lumberjack in order to witness footage of snow, cliffs and trees filmed at vertiginous, and somewhat nauseating angles.) So given that Canadian indigenousness is so reflexively understood to find its rep- resentation in the land, it follows that an authentic Canadian drama ought to take as its concern (rather than dismiss with Cohen's insinuated contempt) the unpostur- ing and homegrown matters that the CNE was designed to exhibit; that is, its allegiance ought to be with those rugged individuals who understand the proper harnessing of horse and cart. Such an assumption is helpfully borne out by the Canadian theatrical landmark that is the Theatre Passe Muraille's collective creation of The Farm Show in 1972, a documentary production that, as Alan Filewod argues, epitomized the "transform[ation]" of "localism into art" (24). The Farm Show's dramatic innovations are many, among these the inauguration of an acting style that could represent what director Paul Thompson called performed "landscapes" (Filewod 39), but it is most celebrated for its mission of discerning culture in agriculture; of identifying foundational national "myths" in the seemingly unaccom- modated locale of Clinton, Ontario (Filewod 25). Implied, though never very tacitly, in this dramatic project is Thompson's reversal of the Stratfordian practice of impos- ing onto its own neighbouring agrarian landscape the for- eign and elite theatre culture of Shakespeare. Indeed the geographical proximity but ideological distance of one site from the other is intimated in The Farm Show's opening lines: Last summer we visited a farming community near Clinton, Ontario. Clinton is about a hundred and twenty miles due west of Toronto. You go down to Kitchener and then take the number eight highway to Stratford, Mitchell, Seaforth, Clinton. (19, original emphasis) What interests me is not so much how the rigid, polar debate anthologized in Rubin's Canadian Theatre History can be read onto Passe Muraille's dramatic achievement, but rather how a small, yet revelatory sample of Canadian drama revises the contestation so manifestly central to its theatre history. In what follows, I will attempt to bring to 12 There is no denying chat Robertson Davies' Tempest-Tost is an Anglophile's delight. Shown here are Richard MacMillan as Hector Mackilwraith and Michelle Giroux as Griselda Webster in a scene from the 2001 Stratford Festival production directed by Richard Rose, set design by Graeme S.Thomson and costume design by Charlotte Dean. PHOTO: CYLLA VON TIEDEMAN. COURTESY THE STRATFORD FESTIVAL ARCHIVES. light how Shakespeare and the demands of the Canadian landscape have been reread, in two plays of recent vin- tage, as team players rather than opponents in the forma- tion of a distinct, national theatre. I mean to unfold this fantasy of theatrical origin by looking at Richard Rose's adaptation of Robertson Davies' novel, Tempest-Tost (pro- duced at Stratford in 2001) and Michael Healey's The Draiver Boy (first produced at Theatre Passe Muraille in 1999).3 The first dramatizes something that looks eerily [ike Stratford's founding moment, and the second aims explicitly to represent the theatrical and quasi-ethno- graphic undertaking that was The Farm Show. My aim is to highlight the ways both plays reconcile and rehabilitate the forces that Nathan Cohen implicates in his 1959 analo- gy as the obstacles to a Canadian theatre: on the one hand, a self-abnegating reliance on a colonial cultural heritage, and on the other, a national identity so tied to the exigen- cies of its soil and climate that even its Grandstand Shows are circumscribed, quite literally, by agricultural matters. There is no denying that Tempest-Tost is an Anglophile's delight. Set in the fictional Ontarian town of Salterton, it is a work that narrates the progression, from location-scouting to opening night, of an outdoor produc- tion of Shakespeare's The Tempest. Not only does the play resound with some of the most famous verse of the English canon, but Davies' delight in Chaucerian humour of the digestive tract, as well as in Wildean (some might say Shavian) send-ups of mannered society, adds up to a tale that feels like professorial proselytizing by other means. Even the nomenclature of his characters - exem- plified by Griselda Webster, or Mrs. Caesar Augustus Conquergood - is a primer in the keywords of English lit- erary culture. CTR 114 revelation, reunion and retrenchment: instead the island is left in the throes of a rebellion that is quashed but not resolved, effectively sentencing the colony to an infinite unrest. That Nature wills it so would seem to depict the recalcitrance of Salterton to the full imprint of a colonial culture. Or, read in a less fractious light, it might be said that in this production, Shakespearean culture and Canadian nature share equal billing, in the manner that Davies' title suggests (that is, both the scripted Tempest and the tempest that interrupts it are featured players here), and vie for the limelight. As Rose stages it, Davies' novel is thus less about idealized transplantation than it is about the near-seismic interaction of Shakespeare and its Ontarian localization; it is in deference to the resulting eclat that Valentine Rich utters the last of the play's Shakespearean quotations: All torment, trouble wonder and amazement . Inhabits here: some heavenly power guide us Out of this fearefull country. (5.1.104^-06) The lines are Gonzalo's, from the fifth act that Salterton never sees performed. What they pray for is an escape from the bewildering combination of Prospero's art and the island's natural wonders. But in the dramaturgy of Tempest-Tost, this is a prayer that has no answer, for the abjuring of both is subject to an indefinite rain delay. In effect, the play leaves its audience in the thrall of what Gonzalo accounts a "wonder[ful] ... torment," sprung from the double impact of a solitary genius, conventional- ly read as a figuration of Shakespeare, and a brave new world. Michael Healey's The Drawer Boy promotes this same inextricability of Shakespeare from Canadian nature, though in this case, rather fittingly, it is Shakespeare who takes on the role of insurgent. Healey's play dramatizes, with ample poetic license, Miles Potter's experience of "researching" The Farm Show; thus the play watches Miles watch two farmers, Angus and Morgan, and takes a wry perspective on the actor's agricultural apprenticeship. But the dramatic crux of The Drawer Boy is less a nostalgic return to Clinton than a tale about rewriting a memory turned blank slate: Angus has suffered an injury in the war that has left him incapable of remembering "one minute to the next" (12), as Morgan puts it. Consequently, the arrival of Miles becomes an opportunity lor the staged repetition of Angus' favourite story, one just beyond his own recol- lective reach, which chronicles the youth, combat, courtship, marriage and bereavement of the two farmers. More complexly, Miles' mission and talent is to imperson- ate Morgan who happens, in his own right, to be impos- turing his and Angus' wartime history. For as the play dra- matically discloses, their biographical narrative is a fabri- cation; the circumstances of the men's homosocial isola- tion are not so neat as Morgan retrospectively wills them to be. It is Miles who sparks this revelation of inauthentic- ity; his scrutiny summons up phantom images of Angus' real past. But as Miles extracts theatrical matter from his rustic hosts in the guise of supplying for his ensemble the real Canadian deal, he imports some theatre of his own. To feed Angus' appetite for stories, Miles offers up a first-per- son account of Hamlet, a role that Miles impersonated to critical opprobrium for the fact that his performance was In Michael Healey's 7Tie Drawer Boy the play watches Miles watch two farmers, Angus and Morgan, and takes a wry perspective on agricultural apprenticeship. Shown here are Johnny Galecki as Miles (left), Frank Galati (standing) as Morgan, and John Mahoney (foreground) as Angus, at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. PHOTO: MICHAEL BROSILOW "too Canadian" (36). While the comment intimates, with a certain fanged gratuitousness, the accusation of self- loathing bardolatry frequently lobbed by the nationalist theatre camp against its foe, the play in its larger sweep suppresses this historical contention by dramatizing in allegory the dependence of an authentic Canadian identi- ty upon Shakespeare. Like Tempest-Tost's downpour, this allegory unfolds during the play's climax, the charged moment at which Angus returns home from a night wandering in the coun- tryside to accuse Morgan of numbing him with a false nar- rative, and thus a false history.6 But oddly enough, when it at last finds expression, this recrimination turns out to be Hamlet's. As Angus narrates: I was in the dark, walking, and I got stopped. I heard a voice. It was a ghost. It stopped me, it warned me against you ... It told me what you did. It told me I should be afraid of you. It said "HE KILLED YOUR FATHER. HE MARRIED YOUR MUM." (52) So it is that in Healey's retelling of The Farm Show, Shakespeare is the force that prompts rural Canadians to reclaim their suppressed and distorted heritage. And in his dramatization of the theatrical search for the Canadian spirit, as it were, that role is played by King Hamlet, who wanders about in the Canadian dark, waiting to scare addleheaded folk with the revelation of their unclaimed history. Admittedly this scene is a bit of a put-on. Angus quickly distances himself from his Freudian accusation, calling it an "antic disposition" and nothing more than an act of pretence (52). But surely, it is better read as nothing less than such an act. For there is something willfully shocking in Angus' adoption of Shakespeare as the demand to self-discovery; it is the same kind of comic sur- prise that ends the play, when it is revealed that the agri- culturally inept Miles has milked a stable of cows unas- sisted. As Angus recites the whole of Gerald Manley Hopkins' poem "At the Wedding March," The Drawer Boy culminates with the affirmation of shared talents: the milk- er of cows is also a player of Hamlet, and the player of 14 CTR 114 if Hamlet is also a milker of cows. That this symmetry comes |fv to light during the marriage rite that Angus has always |5 longed for suggests that the distance between the philoso- phies of Stratford and The Farm Show - that is, between those who discern Canadianness in a Shakespearean script and those who locate it in something so seemingly natural as dairy farming - has collapsed into the union that always signifies comic closure. What is particularly shrewd about this unabashed fan- tasy of reconciliation (or at least inseparability) is how Healey authorizes it by rendering endlessly vexed the aspiration to an authentic past. In The Drawer Boy, the messiness of history is shaped into performed narratives that are clearly influenced by the demands of their audi- ence; Angus, for example, explicitly asks for the stories that he gets. So it should come as no surprise that Healey's wider project - of recalling for Canadian theatre-goers Fasse Muraille's influential production - is less interested in what actually happened than it is in offering up the the- ance in the role of Hamlet in Theatre Passe Muraille's production of Michael Healey's The Drawer Boy. PHOTO. C OU PXESY THEATRE PASSE MURAILLE. which loyalty divided between old worlds and new is understood to be constitutive of the Canadian theatre, and not its impediment. The play therefore confabulates Tempest-Tost's "wonderful torment" - that state of being ^definitely caught between colonial culture and indige- nous nature - as the recovered memory of a national the- atre that used to be a blank slate, ctr Notes 1 The term is James Forsyth's, and intended as praise to Stratford's achievement; he writes of the inaugural production of Richard III that "they [the spectators] loved it.... They came ... with the feeling of Festival and pilgrimage, they were pre- pared to enjoy what they were offered" (200). 2 Cohen, for instance, sees in the founding of Stratford the cata- lyst to two chronic, understandable but thoroughly dangerous Canadian yearnings: the itch to win international glory by excelling, in some branch of the arts, the two big brothers - Britain and the United States - in whose shadow we must always stand; and the passion to bypass the apprentice stage of culture and metamorphose overnight, from an instant, quick-frozen state, as it were, into a full-fledged artistic maturi- ty" (234). 3 I would like to thank Richard Rose for sharing with me his unpublished adaptation. 4 It must be acknowledged that there is more to this coincidence than the merely coincidental; given that Davies had a large hand in conceptualizing, advancing and promoting the Festival, it might be said that Stratford is a legitimization of Tempest-Tost, rather than vice-versa. 5 Typical of Davies' exhortations in this vein is his rhetorical inquiry, in A Dialogue on the State of Tlientre in Canada, "Have you ever asked a group of Canadian schoolteachers, profes- sionally engaged in teaching Shakespeare, how many Shakespearean plays they have seen on the stage? ... the answers would sadden your heart and chill your blood, I promise you" (159). 6 The scene is strangely evocative of Lear's night on the heath: both unaccommodated and epiphanic. Works Cited Broderson, George. "Towards a Canadian Theatre." Canadian Theatre History: Selected Writings. Ed. Don Rubin. Toronto: Copp Clark, 1996.147-52. Cohen, Nathan "Theatre Today: English Canada." Canadian Theatre History: Selected Writings. Ed. Don Rubin. Toronto: Copp Clark, 1996. 228-37. Davies, Robertson. "A Dialogue on the State of Theatre in Canada." Canadian Theatre History: Selected Writings. Ed. Don Rubin. Toronto: Copp Clark, 1996. 155-75. —. Tempest-Tost. New York: Penguin, 1980. Filewod, Alan. Collective Encounters: Documentary Theatre in English Canada. Toronto: Toronto UP, 1987. Forsyth, James. "Canada, Triumph and a Tent." Tyrone Guthrie: A Biography. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1976. Rpt. in Canadian Theatre History: Selected Writings. Ed. Don Rubin. Toronto: Copp Clark, 1996.193-203. Guthrie, Tyrone. "A Long View of the Stratford Festival." Canadian Theatre History: Selected Writings. Ed. Don Rubin. Toronto: Copp Clark, 1996. 206-215. Healey, Michael. The Drawer Boy. Opening Night Edition. Toronto: Playwrights Union of Canada Play Service, 1999. Legatt, Alexander. "Playwrights in a Landscape: The Changing linage of Rural Ontario," Theatre History in Canada 1:2 (1980). 135-42. Moore, Mavor "A Theatre For Canada." Canadian Theatre History: Selected Writings. Ed. Don Rubin. Toronto: Copp Clark, 1996. 238-50. Rubin, Don. "Creeping Toward a Culture: The Theatre in English Canada Since 1945." Canadian Theatre History: Selected Writings. Ed. Don Rubin. Toronto: Copp Clark, 1996. 318-31. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed- David Bevington. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974. Tempest-Tost: A Stage Adaptation by Richard Rose from the Novel by Robertson Davies. Unpublished ps. 2001. Theatre Passe Muraille. The Farm Show. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1976. Ellen MacKay is Assistant Professor of English at Indiana University. She has published in CTR on self-translation and cit- izenship, and on Canadian Shakespeare. She is currently work- ing on a book on spectatorship in early modern tragedy. SPRING 2003 15