Performing Canada: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre, and: Performing National Identities: International Perspectives on Contemporary Canadian Theatre (review)

The University College of the Cariboo publishes Textual Studies in Canada, and in the spring of 2002, with issue 15, began what was to have been a series of monographs under the title 'Critical Performances in Canada.' The monograph series has since been discontinued, but the Canadian scholarly community has Alan Filewod's Performing Canada: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre to remind us of the initiative. In the acknowledgments, we learn that editors Jim Hoffman and Kate Sutherland commissioned Filewod's contribution, and in their introduction we learn that, by doing so, they 'hope[d] to add significantly to Canadian theory.' The editors cite Robert Wallace's Producing Marginality: Theatre and Criticism in Canada (1990) and Ric Knowles's more recent The Theatre of Form and the Production of Meaning (1999) as work that has been 'willing to systematically tackle ... wider areas and issues of performance in their Canadian constructions.' Thus we understand from the outset that Filewod's work will inhabit an interdisciplinary terrain that draws as easily from the discourses of performance and cultural studies as theatre history.

Winner of the 2003 Ann Saddlemyer Award from the Association for Canadian Theatre Research, Filewod's work maintains a careful balance between a 'big picture' thesis and close analysis of his case studies. He takes on the typical 'stages' in the 'meta-narrative' of Canadian theatre, from nineteenth-century closet drama to the alternative theatre movement to the controversy over Garth Drabinsky's Show Boat. But in each case he presents 'a counter-argument that relates historicized understandings of the theatre to the larger ideological narratives of Canadian nationhood.' Filewod's argument is that 'Canadian nationhood' and an 'imagined theatre' are regularly called upon to explain and describe each other, without any acknowledgment that 'theatre models social systems of production.' He writes: 'Theatre is not simply a matter of staged representation: it is an event both physical and symbolic; it transforms experience into a community narrative; and it materially constructs in the audience the community it addresses in its texts.' The result of Filewod's approach is a sort of radical textbook, an impression which is reinforced by the large format with double columns on each page, footnotes embedded in bold in the text, and copious illustrations on almost every page. But while this is an account of topics familiar to students of Canadian theatre history, it is a postcolonial, materialist, and highly theorized reworking that challenges the words 'Canadian,' 'theatre,' and 'history,' at every contested 'stage.'

In her contribution to the anthology Performing National Identities, Erin Hurley takes up a related interrogation. Hurley criticizes the model of international play production that assigns theatre a representative function, as if Canadian plays are supposed to teach foreign audiences about Canada. It is a model nicely illustrated in the chapter by Jennifer Harvie, when she complains of British critics who discuss Judith Thompson's plays as realistic (and alarming) portraits of urban Canada. Hurley advocates instead that Canadian theatre be recast as a 'refracting mirror ... [that] shows the world around itself, through itself.' Hurley's call for Canada to have a 'potentially deconstructive and performative role on the world stage' is answered by intriguing chapters about Canadian productions in Germany and Japan. Yoshinari Minami, for example, suggests that Japan looks to Canadian theatre in order to think about living in a multi-ethnic society, in turn confirming the editors' observation that 'Canadian plays outside Canada question the host country's assumptions about their own national identities as much as they question what it might mean to call a play Canadian.'

Part 1 functions as an introduction to six Canadian playwrights by analysing specific aspects of their work. The collection is divided into three parts. Part...