Committing Theatre: Theatre Radicalism and Political Intervention in Canada by Alan Filewod (review)

Alan Filewod’s Committing Theatre: Theatre Radicalism and Political Intervention in Canada is a landmark entry in Canadian theatre and cultural history. Filewod’s study is the first to construct a genealogy of theatre in Canada that shows a continuous, if diverse and at times fractious, culture of politically committed theatre in all regions of the country over the past two centuries. In so doing, he challenges conventional and official theatre histories in an intellectually rigorous yet highly readable analysis of the cultural field of interventionist theatre.

One of Filewod’s most important contributions here is that he revises and expands conventional definitions of the theatrical generally and political theatre specifically. In Chapter 1, “Purposeful Performance and Theatrical Refusals,” Filewod explains that the theatre (largely indoor, scripted, organized performances on stages) is only one part of theatrical culture, although it is often the most recoverable and institutionally sanctioned. It is therefore unsurprising that theatre history has been dominated by dramatic plays, yet Filewod shows there is much more to the story. Theatrical culture, more broadly imagined, includes a whole range of performances that – in their very contingency and ephemerality – are much more difficult to recover as knowable objects of study. This is precisely the task Filewod sets himself and, in the rest of the chapters, he reconstructs both specific plays and a broader culture of political performance and active spectatorship central to Canadian culture over the past two centuries.

Another important intervention here is that Filewod conceives of political theatre as that which “works to be useful, that has a purposeful intent.” (1) Consequently, not all of the examples that follow are left-wing or socialist theatres; indeed, one of his methodological breakthroughs is to show how such political theatre as William Aberhart’s 1920s radio broadcasts, World War II shows, and contemporary military reenactments need to be understood as part of “the instrumentality of theatre as a social practice.” (1) Political theatre emerges here as a medium available to a range of movements and ideologies, and its history becomes much broader and richer as Filewod casts his net beyond the predictable.

The historical analysis begins in Chapter 2, “Class, Spectatorship and the Unruly Nineteenth Century.” This is a particularly welcome addition to pre-20th-century theatre studies and Filewod uses a variety of case studies to show how 19th-century Canada enjoyed a broad culture of spectacle in playhouses, from scripted performances that ran the gamut from Shakespeare to melodrama, to the morally instructive plays of the temperance movement, to the political interventions of journalistic drama and suffrage mock parliaments. The chapter closes with examples of “spectating performers” to locate these organized theatrical performances within a larger network of theatre culture emerging in workers’ political and fraternal organizations at communal events such as banquets, concerts, parades, and even within the more unruly, often satiric, public performances of crowds, mobs, and mummers.

The next two chapters move onto perhaps better-known ground in Canadian theatre history when they pick up on the development of agitprop and the radical leftist theatres of the 1930s. While some of these details are already available, Filewod brings a unique perspective to the material through his knowledge of the international allegiances, both political and aesthetic, of Canadian radical theatre activists, his personal reflections on the legacy of some of the key players whom he had the opportunity to interview, and his insistence that we understand this explicitly committed theatre as part of a larger and longer theatre culture in Canada and elsewhere. Chapter 3, “Mobilized Theatre and the Invention of Agitprop,” begins with a welcome discussion of non-English theatrical cultures before World War II, such as the Ukrainian and Finnish dramatic societies, and the complex representation of Aboriginality in pageants staged both on and off reserves. Chapter 4, “Six Comrades and a Suitcase,” analyzes the contexts and outcomes of the collaborative production and thwarted performances of the 1932 play Eight Men Speak. The culmination...