Canada's Lost Plays ed. by Anton Wagner and Richard Plant (review)

438 LETTERS IN CANADA 1978 (1710) and the Dialogues (1713)' (The Practical Vision) is a thorough exposition of Bishop Berkeley'S attempt to develop 'a large philosophical strategy by which to undermine materialists, atheists, and Manicheans through a denial of material substance.' Berkeley'S purpose was primarily religious. His theory, as Priestley says, was that 'if there is no such thing as material substance, neither material monism nor Manichean dualism is tenable.' Dr Johnson thought that he could refute Berkeley on material substance merely by kicking a stone. Priestley doubts, therefore, that Johnson could have read either the Principles or the Dialogues. What Berkeley really said, as distinct from what he was popularly supposed to have said, and to whom and why he said it are Priestley's theme. The essay is a demanding one, but the writing is always lucid and the language precise. (FERGAL NOLAN) Anton Wagner and Richard Plant, editors. Canada's Lost Plays CTR Publications. 22}, illus. $11.95 cloth, $6.95 paper One of the consequences of the new vitality on the English Canadian stage during the last decade or so has been a renewal of interest in the drama and theatre of earlier periods. The increasingly detailed and comprehensive research into the past encourages us to see contemporary Canadian playwrights in a fresh light, to recognize their achievements not as a sort of spontaneous cultural combustion, but as the latest in repeated attempts, begun long before Confederation, to capture Canadian realities on stage. The concern is to place recent dramatic accomplishments in their proper context, to detect influences and continuities , in short to define and applaud a long discounted tradition of drama in this country. Canada's Lost Plays is the title of a series of anthologies to be edited by Anton Wagner and Richard Plant. The series will bring together a number of largely forgotten works from the pre-Confederation period to the Second World War. This first volume includes six pieces from Victorian Canada. lt is an interesting, in some respects exasperating, collection. One of its merits is to remind us of the range of the indigenous drama of the period. In subject matter we move from questions of cultural identity and the benefits of Confederation, through the warfare of the sexes and the monstrous regiment of women, to large conflicts of innocence and evil set in remote and exotic continents. Modes and idioms are similarily various : melodrama, farce, fantasy, Gothic horror, political and social satire. Often two or more genres are juxtaposed in a Single play with the cheerful insouciance characteristic of most popular playwrights of the period. The pieces are of disconcertingly uneven merit. Here the range is from HUMANITIES 439 W.H. Fuller's H.M.S. Parliament, an urbane, lively pastiche in the manner of Gilbert and Sullivan, attacking Macdonald's national policy, to the sophomoric inanities of J.N. McIlwraith's Ptarmigan. One of the difficulties of the editors' introduction is a tendency to lump all this material under the umbrella of the emergent 'tradition.' True in a sense, perhaps, but unhelpful. The field of nineteenth-century Canadian drama is scattered , multifarious, of considerable cultural interest, but artistically undistinguished . Its direct influence on twentieth-century developments is slight. The task of the critic concerned with a tradition relevant to the present is to anatomize this various mass with a sharp eye to potential points of growth, as opposed to dead ends. Arguably, Oolorsolatio by 'Sam Scribble: a little didactic satire in support of Confederation, in spite of some heavy-handed personifications, has a kind of seminal vitality. Its vein of zany invention, use of music and dance, and general brashness of tone anticipate that most popular and durable form of English Canadian theatre, the topical review. On the other hand, Santiago is a notable dead end. In an ill-judged apology for this poetical closet melodrama the editors suggest that it 'compares favourably with such generally available works as ... Mair's Tecumseh.' It does nothing of the kind. What it shares with Tecumseh are all the weakest features of its unpromising genre: pasteboard characterizations, derivative, inflated rhetoric, incoherent action, an anarchic melange of sensational horror, sentimental romance...