Popular Political Theatre and Performance ed. by Julie Salverson (review)

This collection of new and previously published writings on popular political theatre in Canada, part of a larger series on Critical Perspectives in Canadian Theatre in English, is an important contribution to documenting some of the practices and issues relevant to this area of theatre studies. The aims of the volume and series include bringing together and facilitating access to a representative selection of the critical work on the subject, particularly for the purposes of teaching Canadian drama and theatre in schools and universities. To experts in the field of popular, community, and political theatre in Canada, especially readers of journals like Canadian Theatre Review, many of these authors and writings will be familiar. Because popular theatre can be ephemeral by its nature and information about these kinds of productions often dispersed or difficult to find for non-specialists, this collection offers a useful point of entry into the field of popular theatre in English Canada between the early 1980s and 2009.

The format is dictated by the general series. The volume contains an introduction by the editor, Julie Salverson, followed by twenty-two brief essays, ranging widely in terms of subject matter – from a historical essay about a 1935 production of Waiting for Lefty by the Progressive Arts Club in Vancouver to an account of a more recent theatre project designed to explore health issues with groups of aboriginal youth in Saskatchewan. The contributions also differ considerably in terms of approaches, what the editor classifies as first-person accounts, essays by scholars/practitioners, and pedagogical pieces. While the volume makes this work more available, the format prevents it from being more usable. For instance, even though Salverson groups the writings in terms of issues and approaches in the introduction, the actual entries are arranged chronologically rather than thematically. Some attempt to provide a context for the individual pieces, even in a brief explanatory note, would help readers less familiar with these writers, companies, or productions to situate them either historically or in critical terms. To find out where any of these essays were first published, the reader must search through a dense paragraph of acknowledgements at the beginning of the book and then flip to the back to find out about contributors. The volume offers a list of suggested further reading, but there is no index and – most strikingly – no photos. The focus on English Canada (perhaps for logistical reasons) necessarily excludes the tradition of work in Québec, even though one essay deals with Théâtre Parminou and others move beyond the geographic borders of Canada.

If the general series format and mandate are beyond the control of individual volume editors, other elements are not. Salverson could offer a clearer working definition of ‘popular political theatre,’ given that she distinguishes it from ‘political theatre in the broader sense’ and points to ‘ongoing debates and inconclusive attempts to define it.’ She pays closer attention to popular education movements with which popular political theatre is closely connected and the international links between practitioners, through the work of influential figures such as Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal. Simply to claim that the writers are ‘sometimes in disagreement and creative tension’ is to avoid the difficult task of making sense of the widely varying assessments of tendencies, especially in the case of forum theatre. Student readers would benefit from a more comparative approach to situating the examples described by practitioners and the critiques of those aesthetic strategies emerging from the theoretical essays. As a whole, the papers relate the highs, lows, and lessons learned chiefly from the viewpoint of producers and critics, reminding us that the voices of audiences often go missing in the critical literature. Just as Sharon Lewis speculates, at the end of the volume, about the possibilities of producing popular theatre in the digital era, readers might consider the methodological challenges of finding new ways to document and assess the genre in the future.

Despite these criticisms, this volume brings together a range of voices, perspectives...