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Reviews 305 CHRIS JOHNSON. Essays on George F. Walker: Playing wilh Anxiety. Winnipeg : Blizzard Publishing, 1999· Pp. 269. $29.95 (Pb). Reviewed by Harry Lane, University o/Guelph Chris Johnson is well qualified to write a book about Canada's most productive and gloriously provocative English-language playwright, George F. Walker. He had close links to Toronto's Factory Lab Theatre in the early 1970s, has directed several of the plays, and in 1980, published the first academic critical analysis of Walker. This book is therefore both very welcome and long overdue. Two previously published articles are included, but there is much here that is new. Johnson covers all of Walker's twenty-seven stage plays except Heaven, which was produced and published in 2000. He also provides a thorough account of Walker criticism, not only published work by such scholars as Dorothy Hadfield, Stephen Haff, Denis Johnston, Ric Knowles, and Ed Nyman, but also unpublished theses and dissertations by James Baldwin, Mary Pat Mombourquette, and Catherine Smith. Since Johnson cites this work extensively and with enthusiasm, his book provides a valuable guide to extant scholarship. Readers may find that the book's style requires some adjustment. At times, it freely blends critical analysis with personal anecdote, as in the startling account of Johnson's nightmare about McGill University, with which he introduces the topic of "shared anxiety" in chapter three (6I). The anecdotes are sometimes quite nostalgic, a quality Johnson acknowledges (247). At times, he invokes personal testimony to support his points, as in the discussion of whether Canada has a class system: ~'At some level, most of us know that it is possible to fall right off the bottom of the scale completely, like William in Walker's Criminals in Love" (65). The tone is consciously conversational, as in the discussion of Walker's artistic status: "Obviously he's not mainstream, the success of plays like Nothing Sacred notwithstanding; he sure ain't Anne a/Green Gables" (250). Sometimes Johnson teases the reader, as in his argument that Walker employs "not [...] two moral poles ('binary opposition'), the white hats and black hats of melodrama, but three. At least" (t0 I). And occasionally he delivers asides: "I would say that this was also a matter of Walker, and Gass, having no respect for the rules in a way that made the Factory the Factory. (That's a generalization, but you know what I'm getting at)" (I 18). I have to confess an initial suspicion of this breezy style, but it is worth persevering, because the book has much to say that is illuminating, and Johnson's passion for Walker's work certainly comes through. The style may reflect his avowed determination to avoid writing "a book of 'theory'" that would appeal only to academics, in favour of "sharing [his] enthusiasm for the plays of George F. Walker" (12). In fact, theory (of Bakhtin, even of Lacan and Derrida) does enter the book, mostly through discussion of other critics, 306 REVIEWS whose work is theoretically inflected, but Johnson's writing succeeds best as a blend of critical analysis and memoir that foregrounds the author's very personal relationship to Walker's work. The book is organized somewhat thematically, with the final chapter ("Walker and High Art") skillfully focused on the opposed ideologies of Hackman and Power in The Art of War to provide .a summary analysis of Walker's relationship to art and class. The first chapter, "A Journey through Anxiety," is an attempt to periodize Walker's entire dramatic output into five phases (even while noting Walker's own intense dislike of "phases" [18)) and is unfortunately the book's least persuasive. While there is useful discussion of how the early plays' cartoon characters "subvert the stereotypes which they represent" (28), other phases, such as the third, from Gossip in 1977 to Rumours of Our Death in 1980, seem to be less clearly defined. The discussion loses even more clarity in digressions on Walker's canonical status or what Walker's and Tremblay's family backgrounds and East Ends have in common. Chapter two is much stronger, reproducing much of lohnson's influential 1980 article "George F. Walker...

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