Dramatists in Canada: Selected Essays ed. by William H. New (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 215 perfectly just indignation at a general public ignorance of Piscator's extremely important work, has too often allowed indignation to substitute for factual scholarship. As a result we do not have here anything approaching a definitive study of Piscator's contribution to political theatre or of his place in the development of modern German drama. , JOHN FUEGI University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee DRAMATISTS IN CANADA: SELECTED ESSAYS, edited by William H. New. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1972. vii & 204 pp. $5.50. At the end of William H. New's anthology is a selective year by year listing of Canadian plays. Up to the end of the Second World War, there are many blank years, and most years have only one entry; but after that the density increases, and the entry for 1972 is so long it has to be printed in paragraph form. It reports not simply play titles as in previous years but the forthcoming publication of a large number of Canadian plays; and it is already seriously out of date. This paragraph, the last in the book, is also arguably the most significant. Within the last two years Canadian drama has crossed a threshold: what is important is not the mere volume of output but the fact that Canadian plays, for the first time, are not being allowed to die after their first productions. A success in one Canadian city will lead to productions elsewhere, and to publication. This kind of exposure, which dramatists in many other countries would take for granted, is something new in Canada. It is only natural that at this stage the academics should run up, breathless and panting, to join the parade. But since the critic's proper place is in the rear of the procession (cleaning up after the elephants) if he arrives when the parade is still forming there will not be much for him to do except make excited noises. And the problem with Dramatists in Canada is that it has appeared, in a sense, too soon. The criticism of recent drama is still necessarily tentative and incomplete; and the past history of Canadian drama is as broad and thinly populated as the country itself. There have been real achievements in the past but they have been scattered and disconnected. To the discontinuity that threatens any anthology, then, are added the discontinuity of the subject itself and the sparseness of the material available to the editor. Lacking (so far) a solid body of drama, we lack also a solid body of criticism; and if Professor New's sampling is anything to go by (and I am afraid it is) what we have is for the most part disappointingly thin. Professor New has filled in with anything he can find: essays on the decline of words in the modern theatre, and on the special demands of radio drama (neither particularly Canadian in its reference, though both written by Canadians); a journalistic survey of the Montreal theatre season of 1969; and 216 BOOK REVIEWS an essay of his own on Simon Gray, who is now for all practical purposes a British playwright. Among the remaining essays there are far too many potboilers. Dealing with general questions, the critics lapse into platitudes (television can use close-ups, live theatre needs an audience); dealing with particular plays, they seldom get close enough to provide any really searching analysis - as though they were afraid that if they got too close they would find there was nothing there. There is also the problem, as in all criticism of Canadian literature, of deciding how high the standards can fairly be set. At the one extreme, we have William Solly describing cozy old jokes about the Toronto Sunday as biting satire; at the other we have the editor, in his introduction, chiding Merrill Denison's lightweight farce Brothers in Arms because it "offers no alternatives, expounds no visionary truth" - which is a bit like asking a political cartoonist to form a government. There are, fortunately, a number of pieces that stand out from the drab background of the rest, enough to suggest that an anthology half as long might have been twice as effective...