Post-, "Grapes," Nuts and Flakes: "Coach's Corner" as Post-Colonial Performance

Post-, "Grapes," Nuts and Flakes: "Coach's Corner" as Post-Colonial Perfonnance RICHARD PAUL KNOWLES We're still trapped in Canada: we're the ventriloquist's dummy on the British and American knee. When the voices come in from all these other places, it's very hard to forge our own. (Urjo Kareda)l In "The Dummy," a short scene in the Rick SalutinfTheatre Passe Muraille collective creation 1837: The Farmer's Revolt, two actors playing a ventriloquist and his dummy address the crowd onstage and off in an allegorical representation of post-colonial mimicry.' As the scene opens, the (pre-)Canadian colonial dummy speaks only in the voice (literally) of "John Bull - your imperial ventriloquist," mouthing platitudes and promising to cut trees and fight Yankees for England while being (literally) manipulated and having his pockets picked by the imperial puppet master. Towards the end of the scene, however, ignoring arguments that on his own he will be helpless, "a pitiable colonial," he stands independently and speaks in his own voice for the first time, rallying the crowd and introducing William Lyon Mackenzie, the radical political refonmer and leader of the only class revolt in English Canada's history. The scene itself is simple enough, except in its veiled critique (within the context of a nationalist collective creation) of the power structures of the traditional theatre in Canada, in which colonial actors, constructed as workers, use British accents to mouth the words and mimic the manners of British, or more recently, American playwrights and directors. I introduce it here, however, as a starting point for the analysis of a different kind of post-colonial performance , one that takes place not in the theatre, but in the intermissions between the first and second periods of telecast hockey games on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Canada's national television network. "Coach's Comer," featuring the fonmer coach of the Boston Bruins, Don Cherry, and hosted by Ron MacLean, who plays the role of interviewer/broadcaster, is both popular and controversial in Canada; and as a live broadcast employing Modern Drama, 38 (1995) 123 124 RICHARD PAUL KNOWLES a character who is presented, at least, as being something of a loose cannon, the show has an element of drama - and a dramatic element of unpredictability - that is unusual on television, particularly in sports programming. The show began as a standard component of hockey broadcasting: an intermission interview segment with a retired coach, who delivered commentary on the game at hand and on developments and controversies across the National Hockey League (NHL). Cherry, however, popularly nicknamed "Grapes," presumably for his sour-grape potential as a coach for complaints and reprisals, brought a more flamboyant personality, a more belligerently opinionated manner, and a more overt flair for the theatrical than is common among coaches and commentators, and the show quickly began to promote, or even caricature, his most distinctive traits. In short, his commentaries on hockey became less important than the performance of his personality, and the show grew to represent what might be described as the most popular ongoing Canadian television drama. As it stands now, "Coach's Comer" - which boosts the ratings of "Hockey Night in Canada," and which many viewers watch independently of the game - is pure performance, verging on camp. Cherry, always nattily dressed sporting outlandishly wide and brightly coloured ties beneath a stiffly starched and unfashionably wide collar, above which his round face perches like that of some red and puffy Charlie McCarthy, sits uncomfortably close to MacLean, so that in the three-quarter camera shot typically employed for the show he seems virtually to be sitting, like a ventriloquist's dummy, on his interviewer 's lap. Cherry faces the camera, thrusting his finger towards the lens as he lectures the viewer aggressively and outrageously on hockey's "tough guys," on the follies of the League's owners and governors, and on the mistakes of timid or overly repressive referees. MacLean, meanwhile, faces Cherry for the most part, with occasional "out takes" to the camera, inserting ironic jibes and raised eyebrows into the discourse, keeping score, and keeping track of the time - at least two or three times in each...