Performing Canada: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre by Alan Filewod (review)

Reviews ALAN FILEWOD. Performing Canada: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined T1Ieatre. Textual Studies in Canada 15 (2002). Critical Perfonnance/s in Canada Monograph Series. Pp. xviii + 119, illustrated. $12.00 (Pb). Reviewed by Michael McKinnie, University ofBimlingham Alan Filewod is likely the most important Canadian theatre historian writing in the English language. His latest book, Performing Canada: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre, continues his research into the ways in which theatre in Canada has been, and continues to be, a locus for national, imperial, and postcolonial struggles. Filewod argues that "all of Canadian theatre , and the nation it stages," is a"constant historical citation and recitation of the postcolonial crises of authenticity and displacement" (roJ). He opens his study by invoking what is commonly held to be the first theatrical performance in a place that would, nearly three centuries later, become part of Canada : Marc Lescarbot's The Theatre of Neptune in New France (1606), a pageant celebrating the return of the Sieur de Poutrincourt to the French settlement of Port Royal, which is now Annapolis Royal in Nova Scotia on Canada 's east coast. Punctuated by high-minded classical allusions, salutations expressed in lofty rhetoric, and declarations of fealty to the king of France by "savages" - most likely played by French settlers - the performance simulated the court masques of Europe on the shore of the Bay of Fundy. The Theatre of Neptune, Filewod argues, was an imperial fantasy marked by unease about authenticity and displacement. The masque is an elaborate and technologically complex form of performance, and the rather basic production conditions of New France could never equal those of Paris. As a result, The Theatre of Neptune was inevitably a humble imitation of a grand model best articulated elsewhere; it aspired to a type and place of performance Modern Drama, 46:3 (Fall 2003) 503 504 REVIEWS it could never fully become. When advocates of theatre in Canada subsequently claimed The Theatre ofNeptune as a "founding moment of Canadian nationhood," they supplemented this anxious imperial performance economy with national desire, but the fundamental logic stayed the same (xv). According to Filewod, five centuries of Canadian theatre have constantly replayed the "formative principle" established by Lescarbofs performance, in which Canadian theatre validates itself by enacting empire and nation (xvii). The ambiguous results of this enactment, however, undermine both the certainties that it intended to reveal and the justification for it in the first place. Filewod examines four "stages" of English Canadian theatre that elaborate upon this thesis (xvii). Those familiar with Filewod's work will recognize both the topic and critical concerns of his first stage: the melodramas from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries that propounded both a Canadian nationalism and a British imperialism that were already archaic by the time of their enunciation. The following stages are represented by the failed "theatrical federalism" advocated by Vincent Massey in the 1950s, the emergence of a dissonant political and regional voice in the Mummers Troupe of Newfoundland during the 1970s, and the uncertain national allegiances displayed by Garth Drabinsky in his lavish commercial production of Show Boat in Toronto in the 1990s. The strengths of Filewod's analysis are many. His central idea of an "imagined theatre" offers a nuanced way to theorize about the persistent link between theatre and nation in Canada (even when the country possesses no statutory national theatre) and helps explain why advocacy for any form of Canadian national theatre has been heavily circumscribed ideologically and practically. Filewod's analysis also benefits from close attention to, and detailed readings of, documentary evidence; he resists the recourse to anecdote that has too often featured in Canadian theatre history. As well, Filewod is aware of the anthropomorphism that has inflected thinking about theatre in Canada since the 1960s, and is sensitive to its unacknowledged effects. As he argues, the nationalist representation of Canadian theatrical culture as growing from gawky adolescence to confident maturity not only encourages the inaccurate perception that there was little theatre of significance in Canada prior to the national centenary of 1967, it also ironically reproduces the nineteenthcentury rationale for maintaining Canada's role as a dutiful member of the...