Collective Encounters: Documentary Theatre in English Canada by Alan Filewod (review)

HUMANITIES 153 instead become world stars' (221). Finally, a larger question is hinted at but not answered - perhaps there is no answer. Given the situation in the 1950S, would a theatrical renaissance have happened in Canada anyway? We know how much was born in the years following 1953; was Stratford the watershed, or a stage in a process? While the account here does not provide answers on these issues, doubtless the Festivalcontinues to loom large on ourtheatrical landscape. Tom Patterson's story tells us much about how that came to be. (ALAN SOMERSET) Alan Filewod. Collective Encounters: Documentary Theatre in English Canada University of Toronto Press. xxvi, 214. $14.95 paper Alan Filewod's book maintains a dual focus throughout: it is both theatre history and dramatic criticism. Itis a measure of the excellence ofthe book that these two aspects consistently illuminate each other: the specific historical and cultural circumstances in which the plays were created are seen to be inscribed in their form. The title of the book itself reflects this approach, as this gloss makes clear: 'it is necessary to consider collective creation as a process, and documentary theatre as its most common result. It is because documentary theatre can be analysed as both an historical phenomenon and a genre of performance with its unique formal characteristics that I have chosen it as the focus of this study.' Filewod has selected seven plays by seven different theatre companies to examine in depth: Theatre Passe Muraille's The Farm Show, Ten Lost Years by Toronto Workshop Productions, Globe Theatre's NO.1 Hard, 25th Street Theatre's Paper Wheat, The Mummers Troupe's Buchans: A Mining Town, and Catalyst Theatre's It's About Time. His examinations place the particular plays within the context of the development of their respective theatres. The book is consistently insightful in analysing the relationship of the process of collective creation to the historical moment of which it forms a part - a more important part in Canada than in other cultures where documentary theatre was set against an already established dramatic literature, in that here it figures prominently in the effort to create indigenous dramatic forms. Filewod's examination of dramatic form is a radical departure from the thematic and textual analysis that forms the· backbone of dramatic criticism in English Canada. It rests on the critical assumption that documentary theatre is a genre of performance rather than a form of literary drama, an assumption clearly owing a great deal to semiological studies of the 'specificity' of theatre (Pavis, Ubersfeld, Elam, et al). This critical method permits him to make precise discriminations between plays that are superficially alike; more important, it is the foundation of 154 LETTERS IN CANADA 1987 the definition of documentary theatre which takes shape through the course of the book: that 'documentary' signifies 'an active relationship existing between the performance and the audience that accepts it as a factual, non-fiction treatment of actuality.' Thus essential features of the form are non-literary: the performers' first-hand relation to the material of the play; the relation of the play to a specifically designed audience for whom it has a special significance; the authentication of actuality in the internal conventions of the performance; the implicit or explicit reference in the play to the process by which it was made; and an informal presentational style. Filewod makes the point that documentary theatre is political theatre. His analyses indicate the wide range of possibilities under this rubric, from the old-left internationalist perspective of Ten Lost Years, which he argues was not made relevant to present historical reality, to the anti-colonial localism of The Farm Show, to the direct advocacy of Buchans, to the Boal-based interactive theatre of It's About Time. However, he finds in all these plays either a preference for sentiment and shared experience over analysis, or an attempt at analysis that is thwarted by the lack of consensus among the collective creators. Although Filewod's argumentis on the whole persuasive, one element ofit is problematical. In a book that practises the Marxist rejection of 'natural' explanations for historically determined phenomena (e.g., he substitutes for the idea...