Re: Producing Women’s Dramatic History: The Politics of Playing in Toronto (review)

In Canadian Theatre Review 132 (Winter 2007), a special issue dedicated to ‘Canadian Women Playwrights: Triumphs and Tribulations,’ Penny Farfan interviews playwright and director Judith Thompson about her experiences adapting and directing Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler at the Shaw Festival in 1991, for a production in Toronto in 2005, and for an American company in 2007. It is fascinating to read this interview after reading D.A. Hadfield’s intricate dissection of the Shaw and Toronto productions in chapter 3 of her study. All of the factors involved in those stagings, from casting to reviews to the venue – mentioned as a matter of course in the interview – are the very stuff that Hadfield unpacks. To adopt the kind of materialist analysis that Hadfield so deftly employs is to look at all theatre, particularly theatre by women, both historical and contemporary, with more discerning eyes.

Hedda Gabler is just one of the case studies that Hadfield tackles, but the material is richly representative. All the pieces of her investigative puzzle come together: colonial veneration for a British translation of a canonical text, a classic play staged at a festival marketed to a particularly touristy audience demographic, an ambiguous female character revisioned by a Canadian woman negotiating her way through a storm of patriarchal resistance, a flurry of reviews that laid bare every political bias one might imagine, and the fallout that makes this production significant but the play text itself unavailable. As she does with other examples in her study, Hadfield picks her subjects exceptionally well, and the reader turns to each chapter eager to see what fresh, feminist work she will make of it.

The clever title and striking cover design of Hadfield’s book signal much of what the reader can expect from this immensely readable investigation into some of the most pertinent and thorny issues of contemporary theatre practice and feminist politics: it is multi-layered, playful, witty, surprising, and illuminating. Chapter 1 offers a succinct and lucid chronological tour through explanations for women’s effacements from history, all the way back to Herodotus, the ‘father of history,’ and his definition of history as ‘preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done.’ Hadfield is, of course, more concerned with what Canadian women have done, but she is thorough in setting the scene. As she points out, the past is available to us only through its traces in constructed texts, so whoever controls their construction and circulation is of paramount concern; as Hadfield writes, ‘Coming to terms with the politics of representation in theatre historiography means coming to terms with the politics of representation as they have affected women.’

From this provocative beginning, we quickly understand that no presupposition will go unchallenged, that no methodologies will go unexamined, and that performance texts will be reanimated but with all the attendant limitations acknowledged and interrogated in turn. Chapter 2 delves into the fraught relationship between production and publication, centring the discussion on the script-focused development work of the Tarragon Theatre under Urjo Kareda, and contrasting it with the tradition of collective creation, drawing primarily on Alan Filewod’s research and examples from Nightwood Theatre.

At the heart of the book, when Hadfield engages with her examples, we are treated to theory in practical application. Hadfield writes that the plays she has chosen ‘all begin with a thematic concern about women’s history and historiography.’ They are written by anglophone Canadian women and geared to Toronto-area audiences in the late 1980s and early 1990s: several plays by Sally Clark, Jessica by Linda Griffiths and Maria Campbell, the collective creation This Is For You, Anna, and Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Good Night Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet). The experience is something like reading Alan Filewod’s 2002 study, Performing Canada: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre, in that the Canadian theatre scholar is rewarded by revisiting familiar material through a radical new lens. The two books...