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Staging Canada
- Theater
- Duke University Press
- Volume 34, Number 3, Fall 2004
- pp. 146-152
- Review
- Additional Information
Theater 34.3 (2004) 146-152
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Staging Canada
Denis Salter
Canada? Theater? Performance? What are they, and to what ends are they interdependent? Canadians are fond—not just in caricature but in real life—of saying "eh?" We live in a culture that is deeply interrogatory about itself, its origins, its instruments of self-awareness, and its desire to exist in a narrative of inscription and deferral. We like to think of ourselves as forever young, a strategy that allows us to deny our "real" age and be continuously engaged in the (re)birth of a nation, its culture in a permanent incipient condition, its crises of authenticity carefully kept out of view and rationalized away.
In this avowedly autobiographical book, Filewod engages these and other paradoxes that have formed and continue to form the idea of Canada. His perspective is that of the Janus head that, to its eternal frustration, yearns to see its opposite side, its defining other: not only, to cite his subtitle, is the nation "enacted in the imagined theatre," but the theater is enacted in the imagined narrative of a shared history; or, as he puts it elsewhere, "nation and theatre produce each other in . . . the elation of spectacle." "The imagined theatre," he writes with an uncanny prescience on his final page, "enacts the operation of power, and every operation of power deploys spectacle to command the cultural imaginary."
Power. Who owns it? Who deploys it? The key to Filewod's book is here in his (ostensible) ending and also in his first page of acknowledgments. He dedicates the book to his father, because he "taught me to question, always question," and to the late artistic director of Toronto Workshop Productions, George Luscombe, who taught him "that the theatre must answer, always answer." Like everyone concerned with power, Filewod is essentially preoccupied by genealogy, so he, as a father, concludes his [End Page 146] acknowledgment with the "hope" that his son, Clement, "will question authority." Keep a keen eye on conspiracy theories. Watch out for hidden agendas. Sniff out the silent inscriptions of normative value systems. Above all, be smart, be skeptical, just like me.
Click for larger view | Figure 1 Stratford Festival of Canada. Photo: Richard Bain |
Rather than write the Great Canadian Tome of Theater History, or a corroborative encyclopedic metanarrative, Filewod opts for the selective case study method. The writing of a tome might sidetrack him from one of his main objectives, which is to demonstrate that evolutionary narratives of historical "development" are not only totalizing and teleological exercises in the erasure of difference and in the establishment of borders that are designed to resist permeability, but also strategies for providing the answer—not the multiple answers that Luscombe had in mind. Filewod analyzes the staging of Marc Lescarbot's nautical masque The Theatre of Neptune in New France on the water at Port Royal in November 1606; pageants and similar public spectacles reenacting the Empire in the nineteenth century; the semiotic decoding of the "costumes," poses, attitudes, and exercises in quasi-monarchical authority performed by Vincent Massey and his various "attendants"; the Mummers and their enactment of a politics of resistance in the 1970s, concentrating on their play about the controversial sealing industry, They Club Seals, Don't They?; and the spectacular, capitalistic, transhistorical nation of Garth Drabinsky created through his own performance, like Massey's, in the public sphere and through his (controversial) staging of Show Boat at the Ford Centre for the Performing Arts in North York in 1993.
A culture like Canada that exists simultaneously in a complex colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial position is fraught by the search for origins. Real origins. But the quest for the real is a mug's game. There is no single originating moment for anything or anyone, least of all for something as large, multifarious, and contestatory as a nation or, in Canada's case, a nation of nations. Filewod convincingly argues that it is instructive to compare The Theatre...
