Establishing Our Boundaries: English-Canadian Theatre Criticism (review)

Establishing Our Boundaries: English-canadian Theatre Criticism. Edited by Anton Wagner. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999; pp. xii + 416. $60.00.

This collection of seventeen essays, with an introduction by its editor Anton Wagner, sets itself to "examine the reviews of twenty-one critics from Halifax to Vancouver from the mid-1820s to the 1990s" with the ambitious goal of creating "a cumulative cultural history of English Canada as seen through its theatre and drama" (15). The four hundred page volume, authored by a group of Canadian theatre scholars, promises more than it delivers and delivers at once more and less than the subject deserves.

Part One, "Editor-Critics," consists of a single and overlong essay by Patrick B. O'Neill dealing with three newspaper editors--William Lyon Mackenzie, Joseph Howe, and Daniel Morrison--who tossed off occasional, and tediously conventional, observations on Toronto and Halifax theatre between 1826 and 1857. O'Neill's remarks on Howe are as near as the Atlantic provinces' critics get to recognition in the volume despite the fact that the area currently boasts three regional theatres, several festival companies of national importance, and a host of youth and alternative troupes that are reviewed regularly.

Part Two, "Reviewer-Critics," comprises two essays, the first on E.R. Parkhurst, music and drama specialist at Toronto's Mail (1876-98) and Globe (1898-1924), who, Ross Stuart tells us, "had very limited tools as a theatre critic," a deficiency the essay more than adequately documents. By way of contrast, Douglas Arrell shapes a socially revealing and amusing narrative from the professionally incestuous and intellectually bankrupt shenanigans of three turn-of-the-century Winnipeg reviewers--Harriet Walker, Charles W. Handscomb, and Charles H. Wheeler.

The book's central section, "Cultural Nationalism," features studies of nine reviewers from Hector Charlesworth (1890-1945) to Don Rubin (1968-1983). Although none of these journalists is a George Bernard Shaw or a Kenneth Tynan, all merit a disciplined analysis of their critical reaction to productions of new and classical plays of all sorts, an examination of their positions on alternative theatre, some indication of their aesthetic convictions, and an evaluation of their achievement in an international journalistic context. Most essayists, however, presumably under editorial direction, focus relentlessly on reviewers' cultural nationalism or lack of it. Quotations from mediocre reviews are piled upon quotations, many of which invoke Canadian plays long since, and deservedly, forgotten; and national and international cultural dimension is in short supply. Worst of all, the reiteration in essay after essay of the tired clichés of cultural nationalism sorely tests the patience of anyone minimally familiar with the subject.

Anton Wagner's piece on B.K. Sandwell, critic for the Montreal Herald (1900-1914) and Saturday Night (1932-1951), implicitly identifies his nationalism as less pro-Canadian than anti-American, an obsession which did not prevent him from making some shrewd judgements about the future Canadian theatre dynamic. Wagner's second essay, on Lawrence Mason, Toronto's Globe reviewer (1924-1939) and chronicler of the country's Little Theatre movement, offers a curious account of a critic determined, in the virtual absence of a commercial theatre, to treat amateurs as professionals--an act of artistic self-deceit and journalistic overkill. Chapters on Herbert Whittaker and Nathan Cohen, by Jennifer Harvie/Richard Paul Knowles and Don Rubin respectively, offer little new to those familiar with Whittaker's memoirs and republished reviews or Edmonstone's book on Cohen. On the other hand, Mayte Gómez's well-judged study of socialist reviewer Oscar Ryan (Canadian Tribune 1955-1988) rehabilitates an important cultural figure who, amid his confrères' stifling political apathy, managed to sustain a clear ideological position. Moira Day's portrayal of Jamie Portman (Calgary Herald, 1959-1975, Southam News Service, 1975-1987) as a "classical humanist," Denis Johnston's depiction of Urjo Kareda (Toronto Star, 1971-1975) as an "archetypal enthusiast," and Ira Levine's reading of Don Rubin (Toronto Star...