Uncovering the Playwright "in the Round"

In her essay, "Playwright: Parasite or Symbiont," Sharon Pollock describes biography "as an attempt to capture the essence of a life and personality and to place it in context in as interesting a way as possible" (297). One could posit that the key word in this sentence is attempt. It is impossible for a single book to reveal unequivocally the core of any individual, let alone one of Canada's most politically outspoken, prolific and thought-provoking playwrights. In the opening chapter of Grace's book, an analogy is drawn between Pollock's life and the lives of Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, and Virginia Woolf. These are strong women who forged their careers despite a nay-saying, male-dominated oligarchy who would have been happier had they remained silent. Grace quotes Woolf's belief that "biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have a thousand" (22). Each play Pollock crafts, like a Russian matryoshka doll, unlocks yet another aspect of her life. The challenge then for the person chronicling her life is to disinter the truth from the fiction of her invented scripts.

Playwright Sharon Pollock circa 1986.

Photo courtesy of Sharon Pollock.

Two years before the publication of Making Theatre, in response to a lecture she attended by her biographer on "auto/biography," Pollock declared that Grace "would never know her, that even her children did not know her" (374). A less judicious and more ego driven biographer might have been insulted by such a statement. Grace could have easily responded by writing a biased work, appealing to her readers' baser instincts. Instead this author, in her preface, makes it clear that as Pollock's "literary biographer" she will report no gossip and that those searching for that kind of story will be sorely disappointed (11). Time and again the reader is offered well-founded insights into the psyche of a playwright who is at once fiercely private and yet, quite contradictorily, unrelentingly candid. "She [Pollock] is aware of the many sides to any position or argument as well as the complex nature of human experience […] she refuses to have her work limited by a label or slotted into one category or another" (375). In a business where artists are constantly compartmentalized according to others' subjective assessments of their talent, is it any wonder that this Canadian theatrical icon is protective of her personal reality? In response to her subject's sensibilities, Grace has chosen to respectfully excavate the facts of Pollock's life. She gently brushes her way through layer after layer of anecdotal and factual information, revealing only what is necessary to the historical narrative in relation to Pollock's overall artistic creativity. The result is not only a well-crafted and interesting chronicle of "a life" in the arts, but also a Canadian theatre history primer accessible to anyone interested in the inner workings of the profession.

Cover illustration for Making Theatre: A Life of Sharon Pollock by Scott McKowen from the poster for the 1989 Grand Theatre production of Blood Relations.

Photo courtesy of Talonbooks

The book is comprised of three sections, with each one subdivided into chapters. Numbering ten in all, they detail the distinct eras of the playwright's life as they relate her body of work. Grace draws an analogy between Pollock's tale and "our collective story as a people or a nation" (18): appropriately so, since Pollock has mined the rich vein of Canadian socio-cultural history and interwoven it with aspects of her personal story to create many of her plays. Grace maintains that to ignore the details of Pollock's past is to deny how far the country has progressed, theatrically and politically, in a short half century (21). Pollock's escape from the painful memories of her youth and early adulthood to the freedom of personal and artistic self-recreation in the west parallels the massive imaginative...