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Reviewed by:
  • Popular Political Theatre and Performance
  • Tim Prentki (bio)
Julie Salverson , ed. Popular Political Theatre and Performance. Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English. Volume 17. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2010.

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Cover image for Popular Political Theatre and Performance. Cover image: "between departure and arrival" by Jin-me Yoon

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"This collection of new and previously published writing presents an exchange of voices, sometimes in disagreement and creative tension, working through the stories, dreams, adventures, analyses, and dilemmas of popular theatre in English Canada between the early eighties and the preset day" writes Julie Salverson in her introduction (vii). In fact the historical sweep covered by some of the contributors, particularly Bonita Bray's account of the Progressive Arts Club's production of Waiting for Lefty (Odets, 1935) and Alan Filewod's location of the beginnings of recent popular theatre in The Farm Show (Theatre Passe Muraille, 1976) offers a selective panorama of work spanning some eighty years. Salverson also reveals that this volume 17 is a companion piece to the forthcoming volume 19, Community Engaged Theatre and Practice. Together, these two volumes promise a rich tapestry that will form an invaluable source of reference for practitioners and students of popular and community theatre for years to come. This richness has been achieved through a judicious mix of practitioners and academics, practice and theory, politics and aesthetics.

With the words available there is no way to do justice to the intensity and diversity of the essays, so I will rather attempt to consider some of the themes, which recur across the range. The decision of the general editor to organize the series by chronology, while providing an excellent sense of the shifting preoccupations in the field across time, does not allow individual contributions to "talk" to each other. This work is, montage-like, left to the reader.

One of these themes is the issue of what makes political theatre "popular" in both senses of the word: achieving large audiences and critical acclaim, and being made by the people. Bray's thoughtful account of the 1935 production of Waiting for Lefty in Vancouver begins by contextualising the odds stacked against the production: "The play's radical subject matter, the players' inexperience and the polarized political climate in Vancouver all mitigated against success" (50). As her essay in part reveals, these factors, rather than mitigating against success, largely account for it. The play was about something that mattered to the local community and to a wider society; it addressed systemic injustices. The choice of actors ensured that there was a connection through recognition between performers and audiences. The performers' inexperience was compensated by telling their own stories and drawing on their authentic experience. Furthermore, the political climate of the day ensured that the theatre was addressing an issue that occupied the minds of the community. Bray concludes by suggesting that the qualities of the play had much to do with its success, reminding us that a traditionally scripted drama can mount a significant popular theatre intervention. For Filewod, however, this method is limited historically and he offers the example of Passe Muraille as a way of transforming "the ideological dead-end that had defeated the political theatre movements of the 1930s" (137). He develops the concept of "radical mobility" to exploit the possibilities of the digital age for transnational cultural collaborations, mirroring the methods, but opposing the purposes, of transnational corporations, citing the instance of Banner/Ground Zero. He sees this work "among countless others [as] practising the transnational, at the edge, and ... pushing back, out there, with insurgent street agitprop, radical clown armies, Internet vaudeville and flash mobs, on the edge, where work defines form, audiences define space and performance maps the connections between them" (143). As economic and cultural realities adopt new formations, so the guises in which popular theatre appears must adapt to keep responding to Brecht's dictum: "Taught only by reality can/Reality be changed" (34).

Another motif is that of the situational differences between practitioners and academics, or rather between those who must seek funding in the market beyond the campus and those who are supported...

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