Drama

374 LETTERS IN CANADA 1981 peurd'une imminente destruction que du manque de r~flexion. Densiteet dur~e sont leurs pierres d'angle. Je clumte parce que je ne veux pas mourir. Drama JOHN H. ASTINGTON 'Let us have a flooding of Canadian plays, the bad and the good: cries the dramatized critic in Rick Salutin's Nathan Cohen: A Review (CTR, no. 30, 45-105, $3.50). The flood this year has issued from Playwrights Canada, our major publisher of drama in 1981 - over twenty plays and ten children's plays, all in the familiar playscript format, which is as attractively produced as the deliberately cheap method allows, though infuriating to fmd in a bookcase. Talonbooks produced no new English play, and there was only one collection, of Sharon Pollock's recent plays, published by NeWest Press (Blood Relations and Other Plays, 210, $8.95 paper). Economic hard times in the publishinghouses and the theatres are no doubt partly to blame, but there is no sign either that good new plays are not finding their way into print, or that the publishers are particularly afraid of letting bad writing appear, so that Cohen's exhortation is being fulfilled. On subject-matter Salutin's Cohen has this to say: 'Canadian playwrights ... Always feel they have to do philosophy ... The nature of art, the cancer of conformity, the immorality of Puritanism, the anguish of being young, the burden of being Canadian.' Clearly things have improved in the last ten years, or perhaps only the mode has changed: what used to be so dreadfully serious is now habitually treated ironically, with the central obsessions remaining the same. One subject not on Cohen's list, and of which no one seems to tire, is the Family: it is the thematic centre of at least half a dozen plays published during the year. The best of the group is Pollock's Blood Relations, which is also arguably her best play to date. Certainly the other two plays in the collection look very thin besideit; one ofthem, Generations, another family play, is merely a collection of stereotyped characters and situations, and the family in question is saddled with the impossible Goon Show title of the Nurlins. Blood Relations, by contrast, shows inventiveness and a good deal of subtlety, and if the play does not quite work in the way the playwright tries to make it work, it remains forceful and impressive in reading and in the theatre. Her central character is the infamous Lizzie Borden, and one of the questions the play opens is that which preys on the mind of Emma, her elder sister: did she or didn't she? Lizzie, despite the children's rhyme, was acquitted at her trial. The play toys with ambiguity on this DRAMA 375 score, but leaves us without much doubt that indeed she did; we are led to understand how the murder comes to be a necessary act, a release, for Lizzie and the people around her. The issue of motives is complicated by the dramatization, within the frame of the play, of the story of Lizzie and her parents: her life is impersonated by an actress, schooled by Lizzie herself, ten years after the time of the murders. The reality of the events we see on stage is therefore always subject to our sense that they are doubly a fiction - inventions, rationalizations, wishes, nightmares. This is hardly an original technical trick, of course, and its danger, which Pollock largely avoids, is that its cleverness obtrudes itself and simply parades, which is boring. The only place where the play becomes somewhat pretentious on this score is, unfortunately, at the end, asif the playwright could not quite trust the suggestions the action has made, and wants the characters to say everything once more: the text seems about two pages too long. Lizzie, in either manifestation of herself, is attractive because she is an ironist, involved in the action and yet outside it, with a mocking analytical awareness of the limits imposed on her by sex, money, and social class, against which she struggles, and which arouse her passionate disgust. She interests us as a character first; her trap...