Sharon Pollock: Essays on Her Works ed. by Anne F. Nothof (review)

374 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 Anne F. Nothof, editor. Sharon Pollock: Essays on Her Works Guernica. 192. $12.00 This collection brings together important previously published material on Pollock, and if most of the articles cover similar ground, they do document main trends in Pollock criticism. Indeed, Malcolm Page tries to offer what seems to me to be an unnecessary revision of his well-known assessment of her 1972B76 plays by downplaying her as >committed= to political and feminist issues. Robert Nunn=s important 1984 overview adds Sweet Land of Liberty, Blood Relations, One Tiger to a Hill, Generations, and the radio play Intensive Care for consideration in addition to Page=s earlier choices of A Compulsory Option, And Out Goes You, Walsh, and The Komatagu Maru Incident, and concludes that her treatment of oppressed individuals and deceptive myths had developed so far beyond the merely didactic that she had become a full-fledged playwright B possibly Canada=s Ibsen. Diane Bessai takes the overview further, charting the move away from the earlier documentary style to the more complex dramatic shape, as she concentrates on the growing importance of the female characters. Blood Relations, with the split character of Lizzie, whose story can only be accessed through audience involvement, marks the first great step forward. But the representation of women in Generations and Whiskey Six Cadenza fails to create a feminist point of view, as it does in Doc which despite its personal subject matter is even less successful according to Bessai. Pollock=s feminism also concerns Sharon Stratton, who examines how the restrictions on female subjectivity are brilliantly explored through the metadramatic role-playing of Lizzie by the Actress. True to the editor=s claim that she is not interested in categorizing Pollock but in showing the richness of her work, no other specifically feminist articles are included. Instead, Craig Walker=s exploration of women and madness in the plays of the early 1990s takes a different direction. Referring to Egg, Getting It Straight, Fair Liberty=s Bell, and Saucy Jack, he suggests that Pollock=s presentation of mad women seems to be, not about gender oppression, but about revisiting the mistakes of the past with sufficient imagination to prevent them being repeated in a more just future. Historical issues are treated in Heidi J. Holder=s demonstration of Pollock=s destruction of national heroes in Walsh and The Komatagu Maru Incident as she reveals both the betrayals perpetrated by and the final entrapments of Walsh and Hopkinson inside the power structures they serve. She reinforces her point that Pollock uses the stage to force the audience to acknowledge that >facts= need to be carefully examined by referring briefly to similar demythologizing practices in Blood Relations, Saucy Jack, and Fair Liberty=s Call. Holder=s ambiguity in not connecting Pollock=s devices with a political agenda is somewhat offset by Anne F. Nothof=s analysis of the Canadian obsession with imposing both personal HUMANITIES 375 and political borders in Walsh and Komagatu Maru; the tragic implications of maintaining them are, as she shows, just as destructively at work in Fair Liberty=s Call. Kathy Chung=s previously unpublished article on Fair Liberty=s Call furthers the discourse by arguing that the prominent issues of >inheritance= as a crippling force are resolved by Pollock=s conclusion, which suggests forging new alliances that disregard past loyalties. Nothof=s interview offers some fresh insights into where Pollock sees herself today. While the production history of her plays at home and abroad confirms that she is not narrowly regional or political, her recent plays, Moving Pictures on Nell Shipman, and Angel=s Trumpet on Zelda Fitzgerald, indicate that she remains interested in women=s, if not feminist, issues. Ultimately the Pollock who emerges is possibly more accomplished but not really very different from the earlier version of thirty years ago. (ROSALIND KERR) Althea Prince. Being Black: Essays by Althea Prince Insomniac Press. 162. $19.95 Althea Prince=s fine essay collection presents an analysis of >doing life in Canada= by examining >what it means to be human and African in the objective realities of Toronto, Canada, the world.= Throughout Being Black, Prince foregrounds...