Canadian Drama

CANADIAN DRAMA ARTHUR L. PHELPS CRITICAL appraisal of the accomplishment by Canadians in the field of drama yields negative findings. Artistically we tend to be a derivative and flaccid people. In drama we are not much more than eager and delighted parasites, as our ninth Drama Festival so patently proclaimed. . Yet, we have been honestly busy in connection with the drama. So busy indeed that one of the first tasks of the critic is to discriminate between the literary and the social significance of the activity he examines. And even after the world of delightful selfconscious green-room gossip and footlights parade in which public and actors revel has been ticketed for what it is worth (and it is worth a good deal; the society which supports a dramatic activity has always been important in the history of drama) and set aside, the composite nature of the drama itself complicates analysis. Indeed, a flared match at a given moment in a particular scene in a dark house may seem more effective than all the words which led up to it. Often the stage director and the electrician are the real makers of what the audience calls good drama. Even those Iiterary persons whose strategy it is to give a place and function to the always suspected and secretly despised director in order that they may keep him within it, frequently deplore our lack of a national theatre and established stages in centres of population; in reality they are admitting the truth: drama does not exist until it is off the paper and into the theatre where stage, actors, producer, director, audience, each play a part in bringing about th~ thing that happens. . Yet, however important setting, pantomime, and gesture may . be, and however difficult it may be to demonstrate that they are nevertheless secondary, the fundamental truth of drama must be clarified and maintained: that the word spoken is the originating, decisive, conditioning matter in the drama that is really important. Intensification of the emotional and intellectual forces latent in human speech occurs in the theatre of course-it is the glory of the theatre that it is so-but the inner ear of the literary artist must first have heard that speech, made it, and felt it in the making. 82 CANADIAN DRAMA ARTHUR L. PHELPS CRITICAL appraisal of the accomplishment by Canadians in the field of drama yields negative findings. Artistically we tend to be a derivative and flaccid people. In drama we are not much more than eager and delighted parasites, as our ninth Drama Festival so patently proclaimed. . Yet, we have been honestly busy in connection with the drama. So busy indeed that one of the first tasks of the critic is to discriminate between the literary and the social significance of the activity he examines. And even after the world of delightful selfconscious green-room gossip and footlights parade in which public and actors revel has been ticketed for what it is worth (and it is worth a good deal; the society which supports a dramatic activity has always been important in the history of drama) and set aside, the composite nature of the drama itself complicates analysis. Indeed, a flared match at a given moment in a particular scene in a dark house may seem more effective than all the words which led up to it. Often the stage director and the electrician are the real makers of what the audience calls good drama. Even those Iiterary persons whose strategy it is to give a place and function to the always suspected and secretly despised director in order that they may keep him within it, frequently deplore our lack of a national theatre and established stages in centres of population; in reality they are admitting the truth: drama does not exist until it is off the paper and into the theatre where stage, actors, producer, director, audience, each play a part in bringing about th~ thing that happens. . Yet, however important setting, pantomime, and gesture may . be, and however difficult it may be to demonstrate that they are nevertheless secondary, the fundamental truth of drama must be clarified and maintained: that the word spoken...