Establishing Our Boundaries: English-Canadian Theatre Criticism 9781442674622

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ESTABLISHING OUR BOUNDARIES

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EDITED BY ANTON WAGNER

Establishing Our Boundaries: English-Canadian Theatre Criticism

U N I V E R S I T Y OF T O R O N T O P R E S S Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1999 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-4115-9 (cloth)

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Main entry under title: Establishing our boundaries : English-Canadian Theatre Criticism Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8020-4115-9 1. Dramatic criticism - Canada - History. PNI707.E87 1999

792'.01'5O971

I. Wagner, Anton, 1949c98-932666-7

The research for the essays published in this volume was made possible by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Editing of this volume was made possible with the support of the Herman Voaden Trust Fund. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Additional publication assistance was provided by the Department of Theatre, York University, the Faculty of Arts, McGill University, Mount Saint Vincent University, Ryerson Polytechnic University, Brock University, the University of Saskatchewan, and the Division of Arts, University College of the Cariboo.

Contents

CONTRIBUTORS

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Introduction 1 Establishing Our Boundaries: English-Canadian Theatre Criticism ANTON WAGNER 3 Part One: Editor-Critics 2 From Puffery to Criticism - William Lyon Mackenzie, Joseph Howe, and Daniel Morrison: Theatre Criticism in Halifax and Toronto, 1826-1857 PATRICK B. O'NEILL 6l Part Two: Reviewer-Critics 3 The Critic as Reviewer: E.R. Parkhurst at the Toronto Mail and Globe 1876-1924 ROSS STUART

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4 The Cosmopolitan, the Cultural Nationalist, and the Egocentric Critic: Harriet Walker, Charles W. Handscomb, and Charles H. Wheeler in Winnipeg, 1898-1906 DOUGLAS ARRELL

107

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Part Three: Cultural Nationalism 5 Hector Willoughby Charlesworth and the Nationalization of Cultural Authority, 1890-1945 DENIS SALTER

137

6 Saving the Nation's Aesthetic Soul: B.K. Sandwell at the Montreal Herald, 1900-1914, and Saturday Night, 1932-1951 ANTON WAGNER

177

7 Becoming Actively Creative: Dr Lawrence Mason, the Globe's Critic, 1924-1939 ANTON WAGNER

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8 Herbert Whittaker, Reporting from the Front: The Montreal Gazette, 1937-1949, and the Globe and Mail, 1949-1975 J E N N I F E R HARVIE and RICHARD PAUL KNOWLES

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9 Criticism in a Canadian Social Context: Nathan Cohen's Theatre Criticism, 1946—1971 DON RUBIN

234

10 In Anger and Hope: Oscar Ryan at the Canadian Tribune, 1955-1988 MAYTE GOMEZ 254 11 The Classical Humanist: Jamie Portman at the Calgary Herald, 1959-1975, and the Southam News Service, 1975-1987 MO1RA DAY 268 12 The Archetypal Enthusiast: Urjo Kareda at the Toronto Star, 1971-1975 DENIS JOHNSTON 291 13 The Critic as Cultural Nationalist: Don Rubin at the Toronto Star, 1968-1972, and the Canadian Theatre Review, 1974-1983 IRA L E V I N E

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Part Four: The Post-Nationalist Period 14 Subverting Modernisms in British Columbia: Christopher Dafoe at the Vancouver Sun, 1968-1975 JAMES HOFFMAN

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15 Journalist or Critic? Brian Brennan at the Calgary Herald, 1975-1988 DIANE BESSAI 336 16 The Iconoclast Sceptic on the Beat: Gina Mallet at the Toronto Star, 1976-1984 ALAN FILEWOD

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17 Establishing Contact between Two Cultures: Marianne Ackerman at the Montreal Gazette, 1983-1987 LEANORE LIEBLEIN

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18 Theatre - Transgression or Tribal Celebration? Ray Conlogue at the Globe and Mail, 1978-1998 ROBERT N U N N

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Contributors

Douglas Arrell is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Theatre and Drama at the University of Winnipeg. He completed his undergraduate training at the University of Toronto and his doctorate at the University of London. Winnipeg drama critic for the NeWest Review, he is also the author of articles on many aspects of Canadian theatre and has been active in Winnipeg as a director and dramaturge. Diane Bessai is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. She is editor of NeWest Press's multi-volume Prairie Play series and is the author of Playwrights of Collective Creation. She has published essays on James Reaney, Wilfred Watson, Sharon Pollock, Judith Thompson, and Joanna Glass and on issues of regionalism in Prairie theatre and drama. Since retirement she has been directing the archival Edmonton Professional Theatre Project, which includes co-writing, with Dr Donald Perkins, the first history of Edmonton professional theatre in the modern period. Moira Day is an associate professor of Drama and graduate chair at the University of Saskatchewan, where she teaches theatre history, aesthetics and criticism, and Canadian theatre. She is also an Adjunct Professor in the Women's and Gender Studies Department. Her specialty is Western Canadian theatre studies, with a particular interest in women pioneers. She has published articles in the Canadian Theatre Review, Theatre Research in Canada, Essays in Theatre, Theatre InSight, and NeWest Review and is editor of The Hungry Spirit, a collection of plays by Elsie Park Gowan. Alan Filewod is a professor in the School of Literatures and Performance Studies in English at the University of Guelph. He is the author of Collective

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Encounters: Documentary Theatre in English Canada and editor of two volumes of Canadian drama. His scholarly work, focusing on Canadian theatre history, postcolonialism, and political theatre, has resulted in several dozen chapters and articles. He has been editor and co-editor of the Canadian Theatre Review since 1988 and has served as president of the Association for Canadian Theatre Research. Mayte Gomez plans to receive her doctoral degree in Communications (Cultural Studies Stream) from McGill University in 1999 after studying theatre at York University and the University of Guelph. She received the Association for Canadian Theatre Research Heather McCallum Award given to young scholars in 1992 and has published in Canadian Literature, Theatre Research in Canada, and Essays in Theatre. Her most recent work has been to study cultural policy and attitudes towards intellectuals of the Communist Party of Spain from 1920 to 1975. Jennifer Harvie is a lecturer in the Department of Drama at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her research interests are in contemporary theatre and theory, particularly in relation to identity politics of national, intercultural, and sexual identities. Within contemporary performance, her focus is on British, Canadian, intercultural, and postcolonial work. She has published in the Canadian Theatre Review, in On-Stage and Off-Stage: English Canadian Drama in Discourse, and in Theatre Research in Canada. James Hoffman teaches theatre at the University College of the Cariboo in Kamloops, British Columbia. He is the author of The Ecstasy of Resistance: A Biography of George Ryga, as well as of articles on British Columbia theatre. He is currently working on performance during the period of the early explorers and settlers in the province. Denis Johnston is a member of the senior staff of the Shaw Festival with responsibility for publications and public education. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto Graduate Centre for Study of Drama and taught theatre history at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Up the Mainstream: The Rise of Toronto's Alternative Theatres and of numerous articles and reviews on Canadian drama and theatre. Richard Paul Knowles is a professor and former chair of Drama at the University of Guelph, an editor of the Canadian Theatre Review, and managing editor of Essays in Theatre. He has published essays on Canadian drama

Contributors

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and theatre and on Shakespeare in performance, and has on three occasions won the Richard Plant Award from the Association for Canadian Theatre Research for outstanding articles in the field. He has worked in the professional theatre as a playwright, director, and dramaturge and is writing a volume for Cambridge University Press on theatre and performance theory. Ira A. Levine, Ph.D., is a theatre scholar with nearly twenty years of experience as an arts and university administrator. He holds degrees from the University of Rochester and the University of Toronto. His publications include the monograph Left-Wing Dramatic Theory in the American Theatre. From 1987 to 1995 Dr Levine was Chair of the Theatre School at Ryerson Polytechnic University, Toronto. Since 1995 he has served as Dean of the Faculty of Applied Arts at Ryerson and as Chair of the Canadian Association of Fine Arts Deans. Leanore Lieblein, former chair of English at McGill University, has published articles on medieval and Renaissance drama in performance and directed medieval, Renaissance, and modern plays. She co-translated Les Esbahis (Taken by Surprise] by Jacques Grevin (1561). As a member of the McGill Shakespeare in the Theatre Research Team, she is currently working on the staging of Shakespeare in French in Quebec. Robert Nunn is a professor in the Department of Film Studies, Dramatic and Visual Arts at Brock University. From 1993 to 1996 he was co-editor of Theatre Research in Canada. His articles on Canadian drama and dramatists have appeared in Canadian Drama, Canadian Theatre Review, Canadian Literature, Theatre History in Canada and Theatre Research International. His current research explores the relation between postmodern and postcolonial theory. Patrick B. O'Neill is a professor of Speech and Drama at Mount Saint Vincent University where he has directed nineteen productions. Although his major field of publication has been bibliographic in nature, he has also published extensively on Canadian theatre in Prairie forum, the Dalhousie Review, the Journal of Canadian Studies, Canadian Drama, and Theatre Research in Canada. He is currently working on a history of theatre in Halifax during the nineteenth century. Don Rubin is a former chair of the Department of Theatre at York University and was one of the founding members of York's Faculty of Fine Arts.

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He served as theatre critic for the New Haven Register, the Toronto Star, Maclean's, and CBC Radio from the 19605 to the 19805. He has been teaching theatre criticism courses at York University since 1969 and was the founding editor of both the Canadian Theatre Review and its book publishing program. He was the editor of Canadian Theatre History: Selected Readings and from 1983 to 1999 was the editor of the World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre, published by Routledge. Denis Salter earned his doctorate at the Graduate Centre for Study of Drama, University of Toronto, and has been teaching theatre studies at McGill University since 1987. He has published widely on Canadian drama and theatre, Shakespeare in Canada, Victorian stage history, and performance theory. His current research interests are alternative models of theatre pedagogy and keywords in Canadian theatre historiography. Ross Stuart, associate dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts, York University, has a Ph.D. from the Graduate Centre for Study of Drama, University of Toronto. He has written extensively on Canadian theatre history, including The History of Prairie Theatre and contributions to The Encyclopedia of Music in Canada, The Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre, and The New Canadian Encyclopedia. He has two chapters on summer festivals and theatres and on university theatre published in Later Stages: Essays in Ontario Theatre from the First World War to the 19705. Anton Wagner received his doctorate from the Graduate Centre for Study of Drama, University of Toronto. He worked as a dramaturge for the Playwrights Co-op in the mid-1970s and since then has served on the executive of the Association for Canadian Theatre History, the Toronto Drama Bench, the Canadian Theatre Critics Association, and the Canadian Centre of the International Theatre Institute. He has edited ten books on Canadian theatre and drama, including Contemporary Canadian Theatre: New World Visions and A Vision of Canada: Herman Voaden's Dramatic Works 1925-1945. He was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Canada Research Fellow at York University, where he was the director of research and managing editor of the World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre, published by Routledge. As a television producer and director, his documentaries include Our Hiroshima, The Photographer: An Artist's Journey, and Cuba: Country of Souls.

INTRODUCTION

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1 Establishing Our Boundaries: English-Canadian Theatre Criticism ANTON WAGNER

Canada's cultural history - from colony to Dominion to independent nation - is mirrored in the pages of its newspapers from the 17503 to the present. Newspapers and magazines have reflected and shaped how we view and express ourselves and how we differentiate ourselves from others - how we establish our personal, collective, and political boundaries. Nowhere is this cultural debate more evident and vocal than in press coverage of foreign and indigenous theatre and drama in Canada. How to express what is here in the face of international standards and how to provide local creativity with the resources and supportive environment necessary to compete with the best the world has to offer has been a major concern of editors, artists, and theatre critics for the past two centuries. 'The Canadian problem/ Robertson Davies observed during one of the crests of indigenous theatre and dramatic writing in 1975, 'is simply stated as: Who are wet Have we anything to say that others have not already said as well or better? ... I feel for the people who deeply desire a national home, rather than simply a geographical area; I understand their longing for a body of accepted belief and a common past; I know why they want to call some men brothers in a particular rather than in a general acceptance of the human state.'1 Only sixteen years later Gina Mallet, the Toronto Star's controversial former theatre critic, proclaimed the demise of indigenous theatre and playwriting. 'No one says the theatre is dying any more - because it's true,' she suggested in Toronto Star columns entitled 'Theatre Is Going the Way of the Dodo' and 'Our Hothouse Culture Stifles New Growth' (20 April and 13 July 1991). She observed that international blockbuster musicals such as The Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables had replaced Canadian plays as the mainstream of Canadian theatre because 'they brought back to the theatre, if only briefly, the mass audience that has long since defected to TV for

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its daily entertainment.' Mallet asserted that arts council support had artificially stimulated Canadian theatre and drama independent of actual public demand and that this artificial 'Cancult' would be swept away by (primarily American) popular culture. 'American pop culture is seductive. Not just because it's marketed so well, but because the idea that animates it is the idea of individual freedom, the most powerful idea today. You can't put a border on ideas and why should we want to? If Canada is to become more culturally vigorous perhaps it will have to open its borders to artists from everywhere. Protectionists may squeal but quality Canadians will surely prosper.' Mallet referred to the restoration in Toronto of the Elgin Theatre to house a two-year run of Cats, the restoration of the Pantages Theatre for the ongoing run of The Phantom of the Opera, the construction by Ed and David Mirvish of the Princess of Wales Theatre to house Miss Saigon, and the construction of the North York Performing Arts Centre with its inaugural production of Show Boat. 'Toronto could in a decade be one of the wonders of the continent, full of splendid new/restored theatres and with nothing to put in them,' she predicted. In May 1998 Garth Drabinsky lost control of his Livent Inc., the Canadian producer of such mega-musicals as Phantom of the Opera, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Show Boat, Sunset Boulevard, and Ragtime, following a loss of $44.1 million in 1997. Control of Livent was acquired by New York Wall Street investment banker Roy Furman and Michael Ovitz, former chair of the Los Angeles-based Creative Artists Agency and briefly CEO of the Disney Corporation, suggesting that Livent would be drawn even deeper into the American entertainment empire. When in August 1998 Livent Inc. suspended Drabinsky after the company found 'serious irregularities' in its financial records, the announcement halted trading of Livent shares on the Toronto Stock Exchange and on the Nasdaq Stock Market in the United States. The Toronto Star editorialized that Ovitz and Furman now had 'a free hand to Americanize Livent' and suggested that 'the real tragedy, in all of this, may be Toronto's status as the third-largest theatre city in the English-speaking world. Drabinsky, whatever his shortcomings as a businessman, made it happen' (12 August 1998). Davies's and Mallet's question of what and how Canadian artists could create for local and international audiences once again became a subject of heated public and artistic debate.2 E.K. Brown had addressed this question in his ground-breaking book of literary criticism, On Canadian Poetry, in 1943. He began by examining 'the psychological factors ... against which the growth of a Canadian literature must struggle' when confronted with the older and more advanced cultures of Britain, Europe, and the United States, and observed that 'a colony lacks

English-Canadian Theatre Criticism 5 the spiritual energy to rise above routine ... It lacks this energy because it does not adequately believe in itself. It applies to what it has standards which are imported, and therefore artificial and distorting. It sets the great good place not in its present, nor in its past nor in its future, but somewhere outside its own borders, somewhere beyond its own possibilities/3 Half a century later Ray Conlogue, the Globe and Mail's Quebec arts correspondent and former theatre critic in Toronto, declared that 'today Canadian movies can still not be seen in Canadian theatres and our legitimate theatre, founded with much fanfare in the sixties, has collapsed before a tidal wave of international mega-musical drivel.' In his 1996 book of cultural criticism, Impossible Nation: The Longing for Homeland in Canada and Quebec, Conlogue concluded about English Canada that 'a community cannot come into existence unless it dares to imagine the world on its own terms.'4 This psychological and material condition of Canada as a cultural colony is already vividly illustrated a century earlier by the arts coverage in the 7 April 1896 issue of the Toronto Globe, with its juxtaposition of a lavish international spectacle featuring a world star and indigenous attempts to imagine the world on Canadian terms. In its page 4 'Music and the Drama' section, the Globe published a long review of Sarah Bernhardt's production of Izeyl at Toronto's Grand Opera House. In this romantic Oriental drama written especially for Bernhardt, the courtesan Izeyl, 'the woman who has lived a life of pleasure and shame until she learns the deeper meaning of a love other than the senses,' dies tragically in the arms of Prince Siddartha after renouncing her past for the spirituality of the Buddha. The anonymous Globe critic initially expressed disappointment at 'the introduction of such a woman as heroine,' having grown 'somewhat wearied of the Magdalen type of heroine so done to death in these days of Thomas Hardy and George Dumaurier.'5 But he quickly conceded that 'the faultfinder soon ceases to grumble when the woman of the demi-monde appears as the "divine Sarah" whose irresistible charm disarms and shames sharp criticism.' Tn the interpretation of the higher and more spiritual love she does not succeed so well as she does in the more human and fleshly kind,' observed the Globe critic, 'but when this is said adverse criticism is at an end. Her voice, clear, resonant, with that peculiar sweetness in it which can be expressed by no English word except "caressing," has lost none of its power; her enunciation is so distinct that every syllable, every whisper is audible in the remotest corner of the house; her whole personality is captivating ... Divine, indeed, is Bernhardt still.' But despite the fact that a 'large audience' at the Grand Opera House 'showed the keenest appreciation, unaccustomed as Torontonians are to the

6 Anton Wagner language of France/ for Bernhardt's performance, the Globe reserved its front page and three times as much coverage to one of Canada's own stars on the international cultural scene, Gilbert Parker. Born in Camden East, Ontario, in 1860, Parker had sailed in 1886 for Australia, where he worked for four years as a journalist for the Sydney Morning Herald. In 1888 Her Majesty's Theatre in Sydney successfully produced his dramatization of Goethe's Faust. In 1890 Parker moved to London, where collections of his romantic travel writings, Round the Compass in Australia, and equally romantic adventure tales set in the Canadian Northwest, Pierre and His People, were published two years later. A volume of poetry, A Lover's Diary, had been published in Chicago in 1894. His romantic historical novels set in Quebec and New France, The Trail of the Sword (New York, 1894), When Valmond Came to Pontiac (London, 1895), and The Pomp of the Lavilettes (Boston, 1896), made Parker the internationally most successful Canadian writer of popular fiction. At the banquet organized in his honour by the National Club in Toronto, Gilbert Parker's international acclaim as a writer from one of Britain's former colonies made the development of an indigenous Canadian literature and culture an obvious topic for discussion. Distinguished guests and speakers from the world of politics and culture included the lieutenant-governor; the Hon. George William Ross, minister of education and subsequently premier of Ontario; George Robert Parkin, a leader of the Imperial Federation Movement and principal of Upper Canada College; George Taylor Denison, internationally recognized military historian and analyst, one of the founders of the Canada First Movement in 1868, Toronto's senior police magistrate, and chief Canadian spokesman for imperial unity; and J.S. Willison, later Sir John Stephen Willison, journalist, imperialist, and editor of the Toronto Globe. The aim of the National Club was the 'cultivation of national sentiment' as a bulwark against the growing political, economic, and cultural influence of the expansionist American empire to the south. In this struggle between Britain and her dominions and the United States, Parker's fiction - as opposed to Bernhardt's romantic verse tragedy set in the ancient Kingdom of Oudh six centuries before the birth of Christ - struck a valiant blow for Britain and Canada. 'No man of Canadian birth/ the Globe editorialized on its front page, 'has done so much in this generation to bring before Englishspeaking people in the form of romance the Canada of the pine woods, of the voyageur, of the old-time habitant. It is a living Canada and living Canadians that Mr. Parker writes of/6 Addressing the topic of 'Provincialism' and the development of an indigenous Canadian culture, Gilbert Parker declared to his Toronto audience, how-

English-Canadian Theatre Criticism 7 ever, that 'there was only one standard of English literature - the standard of the centre. If we could not live up to the standard of Shakespeare and Addison we must blame, not the standard, but ourselves.'7 For Dr Parkin, as well as for probably most guests at the banquet, Toronto at the end of the nineteenth century was 'the centre of Canadian thought.' Yet he saw the security of Canada's national borders deriving not from Canada's own political, economic, and cultural independence but from its membership in the British Empire. 'The great power and strength of the colonies and their highest future would be found in clinging close to the great empire and claiming the right of British citizenship/ Parkin affirmed to the cheers of his audience. 'Americans going to London for literary fame could not strike the national cord that men from the colonies could. They felt that they were in a country that was not theirs, while Canadians felt that they had an equal right to the glories of St. Paul's and Westminster with the people of the centre. In return for these rights of citizenship, we of the colonies give back the strength and virility that comes of living on great, fresh continents, and to the blood of the empire add the oxygen that is the product of these wide spaces.' Proposing the toast to 'Canadian Literature,' the Globe's editor, J.S. Willison, rejected the charge that the Canadian press was neglectful of Canadian literature. The truth is that we turn out our fair share of literary rubbish, and to seek to give legitimacy to this rubbish would be to degrade the Canadian press and not to elevate Canadian literature ... We do not make the world's standards in letters, but no Canadian who can reach the world's standards will fail of appreciation in bis own country. There is only one determining test for the literary craftsman: will the world hear him; and it is his privilege, his duty perhaps, if he have a message for his fellows, to speak from the world's centres. Gilbert Parker can do greater honour to Canada in London than in Toronto.

Willison's assessment was borne out when only a month later Methuen in London published Parker's romantic historical novel The Seats of the Mighty to international critical acclaim. The novel, set in the Palace of Versailles and in the Governor's Palace in Quebec before the English Conquest, quickly became a best-seller. At the request of Herbert Beerbohm Tree, London's leading actor-manager, Parker dramatized his novel to open Tree's second tour of the United States. The play premiered at the Lafayette Square Opera House in Washington, DC, on 27 November 1896 with President Grover Cleveland in the audience, opened Tree's New York season at the Knicker-

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bocker Theatre on 30 November, and played in Boston at the Hollis Street Theatre on 29 January 1897. Undeterred by the harsh critical reception in New York and Boston to Parker's romantic melodrama, Tree chose The Seats of the Mighty to inaugurate his new Her Majesty's Theatre in London on 28 April 1897, with the Prince of Wales in the royal box. Parker's drama, the first Canadian play to receive a lavish professional production in Britain, ran for six weeks to mixed reviews. The Seats of the Mighty was not toured or staged in Canada and Parker subsequently never again attempted to dramatize one of his novels for the stage.8 O.A. Howland, MPP, perhaps inspired by Dr Parkin's reference to 'great, fresh continents' and their 'wide spaces/ suggested at the 1896 National Club banquet in honour of Gilbert Parker that 'the time was perhaps not yet come for the highest development of Canadian literature. There was as yet much other work to do. Sir John Macdonald had written two iron lines with an iron pen across this continent - (cheers) - and in creating that great work he did as much a work of the imagination suitable to the period as that of any poet.'9 Macdonald's national dream of politically and economically uniting the Canadian provinces through the Canadian Pacific Railway also facilitated the imaginative and cultural connection between Canada and Britain. But improved train travel also opened Canada up to the preponderant influence of American theatre touring companies, creating head-to-head competition between British and American cultural products for the taste and loyalty of Canadian audiences. Robertson Davies (1913-95) experienced this cultural conflict between American and London touring productions while still a schoolboy in Kingston from 1926 to 1928 and while attending Upper Canada College in Toronto from 1928 to 1932. For his own developing theatre aesthetic, Davies rejected the realism of American touring productions, such as Elmer Rice's Street Scene, for the beauty of the non-naturalistic nineteenth-century romantic school of acting of John Martin-Harvey, whose productions Davies had seen in Kingston and Toronto. 'When in 1929 he saw Martin-Harvey playing Sidney Carton in The Only Way, a melodrama based on Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, he was moved as he had been as a child watching Uncle Tom's Cabin/ Judith Skelton Grant writes in her biography Robertson Davies: Man of Myth.10 T don't believe in realism, an impossible concept, a dismal attempt to produce reality. There are more truths available in the theatrical than in the realistic/ Davies observed of his own playwriting in 1973." In his obituary of Martin-Harvey, published in the Peterborough Examiner in 1944 - the year

English-Canadian Theatre Criticism 9 that Davies began writing plays intended for the London stage12 - he recalled of Sir John that 'when he acted he was a most uncommon man, a portent and a phoenix before the eyes of his audience ... [W]e grow weary of common men on the stage; there we want heroes and demi-gods, and Martin-Harvey was able to give them to us/13 As a junior actor in the Irving Company, Martin-Harvey had played in Montreal and Toronto with Henry Irving during his North American tours of 1883-4, 1884-5, 1887-8, 1893-4, and 1895-6. In 1903 he acted in Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, and Hamilton on an independent tour, and undertook his first all-Canadian transcontinental tour in 1914.14 Sir John travelled nearly 100,000 miles in Canada on that and subsequent tours in 1921, 19234, 1925-6, 1928, 1929-30, and 1932, crossing Canada by train a total of four teen times.15 As the critic for the Toronto Evening Telegram stated in a 1926 review: 'Inextricably bound together in the loyalties of theatre lovers of the Old Land and of the Dominion are Martin-Harvey and The Only Way/16 We encounter the elderly Sir John and Miss Nina de Silva (Lady MartinHarvey), the company's female lead, on their final cross-Canada tour in Robertson Davies's 1975 novel World of Wonders. But Davies provides us with only a brief glimpse of the critics covering the touring company at the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto and their critical reactions. 'The important four were in their seats, as usual/ Davies writes: 'the man who looked like Edward VII from Saturday Night [Hector Charlesworth]; the stout little man, rumoured to be a Theosophist, from the Globe [Lawrence Mason]; the smiling little fellow in pince-nez from the Telegram [Edward W. Wodson]; and the ravaged Norseman who wrote incomprehensible rhapsodies for the Star [Augustus Bridle]. They were friendly (except Edward VII, who was jocose about Milady), but they would persist in remembering Irving (whether they had ever actually seen him, or not), and that bothered the younger actors/17 In his novel, Davies conflates Martin-Harvey's many cross-Canada tours into one tour taking place in 1932 and also reduces the varied critical reactions to his productions into what is essentially a caricature of the naive, provincial, and self-important Canadian critic still hovering in the popular imagination. The actual 1926, 1928, and 1929 Toronto reviews of The On Way show a much more complex picture of Canadian cultural tastes and of the varied sophistication of Canadian theatre critics. The anonymous Telegram reviewer in 1926 was indeed 'friendly/ and even Hector Charleswort in Saturday Night observed, like Davies, that 'there is an innate, spiritual elevation in the acting of Martin Harvey which illuminates every role he assays' (16 Jan. 1926). Fred Jacob (1882-1928), music and drama critic for the

io Anton Wagner Toronto Mail and Empire since 1910, also had a critical reaction similar to Davies's perception of Martin-Harvey. 'He has a most sympathetic voice and he is not afraid of a poetic eloquence of utterance - something not often heard on the stage since the clipped directness of realism came into vogue ... in a decade that favours more cynical offerings in the theatre, it remains a moving performance, with some moments that are genuinely haunting' (12 Jan. 1926). The Toronto reviewers were far from naively uncritical, however. Augustus Bridle, music and drama reviewer for the Toronto Star from 1922 until, at the age of 83, he was hit by a slow-moving truck at the corner of Sherbourne and Bloor streets in December 1952, was just beginning to show traces of the eccentric stream-of-consciousness writing style for which 'the ravaged Norseman' became notorious later in his career.18 In 1926 Bridle expressed puzzlement at the continuing popularity of Martin-Harvey in Canada in view of the total absence of his name in London newspapers and cultural magazines. 'New plays by old actors are as likely to be talked about as old plays by new actors. But old plays by old actors are in danger of neglect/ Bridle concluded. 'Post-war London has a strange restless appetite. London after all remains a sort of final judgement seat. And Sir Martin Harvey at present does not seem to be even pin-pricking London.'19 To the Globe's Lawrence Mason, a vocal advocate of the modern European and American 'new stagecraft' as a production model for Canadian theatres, the absence of Martin-Harvey's name in London newspapers was explained by the fact that the English actor-manager was producing what was essentially museum theatre. 'To students of the drama the chief interest of the play will be historical/ Mason wrote of The Only Way. 'It is highly instructive to note the old-fashioned use of the soliloquy, the incredible series of eaves droppings and over hearings, the impossible speech by Sidney Carton at the close of the second act, with exposition, motivation, characterization and who knows what else all huddled up into one sudden outburst of rhetoric. It is also equally instructive, on the mechanical side, to note the painted back-drops and painted canvas flats, with almost no solid properties "in the round"' (12 Jan. 1926). It is difficult to reconcile Mason's critical reaction with Judith Skelton Grant's assertion in Robertson Davies: Man of Myth that 'Davies knew just as much about the critics ... In Toronto, there was Dr Lawrence Mason of the Globe, who reported but never judged or criticized the plays he saw.'20 Other Toronto critics were also more perceptive than Robertson Davies's caricature allows. Hector Charlesworth, searching his long memory as a theatre critic, noted that Martin-Harvey had already starred in The Only Way

English-Canadian Theatre Criticism 11 in his 1903 tour and had revived the play in 1914 and 1921. He was only partly 'jocose about Milady/ writing that 'Lady Harvey, who has played the devoted Mimi through thick and thin since the original performance in 1899, still shows the technical skill which impressed critics on her first coming to America in this role.'21 Fred Jacob, in his monthly survey of foreign professional and Canadian Little Theatres published in the Canadian Forum, stated much more bluntly in May of 1928, T do not suppose there is a town in Canada where it remains a secret that Lady Martin Harvey cannot act ... even a child would see that she is miscast, from the boy in The Breed of the Treshams to Ophelia in Hamlet. In The Burgomaster of Stillemonde, Lady Martin Harvey ruins the final scene, because of her complete incompetence, vocally and otherwise, to handle an intense emotional outburst, and she helps to spoil the memory of Sir John's superb performance in the finest modern play in his repertoire.' By 1929, the year the sixteen-year-old Robertson Davies fell under the spell of The Only Way,22 Lawrence Mason, Augustus Bridle, and Hector Charlesworth were no longer critically interested in the production. Mason and Bridle indicated in their brief i October reviews that Tittle need be said' about its star actor, 'Admirable in His Most Accustomed Role.' Charlesworth sent a second stringer to cover Martin-Harvey for Saturday Night, devoting all of his own column to the New York Theatre Guild's production of Wings Over Europe at the Princess Theatre. He excitedly wrote about the dramatic theme of that production - the implications of Einstein's theory of relativity and the future possibilities of atomic energy - commenting, '[N]o more salient attempt to present intellectual ideas through medium of drama has been seen in our time and it is an experiment that would have seemed utterly preposterous by the theatrical managers of the nineteenth century' (5 Oct. 1929). The tastes of Canadian audiences also had begun to change. Bill Graham has recalled seeing Martin-Harvey during his last cross-Canada tour at the Walker Theatre in Winnipeg in 1932. At the conclusion of The King's Messenger, after perfunctory applause with the house only a quarter full, 'the curtain came down and rose again in almost complete silence. There was a little embarrassed applause as it continued, to our bewilderment, to go up and down to no applause, as though it were operated by a machine ... At the last curtain, Martin-Harvey and Miss de Silva stood together, hand in hand, on the bare boards of the stage in the almost empty theatre, looking small, pathetic and somehow lost. The glory of the old tumultuous surges of applause had gone.'23 Absent from Davies's World of Wonders is any indication that Canadian

12 Anton Wagner audiences, artists, and critics in the 19205 might want to see their own theatre and dramas on their stages. Fred Jacob had already called for a Canadian national drama during Martin-Harvey's first cross-Canada tour in 1914 and for playwrights who could create an image of their country immediately recognizable to other Canadians. 'It is true that a land called "Canada" has been made the scene of a few dramas in the past/ Jacob wrote in the Canadian Magazine, but in every case the name only served the purpose of telling the audience in advance that they were to be entertained by lawlessness and thrills ... Mr. [Edgar] Selwyn came back to the land of his birth to find material for a play when he made a dramatized version of Sir Gilbert Parker's novel 'Pierre of the Plains,' but this drama served to show only how completely out of touch he was with all things Canadian. He catered to the popular notion, now happily dying out, of the civilization to be found in the northern half of the continent. For stage purposes, Canada has been regarded as a land of melodrama. 24

During Martin-Harvey's fourth cross-Canada tour, Jacob concluded in the Canadian Forum that such a Canadian national drama would not emerge from the foreign-dominated professional theatre, and that 'out of the nonprofessional theatre ... must come Canada's native drama' (February 1926). He reviewed an all-Canadian bill at Hart House Theatre shortly before his death from an asthmatic attack on 3 June 1928, finding Mazo de la Roche's The Return of the Immigrant, set in Ireland, artificial in language, setting, and characterization. He suggested that the author 'handicapped herself hopelessly by deciding to use a derived atmosphere ... Why Canadians insist upon writing of things about which they have no first hand knowledge, I cannot understand.' Jacob thought Merrill Denison's The Prize Winner, by contrast, 'rang true' because the play's author 'has seen such people, and has made a portrait of them ... Merrill Denison furnishes an object lesson for all the would-be dramatists. He is putting Canada into his plays. Hence that quality of freshness which makes his work stand out so prominently in the limited field of our native drama' (April 1928). In his obituary in Saturday Night, Hector Charlesworth praised Jacob for 'the soundness of his judgements and clearness of his expositions [which] had for more than a decade made him recognized as ablest critic of drama on the daily press of Toronto and indeed with few equals elsewhere' (9 June 1928). Yet Jacob's conviction that a Canadian national drama would emerge from Canadian little theatres - particularly Hart House Theatre in Toronto -

English-Canadian Theatre Criticism 13 was not shared by his paper for long. During Martin-Harvey's last Canadian tour in 1932, Merrill Denison strongly criticized the Mail and Empire for the decline in the quality of its theatre coverage since Jacob's death and for ignoring the work of local professional stock companies and Hart House Theatre, 'one of the leading pioneer Little Theatres of the continent/ English Canada's first major twentieth-century playwright lambasted the paper for 'another of these editorials which have expressed devout thankfulness for the presence of British theatrical companies in our midst and [which] have uttered pathetically humble, colonially inferior bleats of gratitude such as are apt to rise from press, pulpit and luncheon table whenever there appears in Toronto a British company.'25 Denison called the writer of these unsigned Mail and Empire editorials 'an anonymous colonial.' The paper in turn referred to Denison as 'an eminent provincial from Bon Echo' (Denison's summer retreat near Kingston), and saw no reason to withdraw its support of companies such as the Barry Jackson Players, the Colbourne-Jones and Sir Martin-Harvey companies, and 'other first-class English organizations ... We make no apology for espousing the Shakespearean drama and the British stage in general. Our best traditions - much that we hold most dear - have their origin in British traditions, in English literature and in English ideals. This is not to say that we should not develop our own drama, but for a long time to come our playwrights and players will have to draw upon British culture.' 26 Perhaps it was the decline in the quality of Canadian theatre criticism in the 19305, a direct reflection of the great decline in professional theatre itself during the Depression, that distorted Davies's view of critics. Economic hardship, combined with the loss of audiences to vaudeville, radio, film, and Canadian little theatres, brought an end to 'the road' for foreign professional touring companies. Large playhouses across the country fell into disrepair. Famous Players Canada Limited, a subsidiary of Paramount Pictures, purchased and converted playhouses into movie houses to eliminate competition from touring companies. In January of 1940, the British actor-manager Maurice Colbourne completed a ten-city Canadian tour with Bernard Shaw's Geneva and Tobias and the Angel and Colbourne's own play Charles the King. He promptly reported in the New York Times that Canadian theatre was 'moribund' and 'lacks at present even the will to live.' Colbourne charged that Canadian little theatres were mere 'exhibitionists' that had alienated audiences and therefore had done 'incalculable' harm to the theatre.27 Alberta playwright Elsie Park Gowan responded to Colbourne's charges in the Edmonton Journal, suggesting that 'perhaps the reason his tour was not a

14 Anton Wagner success is because the Little Theatre in Canada does better plays ... I had a few words with Mr. Colbourne when he was here. When it was mentioned that I wrote plays, he remarked that he would like to see them on the London stage, for if they remained in Canada they would be performed only by amateurs. I told him that I was not concerned whether they appeared in London or not, for inexperienced amateurs sometimes were able to express more real emotion on the stage than the professional/28 Canadian critics have played a major mediating role in this cultural conflict between indigenous amateur or semi-professional theatre and foreign professional companies and between emerging Canadian playwrights and the international repertoire. Yet, like 'Edward VII' and the 'stout little man' from the Globe, most of these critics have receded from our personal and collective memories. Their many contributions to the development of Canadian culture have been largely forgotten. Genuine theatre criticism in English Canada - according to popular beliefbegan with Nathan Cohen (1923-71). For his biographer Wayne Edmonstone, critics before Cohen began theatre reviewing in 1946 'were in reality little more than reporters or feature writers who contented themselves, and their editors, with giving a brief synopsis of the plot, a voter-list of the characters, and as many words of encouragement to the local actors as they could muster when they reviewed a play/29 Martin Knelman, who worked with Cohen as the Toronto Star's film critic, has similarly asserted that 'Cohen revolutionized the role of the critic; for this country, indeed, he practically invented it/3° Cohen's considerable contribution to theatre criticism in Canada was commemorated in 1981 when the Toronto Drama Bench, founded in 1972, and the national Canadian Theatre Critics Association, founded in 1979 with Herbert Whittaker as chair and Jeniva Berger (editor of Scene Changes) as president, established an annual national award for excellence in theatre criticism, the Nathan Cohen Award. Yet as the essays that follow indicate, Cohen was but one in a series of critics from the 18205 to the present who sought to elevate standards of theatre production, increase the size and sophistication of audiences, and improve the economic and artistic conditions in which indigenous theatre and drama could flourish in Canada. The first theatrical notice in English appeared in newspapers in Halifax in 1773. Since then, theatre critics have left us several hundred thousand reviews published in newspapers and magazines across Canada over two centuries. These reviews often are the only descriptive record left to cultural historians of theatre production in Canada. But who were the writers of these reviews? What were their aesthetic, moral, sociological, political, and other

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orientations? How did the varied personalities and cultural backgrounds of these critics affect their perception of - and commentary on - theatre production in their communities? What was the specific chronological, geographic, and overall cultural and sociological context of the local theatre being observed? How were reviews contextualized by the very publications in which they appeared? And what can be learned from this cultural analysis over nearly two centuries about the development of Canadian theatre and drama, past, present, and future? Because of the immensity of this critical cultural data - accessible almost exclusively only on microfilm - theatre reviews began to be analysed in a concerted, cross-Canada manner by cultural historians only in the 19905.31 The seventeen essays that follow examine the reviews of twenty-one critics from Halifax to Vancouver from the mid-iSzos to the 19905. This is a representative - though far from exhaustive - selection of the most interesting and important English-Canadian theatre critics writing during the past two centuries.32 The chronological, and geographic coverage of the essays included in this collection - combined with an analysis of the political, ideological, and aesthetic viewpoints of the critics represented - create a cumulative cultural history of English Canada as seen through its theatre and drama. On what basis were these twenty-one critics selected for inclusion out of the hundreds of theatre reviewers writing since the 18205? As Frederic Robson noted in the Canadian Magazine in 1908, 'Unfortunately for Canada, dramatic critics are not to be plucked from every maple tree. Even were they abundant and possessed an appreciative sense, with good knowledge of dramatic technique and good means of expression, what newspaper would want them? How many newspapers would stand for candid criticism of the local theatre's offerings? Possibly ten in the whole Dominion. How many newspapers in the Dominion, no matter how willing to slash unworthy "shows," have at present dramatic columns of any appreciable value to readers? Possibly three.'33 The importance of the twenty-one critics analysed in these essays derives from a number of factors. First, the perceptiveness and quality of their reviews stand out over the writing of their contemporaries. Many also have additional importance because of the decades-long longevity of their theatre criticism or - as with Hector Charlesworth, B.K. Sandwell, and Nathan Cohen - because of the much wider cultural scope of their critical concerns. Some of the critics stand out because of the passionate expression of their particular critical views: Oscar Ryan's Marxist humanism in the communist Canadian Tribune, Don Rubin's cultural nationalism in the Canadian The-

16 Anton Wagner atre Review, and Marianne Ackerman's writing about English-Canadian cultural survival and English-French cultural communication in the Montreal Gazette. All of the critics included in Establishing Our Boundaries are important because of their commentary - or direct influence - on the embryonic development of Canadian theatre and drama since the early iSoos. Collectively, these essays analyse both the historical development of theatre and theatre criticism in English Canada and the role of theatre criticism in the evolution of English-Canadian theatre and culture. The essays also reveal recurring patterns as prominent critics attempt to affect and stimulate the maturation of indigenous theatre as advocates and articulators of English-Canadian and world cultural values. These essays suggest that the function of criticism in Canada has fluctuated since the early iSoos from locale to locale and period to period depending on the strengths or weaknesses of local theatre production, economic conditions, and the cultural sophistication - or lack of it - of local communities. The contributors to the volume have also examined the economic, social, and political characteristics of the newspapers in which theatre reviews appeared. In his essay Trom Puffery to Criticism' in the opening 'Editor-Critics' section, Patrick O'Neill examines the dependence of colonial newspapers on advertising revenue for their survival. Most early papers printed paid 'puffs' — essentially favourable press releases supplied to newspapers by theatre managers themselves. Before Confederation, only a few owners and editors of newspapers, such as William Lyon Mackenzie, Joseph Howe, and Daniel Morrison, felt strongly enough about cultural conditions in their communities to write and publish critical reviews despite the potential loss of advertising revenue. Newspapers were - and continue to be - in an economically and culturally conflicted position. The editor of the Quebec Mercury asserted in 1855 that his paper and its theatre reviewer were 'best qualified to carry out the intentions of the advertiser, as well as represent the interests of his patrons and the public' (15 Sept. 1855). But for many newspapers the 'intentions of the advertiser' outweighed the interest of the public far into the twentieth century. As Frederic Robson observed in 1908, 'Nearly every newspaper gives in return for theatre tickets and advertising contracts, a certain amount of space to the local theatre manager in the news columns, wherein the latter is allowed to say almost what he pleases about a coming attraction, and the newspaper shoulders the responsibility for the accuracy of his statements.'34 When in the same year the reviewer for the Ottawa free Press called the

English-Canadian Theatre Criticism 17 touring production of Franz Molnar's The Devil 'libidinous, unclean, unhealthy and inexcusable/ the Ottawa theatre manager for the New York Garden Theatre touring production withdrew his advertising from the paper and even demanded back the free seats that had been passed out for the engagement. In his letter to the Free Press, he explained that 'you cannot consistently expect us to do business with your firm and have them run down our attractions any more than you would a Sparks street merchant whose goods you were belittling/ According to the theatre manager, the Free Press critic had failed to carry out his duty - 'to report what the audience think of the production, aside from his personal opinion altogether/35 William Lyon Mackenzie at the York Colonial Advocate, Joseph Howe at The Novascotian, and Daniel Morrison at the Toronto Daily Leader were clearly on the side of the public, not of the theatre advertisers, and did not hesitate to state their considered opinions. Mackenzie expressed concern in 1824 about the amount of much-needed capital taken out of local circulation by foreign touring companies. For Howe and Morrison, the object of criticism was reformation. Howe, like Morrison, saw his 'duty' as a critic to 'disabuse the public' about inferior performances and production standards and to elevate public taste. Patrick O'Neill analyses how Morrison's critical acumen and independent personality, along with the support of a larger daily paper, enabled him to preside at the birth of regular theatre criticism in British North America in the 18505. Such births and rebirths of genuine theatre criticism would occur and reoccur in cities across Canada for the next century as dramatic critics - who primarily made considered artistic judgments gradually replaced dramatic reporters, for whom artistic judgments were subservient to the conveying of publicity information. Reviewers and Critics According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word critic derives from the Latin medical term criticus, 'relating to or involving the crisis of a disease/ By the late 15005 and early 16005, the two meanings still most closely associated with the term today came into usage: 'one who passes severe or unfavourable judgment; a censurer, fault-finder, caviller' and, on the contrary, 'one skilful in judging of the qualities and merits of literary or artistic works/ The verb 'to review/ the OED informs us, dates from the same period and means 'the act of looking over something (again), with a view to correction or improvement/ 36 This distinction between reviewing and criticism is commented on by both the contributors to this volume and by critics themselves writing about the

i8 Anton Wagner art of criticism. The distinction in terminology is complicated by the fact that writers on the theatre in Canada since the beginning of the eighteen hundreds have faced the necessity of fighting for the very survival of live theatre. This has often meant encouraging audiences to attend performances the theatre writers themselves knew to be of less than outstanding artistic merit. Ross Stuart notes in the 'Reviewer-Critics' section that E.R. Parkhurst's most important function in his half-century-long theatre reviewing from 1876 to 1924 was to get Toronto audiences into the theatre. Parkhurst by and large refused to impose his taste and critical sensibilities on his theatre public and became essentially a publicist. Douglas Arrell, in his essay on theatre criticism in Winnipeg at the turn of the century, similarly concludes that 'there was no doubt that in the "frontier" phase of Winnipeg theatre, theatre critics were often viewed as more or less paid publicists of the theatres/ It was perhaps this critical function of being primarily a publicist that Lawrence Mason, Parkhurst's successor at the Toronto Globe, referred to in speaking of 'criticism's Age of Innocence.' For Mason, as he frequently stressed in his dramatic column beginning in 1924, the distinctions between theatre reviewing and dramatic criticism were quite clear. 'Dramatic criticism means something more than parrot-like repetitions of the "plot," requires more training than is implied by an unabashed glibness in broadcasting personal likings or prejudices, and may even aid constructively in the development of the drama as well as merely serving as a guide for playgoers.'37 B.K. Sandwell had already dismissed this belief - still prevalent among many newspaper editors today - that any journalist is qualified to serve as a theatre critic, at the beginning of the century. Writing in the Montreal Herald in 1905, he ridiculed 'the time-honored practice of sending the prize-fight editor to do the symphony concerts and the financial editor to strike a balance between Willard and Irving.' Four years later Sandwell was still complaining about 'police court reporters and sporting editors, who are sent by some newspapers to write up the show.' This realization that theatre criticism required a considerable knowledge of dramatic literature and an extensive background in observing live theatre led both Jamie Portman and Brian Brennan initially to describe themselves, in the 19605 and 19705, as theatre journalists rather than as theatre critics. As Moira Day and Diane Bessai describe in their essays, it was only after years of gaining this knowledge and experience that Portman and Brennan felt qualified to define what constituted excellence in play production and dramatic literature. They then evolved into arts advocates addressing larger cultural, economic, and socio-political issues affecting the arts on a local and national level.

English-Canadian Theatre Criticism 19 Their initial reluctance to describe themselves as theatre critics may have resulted from the powerful precedent set by Nathan Cohen, who established a new benchmark for theatre criticism after the Second World War. 'Most socalled drama critics are really feature reporters/ Cohen observed once again in 1949. As Don Rubin notes in his essay, Cohen believed the critic had to possess 'an ability to probe for the play's underlying value' and 'a desire to see a play performed as well as possible, never settling for less.' For Cohen the critic was the conscience of the theatre, who 'must fight to keep its standards high and he must oppose every concession to the vulgar and the inferior.' This belief in the much larger critical function of the critic is still echoed four decades later, as we see in Leanore Lieblein's essay, in Marianne Ackerman's assertion that 'the reviewer's responsibility is to the state of the theatre ... [T]he scene itself - its health, trends and potential (lost or realized) - would seem to be far more important than any one play.' Able Practitioners and Ignorant Quacks One metaphor running through Establishing Our Boundaries is that of the critic as both skilful physician and armed gladiator fighting on behalf of the art of the theatre against a frequently indifferent public and complacent theatre practitioners themselves. How the critic should fulfil this cultural function has been debated from the beginning of the eighteen hundreds to the present. In the 19 December 1818 Montreal Herald an anonymous correspondent differentiated a destructive from a constructive critic: 'the former may be compared to an ignorant quack, who lops off an useful limb to cure a trifling sore. While, the latter, like an able Practitioner, only applied the lances when emollients would be unavailing.' Writing in Saturday Night in December of 1966, Christopher Newton was still condemning all the 'rotten theatre critics in this country who don't know a good production from a bad [one] and who seem determined to kill all our ventures either with misapplied kindness or a free-swinging club which destroys good and bad alike.'38 But a new alliance between theatre criticism and indigenous theatre began with the emergence of the alternative theatre movement in the early 19705. Ira Levine describes the transformation of Don Rubin from a traditional dramatic critic reviewing for the Toronto Star to a critic as cultural activist and founding editor of the Canadian Theatre Review in 1974. 'A culture in the process of finding and realizing itself needs critical voices on the front lines as much as it needs them in the darkened theatres,' Rubin has himself stated of this transformation of the critic's function. Denis Johnston, in his discussion

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of Urjo Kareda's critical coverage of alternative theatres in the Toronto Star from 1971 to 1975, similarly suggests that Kareda 'became a spokesman for these revolutionary Toronto companies, and particularly for the new plays which they created.' This belief in the healing and mediating function of both theatre and theatre criticism could still be heard in the mid-1980s in Ray Conlogue's comment that theatre and drama were not only about 'conflict and fragmentation' but also about 'affirmation and healing/ Marianne Ackerman similarly suggested that the 'health and prosperity of a community is deeply bound up with how it treats its artists, with how those artists respond to the community's history, anxieties and hopes.' Christopher Newton's 1966 lament points to the doubly difficult role of the critic in Canada over the past two centuries: on the one hand upholding international artistic standards derived from the best performers, productions, and plays critics had seen, particularly from the British and American stage, and on the other hand developing audiences and helping to create the kind of cultural climate in Canada in which indigenous artists could also create at such an artistic level of achievement. Joseph Howe curtailed his theatre criticism when he concluded in the early 18305 that his reviews of productions had little actual effect on Nova Scotia's cultural life. The population of Halifax (14,500 in the 18305) was simply too small to attract either first-class American and British touring companies or to sustain a resident company of quality from which local actors and playwrights could develop. By the 18505 the increased population in cities such as Toronto (31,000 in 1851), improved transportation, and telegraph communication with the outside world resulted in permanent resident stock companies and daily newspapers that regularly reviewed performances. Critics began to exert a measurable influence on theatre in their communities. Daniel Morrison still applied different standards of critical evaluation for the performers of Toronto's Royal Lyceum and the occasional visiting star from England and America, however, whom Morrison judged 'by the code of criticism from whence he has come.' Such a duality in critical evaluation remained in effect for the next century as foreign touring companies and visiting stars were gradually replaced by indigenous theatre. In the embryonic colonial theatre from the 17805 to Confederation in 1867, uncritical promotional puffery often existed side by side with examples of shrewd, insightful observations and sharp critical attack. Such a dichotomy still exists today in pre-opening promotional interviews with actors, playwrights, and directors designed to arouse public interest in productions.

English-Canadian Theatre Criticism 21 These up-beat features are frequently followed a few days later with startlingly contrasting opening-night reviews. The publication of promotional puffery for theatre companies in the eighteen hundreds can be attributed not only to the additional revenue they provided to newspapers for also printing company playbills, posters, and theatre advertisements, but also to the genuine desire of newspaper editors to make culture part of colonial society as in major European and North American cities. Cultural Garrisons The sharp attack on Joseph Howe for his frank criticism of theatre performances in Halifax in 1828 and similar editorial debates about Daniel Morrison's theatre criticism in Toronto in 1854 exemplify what Northrop Frye has called a 'garrison mentality.' Frye defines that mental outlook in his conclusion to the Literary History of Canada as arising from small and isolated communities surrounded with a physical or psychological 'frontier/ separated from one another and from their American and British cultural sources: communities that provide all that their members have in the way of distinctively human values, and that are compelled to feel a great respect for the law and order that holds them together, yet confronted with a huge, unthinking, menacing, and formidable physical setting - such communities are bound to develop what we may provisionally call a garrison mentality ... A garrison is a closely knit and beleaguered society, and its moral and social values are unquestionable.39

So are a garrison's cultural values. As late as 1923, E.R. Parkhurst felt compelled to explain to his Toronto Globe readers that 'you can't build a lodge in the forest without cutting away the underbrush and pulling up the rank weeds. So when the chroniclers insist on pointing out what is bad it is that they may the more clearly show what is good' (i Dec. 1923). Moira Day's research elsewhere suggests that Frye's concept of the garrison mentality is no mere literary conceit, but represents very real psychological and cultural realities. In her study of entertainments in the isolated Peace River country in northwestern Alberta between the First and Second World Wars, Day has observed that the depressingly frequent accounts of violent death through suicide, murder and mishap were a constant reminder that the land was a source of death and madness as well as life, and communities had to create their own psychological and social defenses

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against it ... Townspeople were usually prepared to accept criticism from a trained, outside adjudicator in a competitive festival situation but they clearly felt that when it came to locals reviewing productions by the community at large, the home newspaper had a higher duty to bolstering community spirit than serving the lofty dictates of aesthetic truth ... [A]ny reviewer foolish enough to break that unspoken rule was apt to quickly find himself a social pariah, and publicly blasted for callously throwing 'a gift involving much love and sacrifice' back in the face of the givers.40

Such strong defensive reactions to criticism of local actors and productions have persisted to the present. Bronwyn Drainie, in her biography of her actor father, recalls of Nathan Cohen's criticism on CBC radio in Toronto in the 19505 that 'in my childhood home, there were very few immutable beliefs we were forced to share, but that Nathan Cohen was the antichrist was drummed into my psyche from the earliest possible age/41 Keith Ashwell and Brian Brennan, theatre critics for the Edmonton journal and Calgary Herald, were banned by Stage West in those two cities in the 19803 for writing negative reviews of their productions. In 1990 the artistic director of the Stratford Festival, David William, dubbed the Toronto Star's Robert Crew and the Globe and Mail's Ray Conlogue the 'two weird sisters' of Toronto theatre criticism. 'We're not dealing with critical standards but a pathological situation/ William asserted of Conlogue's criticism. T can only recommend that he seek help/ 42 Pathological Situations In his essay on theatre criticism in Winnipeg at the turn of the century, Douglas Arrell describes Charles Wheeler as an example of the 'egocentric' critic who, for reasons of vanity and personal self-aggrandizement, poisons the cultural climate of his or her community through unjustified attacks on performers, theatre managers, and fellow critics. Although theatre artists may feel otherwise, such 'egocentric' criticism - 'criticism in the service of personal power' - fortunately has been an anomaly in Canadian theatre. These essays suggest that the prevalent norm has been the critic functioning as a cultural healer not only of local theatre institutions and their audiences but also of his or her community at large by shaping and elevating the public's artistic and moral taste. In the 18205, Mackenzie and Howe sought not only to correct what happened on the stage but also to change the lawlessness and drunkenness of theatre audiences as well. The most persistent critical function over two centuries was not modifying daily audience behaviour, however, but modifying the ongoing moral and aesthetic sensibilities of audiences and communities.

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In 1833, Howe urged Rufus Blake, manager of The Theatre in Halifax, to produce Shakespeare rather than the pantomimes and other novelties being offered to the public. In the 18505, Morrison favoured the dramatic works of Shakespeare and Sheridan and opposed the introduction of French melodrama in North America on moral grounds, fearing that plays such as La Dame aux Camelias pandered to audiences' lower instincts. E.R. Parkhurst similarly criticized Sarah Bernhardt in 1881 for producing 'unwholesome French plays' that exercised a deleterious effect on 'the tone of the modern English drama.' As Ross Stuart indicates in his essay, Parkhurst instead endorsed 'healthful amusement' and the 'higher aspects of dramatic art,' which would exercise 'a refining influence, freeing the masses from "vulgarity" and elevating the public taste.' 'Our people are liable to go to sleep witnessing the woes and trials of suffering virtue,' he complained in 1885, 'but give them something that will keep them laughing hysterically for a couple of hours' and a production would be a hit. Like Parkhurst in Toronto, Charles Handscomb and Harriet Walker attempted to counter the 'abnormally developed taste' of Winnipeggers for musical comedy, melodrama, farce, burlesque, variety, and minstrel shows. This belief that theatre - and therefore also theatre criticism - should elevate the public's artistic taste and improve its overall cultural/sociological values is shared by virtually all the critics included in this volume. For B.K. Sandwell the stage was 'one of the greatest educators of a nation' and the purpose of criticism to develop the critical faculties of audiences so that they could properly appreciate this pedagogical and aesthetic function. Even before Sandwell, Hector Charlesworth in 1898 in his theatre criticism declared war on New York, 'the city responsible for the degradation of theatre on this continent.' Dennis Salter describes how art for Charlesworth 'always had to be a force for moral improvement, for individual and social edification.' For Oscar Ryan after the Second World War, theatre had to offer hope to politically, economically, and culturally alienated members of society and to suggest, in a life-affirming manner, how society could be transformed to end that marginalization. As we see in Mayte Gomez's essay, Ryan attacked what he perceived to be the politically reactionary nature and moral decadence of the alternative-theatre movement of the 19705, declaring in 1977 that 'sick theatre is no medicine for a sick society/ Cultural Gatekeepers In attempting to affect the public taste of their communities, theatre critics assumed the role of cultural gatekeepers by determining which outside influ-

24 Anton Wagner ences were appropriate - or inappropriate - for their cultural garrisons. Harriet Walker, born in New York and a successful child actress and comic-opera performer before coming to Canada, expressed a cosmopolitan outlook in her theatre criticism, which sought to educate Winnipeg audiences to appreciate the best in international theatre. Her colleague Charles Handscomb made yearly trips to see theatre in New York, but frequently rejected the morality of productions emanating from that city as well as from London and Paris. Unlike Hector Charlesworth and B.K. Sandwell, who championed Ibsen's realism and dramas of ideas at the turn of the century, Handscomb denounced the first performance of Ibsen's Ghosts in Winnipeg in 1904 as 'unwholesome, degrading - disgusting ... The Ibsen cult may be all right, but in this morally healthy western community we want none of his gruesome dissections.'43 Theatre critics not only took leading positions about whether their local stages should be censored or free forums for artistic and political expression. After the Second World War the extent of government subsidy for the arts became a major concern and, in the 19705 and 19805, the issue of whether foreign artists should be allowed to direct the Stratford Festival and Canada's regional theatres. In this function of cultural gatekeeper, the individual personality of the critic and his or her proximity or distance from their local communities have shown themselves as major factors in the writing of theatre criticism. The chronological arrangement of the essays in Establishing Our Boundaries suggests that reviewers in both the nineteenth and twentieth century wrote their most incisive criticism when in positions of relative power and independence from their communities. In the first half of the nineteenth century they began to lose their anonymity when they were also the editors of their own publications, such as William Moore's Herald in Quebec City, Nahum Mower's Canadian Courant in Montreal, Howe's Novascotian, Edward John Barker's British Whig in Kingston, and William Lyon Mackenzie's Colonial Advocate and Daniel Morrison's Daily Leader in Toronto. George Stewart, Jr continued this role of the editor-critic in Saint John, New Brunswick, and in Quebec City from 1867 to 1902,44 as did B.K. Sandwell at Saturday Night from 1932 to 1951. For theatre critics who were not also the editors of their own publications, such as The Man in the Front Row' reviewing for the Toronto Evening Telegram in 1887, the emergence from anonymity took much longer. While the practice of anonymous reviews continued in smaller cities until the 19405, in large urban centres many reviews began to be signed before the First World War. Already by the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth

English-Canadian Theatre Criticism 25 century, major critical voices assumed the persona of pseudonymous individuals such as 'Touchstone' (Hector Charlesworth) in Saturday Night and 'A First-Nighter' and 'Munday Knight' (B.K. Sandwell) in the Montreal Heral. In the twentieth century many critics assumed additional responsibility and influence by also becoming the head of their paper's entertainment section, such as E.R. Parkhurst and Lawrence Mason at the Globe, Nathan Cohen at the Toronto Star, and Jamie Portman at the Calgary Herald. Many also continued the pattern of the independent outsider, coming to review at their publications either from abroad (Mason, Don Rubin, Brian Brennan, Gina Mallet) or from other parts of Canada (Herbert Whittaker, Cohen, Christopher Dafoe, and Marianne Ackerman). B.K. Sandwell claimed in 1928 not to be a leader but a follower of society. T follow it at a respectful distance, near enough to permit me to study its many interesting qualities, but far enough away to make it clear that I do not belong to it/45 For Herbert Whittaker, as Jennifer Harvie and Richard Paul Knowles discuss in their essay, writing criticism as well as taking an active part in the theatre as designer, director, and adjudicator from the 19305 to the 19805 appeared a natural development. For in Canada, as Whittaker stated in 1961, 'the critic finds himself closer to the actors and producers than in other countries - banded together, as it were, with public apathy as a common enemy.'46 Whittaker's immediate predecessor at the Globe and Mail, film and theatre critic Roly Young, had himself attempted to establish a communitybased professional theatre as founding artistic director of the Toronto Civic Theatre from 1945 until his death in 1948.47 Nathan Cohen, as Don Rubin notes in his essay, avoided such artistic collaboration with actors and theatre producers in Toronto, believing such contact would compromise his objectivity. Robert Fulford, recalling Cohen's editing of The Critic in the early 19505, has observed that "'unmitigated disaster" was a phrase he frequently found useful. Part of this hyperbole was grand-standing, his way of waving for attention, but part of it was an outsider's honest reaction to the pervasive complacency of those who wrote about the arts in Canada ... Cohen's greatest sin was to express publicly what many said in private.'48 It was partly by breaking this social taboo - a remnant of Frye's garrison mentality - that, as Martin Knelman has stated, 'Cohen arrived on the scene like a ton of bricks.'49 A century earlier Daniel Morrison lost much of his critical independence and objectivity when he married the actress Charlotte Nickinson, the eldest daughter of the manager of the Royal Lyceum, in 1858. By identifying himself so closely with Toronto theatre audiences, E.R. Parkhurst failed to

26 Anton Wagner develop his own overtly stated critical aesthetic and persona during his halfcentury-long reviewing for the Mail and Globe from 1876 to 1924. Because of his longevity, Parkhurst nevertheless legitimized reviewing as a journalistic profession and influenced other critics such as Hector Charlesworth, who in turn inspired still other critics and cultural commentators like Sandwell50 and Robertson Davies.51 Northrop Frye's observation about the great emphasis placed on law and order in garrison communities explains in part the continuing concern with the question of the morality of the theatre found in newspaper debates from 1768 to the 19205. At first glance, this debate seems to focus primarily on religious and moral standards and beliefs. But it also derived from social-class distinctions and conflicts between 'high' and popular culture, 'elite' audiences and 'the masses/ In Canadian colonial society, many among the elite leisured class - military officers, government officials, merchants, and lawyers - supported local garrison productions and entertainments by visiting artists and companies. Theatricus' asserted in a letter to the editor in the 11 August 1768 Nova Scotia Gazette that plays, by giving 'entertaining Pictures of the ridiculous actions of Mankind, convey a useful Lesson of Morality.' In the same publication, 'Anti-Thespis' argued on the contrary, however, that the theatre did not provide such an 'uplifting' function for all members of society. For him, plays were 'particularly destructive of Industry among the lowest Class of People ... impoverish and give an idle Turn to the most useful Part of the People [and] ruin our Servants/ Since theatres in many parts of Canada were frequently attached to drinking establishments until the end of the 18005, they were often perceived by the middle and upper classes as injurious to public order and tranquillity. Patrick O'Neill notes that even such a radical champion of the 'common man' as William Lyon Mackenzie opposed theatrical performances as a corruptive influence on the working class. As he declared in his 12 June 1828 Colonial Advocate, theatre lured 'the hard working tradesman from his peaceful home and regular hours of rest, to the midnight company of persons dangerous to the public peace/ Mackenzie spoke from direct observation and experience. A week earlier, one of his former printers, Charles French, had murdered the ruffian Edward Nowlan after a performance of Tom and Jerry; or, Life in London at Frank's Hotel in Toronto. Before French was hanged in October 1828 for his crime, his parents - in their petition for clemency to the lieutenant-governor described Frank's Hotel as 'neither under order or restraint ... This infernal region ... soon became the haunt of the gay and dissolute, the idle and the

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profligate, the ruffian and woman of bad fame, those who show in the light of the moon were there - and from its temptations few parents or masters could restrain the youth/ 52 As Canada's frontier extended westward, other cities also experienced such conflicts between upper and lower classes, younger and older generations, chaos and public order, popular entertainments and 'high' art. This interaction between economic, social, and cultural factors - and the role of theatre criticism in such a dynamic - is most evident in Winnipeg during the last two decades of the nineteenth century.53 Land speculation in Winnipeg in 1881, fuelled by the arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway, created a euphoric 'boom' environment in which popular entertainments flourished in a relatively unstructured society. The majority of the population, primarily unmarried males, was between twenty-one and thrity-seven years of age. Preponderantly male audiences went to the theatre in a partially intoxicated state to ogle the semi-nude actresses. As David Spector has described the variety entertainments at Winnipeg's Theatre Comique, '[F]or a week's salary a young man could secure everything he craved - liquor, laughter, and sex ... Harry Robe, Manager of the Theatre Comique, hired alluring women to encourage alcoholic purchases and to sell their services.'54 The editors and theatre critics for Winnipeg Siftings, James Irving Crabbe and George Bonner Brooks, evaluated variety theatre, melodrama, and Shakespearean tragedies and comedies for their unmarried male readers in 1883 on the basis of their entertainment values rather than on their socially redeeming virtues. In 1885, however, Winnipeg's City Council enacted a by-law forbidding places of amusement to be connected to wine rooms and prohibiting 'immodest, lewd, lascivious' movements made by a woman or person attired in women's clothing that were likely to be 'offensive to womanly modesty or common decency.'55 By 1887, the theatrical excesses of popular culture were being curbed by a new sense of propriety after middle- and upper-class voters took control of Winnipeg's City Council. Prostitutes no longer mingled freely with theatre audiences. At the i3oo-seat Princess Opera House in 1886, 'after patrons climbed the rickety flight of stairs to the second floor theatre, they no longer encountered prostitutes flaunting their wares. A specially-curtained section of the upper gallery was reserved for those whores willing to pay the stiff entry fee.'56 As Douglas Arrell describes in his essay, when another economic boom enabled C.P. Walker to refurbish the deplorable Bijou Theatre into the posh looo-seat Winnipeg Theatre in 1897, theatre criticism evolved to support the economic and moral values of a new middle- and upper-class social and economic elite. Charles W. Handscomb, chief drama and music critic for the

28 Anton Wagner Manitoba Free Press and editor of his own weekly, Town Topics, Charles W. Wheeler, drama critic for the rival Winnipeg Daily Tribune, and Mrs C.P. Walker, wife of the manager of the Winnipeg Theatre, who wrote perceptive reviews under the pseudonym The Matinee Girl' in Handscomb's Town Topics, 'utilized their respective organs to preach the new Edwardian business morality - a philosophy of individualism, courage and character ... Only those traits which fostered initiative, thrift, and sobriety ought to be enacted in the theatre, and these values should be passed on to the masses/57 Douglas Arrell suggests that there was an additional stage in Canada in the movement from puffery to criticism in the nineteenth century, as discussed by Patrick O'Neill in his opening essay. 'There was an intermediate phase, in which the critic was no longer simply mouthing the praise required by the theatre manager, but was not producing objective criticism in the modern sense either/ Arrell concludes on the basis of his examination of theatre criticism in Winnipeg. 'Between the critic as publicist and the critic as judge there was the phase of the critic as mediator, the critic who sought generally to support the manager and mediate between him or her and the audience, while retaining a degree of objectivity in the criticism of specific shows/ Sometimes critics such as Daniel Morrison, E.R. Parkhurst, and B.K. Sandwell softened the initial harsher criticism written at the beginning of their reviewing careers as they became more aware of the fragility of the local artistic scene. Lawrence Mason, summarizing Parkhurst's half-century-long career as a music and drama critic, suggested that in his middle period Parkhurst 'still discriminated clearly between good and bad, but dealt much more gently with offenders, in accordance with his famous theory that knowing readers can be relied upon to "read between the lines/"58 Herbert Whittaker has commented on his own use of a coded critical vocabulary comprehensible to his faithful readers in the 19505 and 19605. T gave my views by implication, by degree, by shading, by admitting the good points. Appreciation has always been more important than fault-finding in the theatre critic's lexicon. I think I make my points quite clear without a hammer.'59 By the early twentieth century, however, critics such as Charlesworth, Sandwell, and Lawrence Mason began to assume a different mediating and healing function. They began to achieve a national importance because their primary function - unlike Parkhurst's in Toronto and Handscomb, Walker, and Wheeler's in Winnipeg - was no longer getting people into the local theatre but discussing larger aesthetic and cultural values. Denis Salter characterizes Charlesworth as the 'quintessential outsider/ like Cohen, and examines the critic's function of enlarging the aesthetic sensibility of his or her society through the analysis of artistic standards and values from outside cultural centres.

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Critics before Charlesworth familiar with the British and American stage, such as Howe and Morrison, had used the highest acting and production standards accepted in England and the United States as the 'touchstones' against which they compared theatre in their communities. Beginning as a radical thinker in the 18905, Charlesworth went much further by completely rejecting prevalent Canadian cultural values, particularly - unlike Handscomb, Walker, and Wheeler in Winnipeg - the commercialism and materialism of Toronto society at the turn of the century. As Denis Salter discusses in his essay, Charlesworth instead adopted as his critical aesthetic the cultural values and beliefs of Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Matthew Arnold, William Dean Howells, and George Bernard Shaw. Most influential of these influences was Arnold's humanism, as expressed by his 1864 essay The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.' Its dictum that the critic should always seek 'to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world, and thus to establish a current of fresh and true ideas'60 has in itself become a 'touchstone' consciously or unconsciously affecting critics to the present. Charlesworth sought to 'nationalize' this primarily British cultural authority for Canada as a bulwark against an increasingly prevalent crass American popular culture in the hope that Canada would experience a similar cultural awakening as had occurred in England in the 18903. Cultural Nationalism The difficulty - as Sandwell discovered while examining in the Montreal Herald various possible European and American models for the creation of a Canadian theatre culture - was that Canada at the beginning of the century was completely lacking a basic cultural infrastructure that could produce an artistic flowering through the stimulus of the aesthetic ideals Charlesworth and Sandwell were advocating. In 1908 Charlesworth and Augustus Bridle were two of eight founding members of the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto, seeking 'an absolute escape from all that otherwise made Toronto consumingly commercial.'61 The club provided a haven for artists such as the nationalist Group of Seven painters (whose studio and painting expeditions were subsidized by Lawren Harris),62 the painter, playwright, novelist and cultural nationalist Bertram Brooker,63 and Roy Mitchell, first artistic director of the Massey family-subsidized Hart House Theatre, which provided a model for the amateur little-theatre movement in the 19205 and 1930s.64 At the turn of the century, however, professional theatre in Canada was in the grips of the monopolistic Theatrical Syndicate in New York, which - to

30 Anton Wagner an even greater extent than U.S. film studios and distributors today imposed its cultural values upon the whole North American continent and restricted local artistic self-expression and development. In 1902, a year before the Syndicate gained virtually complete control over first-class theatrical production and foreign touring companies in America, Sandwell remarked of its leading producer, Charles Frohman, in the Montreal Herald that 'it is a singular state of things when one lonely man, stepping off a transatlantic steamer, can announce to New York nine-tenths of the plays which will be produced on this continent during the coming season' (26 July 1902). This monopolistic control over repertoire and performers extended to Canada, the syndicate's most profitable foreign market, and prohibited the emergence of a Canadian professional theatre culture. In his 1911 essay The Annexation of Our Stage,' Sandwell protested that 'Canada is the only nation in the world whose stage is entirely controlled by aliens. She is the only nation in the world whose sons and daughters are compelled to go to a foreign capital for permission to act in their own language on the boards of their own theatres. The only road to the applause of a Toronto theatre audience is by way of Broadway. The Montreal girl who wants to show her own people that she can act must sign an agreement with a New York manager.'65 Addressing the Canadian Club in 1913, Sandwell described a visit to either the Syndicate or rival Shubert booking office in New York, where he was shown 'the immense map of North America on which the routes of travelling shows are plotted ... It was an enormous map, with a dot for every theatre on the continent, and circles of various sizes for the various large cities, and every railway line of importance was most accurately indicated. There was just one thing that was not indicated; I looked very closely for it, but so far as I could see it was not there; and that one thing was the boundary line between the United States and Canada.'66 Sandwell perceived this American domination of Canadian cultural life as an unprecedented case of cultural imperialism, declaring, '[T]he situation is without a parallel in history ... You may look in vain in a country such as Poland, occupied and administered by an alien conqueror, for any such foreign domination of the Polish stage as exists in Canada, although Canada has not been even invaded for the last hundred years, to say nothing of being conquered.'67 Sandwell was aware that Canada had been invaded and conquered on a theatrical/cultural level at the end of the iSoos, reminding his Canadian Club audience in 1913 that 'the older members of this club will have no difficulty

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in remembering when the theatrical entertainment of Montreal was provided largely by permanent local companies, occasionally assisted by travelling stars/ He had written a number of essays and reviews on the question of a Canadian national theatre in 1911, the year that Robert Borden's Conservative party defeated Laurier and his Liberals over the issue of loyalty to Britain or free trade with the United States. In May of that year, Sandwell wrote in the Montreal Herald, T do not think Canada would have suffered very greatly if the American producer had never made his entry here ... In the old stock days before the touring company became universal, Canada in spite of its small size and its puritanism was by no means deficient in theatrical amusement, and the stock system would have developed into a small combination system all our own - perhaps a mixture of repertoire and touring companies - if the Americans had been kept out by law' (6 May 1911).68 Sandwell concluded his 1913 address to the Canadian Club of Montreal with the declaration, '[W]e have allowed ourselves to get into a position which is not becoming to us as a self-governing community ... Let us get out of it, and see that the 49th parallel is re-established on the theatrical map of North America/ But how could such a liberation of the Canadian stage and imagination be brought about? In the 19205 the Group of Seven, particularly its chief spokesmen Lawren Harris and Arthur Lismer, sought to create a spiritual, physical, and imaginative bonding between Canadians and their northern environment. Harris found such cultural bonding in Merrill Denison's The Unheroic North: Four Canadian Plays published in 1923. In his review of the anthology, entitled 'Winning a Canadian Background/ Harris stated in the Canadian Bookman that 'if anything warrants enthusiasm it is the creation of a work of art in our midst. It is an event of the highest importance ... The work may lack any one of a thousand qualities that work done in other lands, other times, possess, but so long as it lives, so long as it speaks to us with sure voice, it is to us more vital by far than works done in other lands, other times. It means that in our land vision is being found, that conviction is being born. It means that as a people our heart begins to beat' (February 1923). Harris concluded of this necessary fusion of creative imagination, love of one's natural environment, and artistic vision that 'we in Canada are only commencing to find ourselves. People from other lands come to us already sustained by rich, stable backgrounds thinking that these can also sustain us. It is not so. We are about the business of becoming a nation and must ourselves create our own background/ Arthur Lismer, writing about 'Canadian Art' in the Canadian Theosophist

32

Anton Wagner

two years later, also found the source of artistic creativity in this conscious awareness of one's physical and imaginative background. The artist at some period in the existence of a nation must become conscious of his background or environment ... This design, or form, of our country is its character, the elemental nature which we recognize as one recognizes a familiar loved shape. It partakes of our own character, its virility and emphatic form is reflected in the appearance, speech, action and thought of our people. It is the setting for our development, firing the imagination, establishing our boundaries' (15 Feb. 1925). Inspired by the Group's depiction of the Canadian landscape and cultural nationalism, playwright and director Herman Voaden attempted to create a 'Canadian "Art of the Theatre" ... that will be an expression of the atmosphere and character of our land as definite as our native-born painting and sculpture.'69 In his 1930 introduction to Six Canadian Plays, Voaden cited Lawren Harris's conviction that artistic expression in Canada 'needs the stimulus of earth resonance and of a particular place, people and time to evoke into activity a faculty that is universal and timeless.' Voaden believed a national drama could emerge from such a spiritual oneness with the soil and natural forms of Canadian nature, 'being the reflection of the vision and beauty of a new people in a new land.'70 But such a fervent nationalism could not find expression in the face of the economic and cultural realities of Canadian theatre in the 1920$ and 19305. With theatre buildings, repertoire, and performers largely controlled by U.S. syndicates, none of the various professional theatre models B.K. Sandwell examined at the beginning of the 19005 - privately subsidized 'art' theatres, civic theatres, repertory and commercial companies, or a government-subsidized 'national' theatre - was economically or culturally viable in Canada before the Second World War. C.P. Walker had attempted to free himself from his dependence on U.S. touring shows for bookings at the Winnipeg Theatre by managing the popular all-Canadian Harold Nelson company and its repertoire of productions such as Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Richelieu, Faust, and Quo Vadis form 1903 to 1906. Charles Handscomb gave his critical support to the company's director and star actor, Harold Nelson Shaw, and expressed a cultural nationalism that would be heard increasingly as the century progressed. In his 1903 Manitoba Free Press review of the Harold Nelson company's Quo Vadis, Handscomb exclaimed to his readers, 'A Canadian star, supported by a Canadian company, organized to play Canadian territory! ... And with Canadian companies the next step would be Canadian plays - dramas telling Canadian stories, with Canadian heroes and extolling our own Canadian flag. Why not?' 71

English-Canadian Theatre Criticism 33 'Why not/ as C.P. Walker soon discovered, was that no single Canadian professional company such as Shaw's could financially sustain a touring house like the Winnipeg Theatre much less inaugurate a Canadian national dramatic movement. When he opened the i8oo-seat Walker Theatre in 1907 as the leading touring house of his Red River Valley Theatre Circuit, he obtained productions for his regional chain through an affiliation with the Theatrical Syndicate, making the repertoire of the Walker Theatre largely indistinguishable from Syndicate theatres in Chicago and New York.72 Canadian cultural nationalism before the 19605 could only become a creative force when combined with a much larger talent pool of actors, directors, playwrights, and designers able to circumvent the economic restrictions of professional theatre through 'amateur' activity. Handscomb's dream of a local, all-Canadian professional company producing Canadian and world drama would not be realized until the founding of the Manitoba Theatre Centre in 1958. What was viable as a means of creative self-expression in the 19205,19305, and 19405 was the amateur-theatre movement, what prairie playwright Gwen Pharis Ringwood called 'Do It Yourself Theatre'73 and Roy Mitchell, 'to build with native stone, to carve in native woods.'74 It was this amateurtheatre movement that critics such as Lawrence Mason, from 1924 to 1939, and Herbert Whittaker (at the Montreal Gazette, 1937 to 1949, and subsequently in Toronto at the Globe and Mail) tried to shape into a Canadian national theatre. But what would be the characteristics of such a national theatre? Hector Charlesworth had strongly opposed the cultural nationalism and figurative painting style of the Group of Seven and both he and Sandwell had difficulty applying their international cultural aesthetic to the nascent Canadian theatre and drama in the 19205 and 19303. Reviewing the Central Ontario Region Finals of the first Dominion Drama Festival in 1933, Sandwell warned in Saturday Night that 'a Canadian drama whose sole impelling motive is a rather self-conscious patriotism is not likely to get very far; and at present that does seem to be the chief preoccupation of both workers and followers in this sphere of our national art' (8 April 1933). He was critical of the mysticism and non-realist, symphonic expressionist form of Herman Voaden's dramas but found his directorial production style 'right' for Voaden's Canadian premiere of T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral in 1936.75 That same year he also criticized the leftist workers' Theatre of Action, expressing the hope that the group 'has a genuine interest in the theatre as art as well as in the theatre as a sounding-board for preaching novel doctrines' (7 Nov. 1936). Unlike Sandwell and Charlesworth, the other critics included in the 'Cul-

34 Anton Wagner tural Nationalism' section (Mason, Whittaker, Cohen, Oscar Ryan, Jamie Portman, Urjo Kareda, and Don Rubin) had much less difficulty, from the 19205 to the 19805, reconciling their appreciation of high international artistic and critical standards to the emerging Canadian theatre. They realized that Canadian artists were just beginning to create an original national theatre and drama and that audiences were also just beginning to emerge from their reliance and dependence on U.S. and British cultural products. From Garrisons to Communities One concern common to the cultural-nationalist critics was the belief that Canada was more than a collection of isolated and socially stratified garrisons. They focused on a sense of community, both locally and nationally, and on both a physical and a larger cultural level. This often entailed taking possession of the land on a physical level in order to attempt to transmute Canada's immense geography and scattered settlements into a common imaginative and social construct. Joseph Howe had travelled throughout Nova Scotia on horseback, publishing his observations about the state of the colony and its people in the Novascotian serials 'Western Rambles' and 'Eastern Rambles' from 1828 to 1831. By travelling widely within Canada in the 19205 and 19305, Lawrence Mason similarly became the first theatre critic to create a national perspective of theatrical developments in English Canada and to promote national unity through attempting to create a national cultural consciousness. Nathan Cohen, Herbert Whittaker, and Jamie Portman continued this critical function by reporting on professional theatre productions across Canada in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. At the end of the 19205, Lawrence Mason thought the revival of theatre in Canada - and hence 'a renaissance in all the arts, and, indeed, in our whole civilization' - was imminent owing to the widespread desire for artistic selfexpression on a local community level. Advocating the creation of a provincial drama league, he asserted in his Globe column in 1928 that the time is ripe for an important step forward in the Canadian theatre. In every city, town, or even village and rural district, there are people of culture, talent, and standing who are eager to better the almost intolerable existing conditions in theatrical matters by forming a Little Theatre group or Drama League and presenting worthwhile plays in an artistic and interesting way ... The purpose of this movement is not just to provide amusement or pastime for idle pleasure-seekers. A Little Theatre is an astonishingly effective 'melting-pot' for different elements in a community, and thus, as a democratic eye-opener, leveller and mixer, exercises the most salutary kind of social influence. (24 Nov. 1928)

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Mason's conviction that local indigenous artistic self-expression could become 'at once national and universal' required him to resist - like Sandwell and Charlesworth before him - the 'infiltration and dominance of United States influence.' He was instrumental in the creation of the amateur Dominion Drama Festival in 1932, Canada's first form of a national theatre, as one means of countering U.S. cultural influence. Mason's extensive reportage on developments in British and European theatre in 1926, 1929, and 1931 placed the arts in Canada in an international context, and, like Sandwell, he examined possible models for the creation of a Canadian theatre culture. Like Charlesworth, Mason found inspiration on an aesthetic level in the European modernism of the early twentieth century. But he was much more persistent and proactive in encouraging Canadian amateur theatres to abandon both the conventions of the late-nineteenth-century theatre and the conventional realism of the early twentieth century in order to create new original experimental plays in non-representational production styles. Like Mason before the Second World War and Sandwell at the end of the 19405, Nathan Cohen detected a transformation of the Canadian garrison mentality in the emerging indigenous professional theatre after the Second World War. He perceived the work of the New Play Society, Robert Gill's productions at Hart House Theatre, Murray and Donald Davis's Straw Hat Players, and the International Players in Kingston as 'a small cultural groundswell, the start of a feeling, the beginnings of a rude and scattered irrigation of a hitherto sterile world.'76 Already in 1948, he had observed Canadian drama beginning to assume an identity of its own, declaring on CBC Radio that 'to witness the birth of a creative drama is a sensation few are privileged to experience ... and I honestly believe that I will be among the lucky ones.'77 Urjo Kareda analysed and critically stimulated a similar cultural renaissance by Toronto's 'alternative' theatres - what he called 'the most recent great ocean roar of creative achievement' - as Cohen's successor at the Toronto Star from 1971 to 1975. He then joined the Stratford Festival as literary manager under Robin Phillips and was part of the four-person artistic directorate initially hired and then fired to make room for the noted English director John Dexter. Kareda became an object of, rather than a vocal participant in, the heated debate that followed about whether Canada was becoming a closed cultural garrison or whether it was inappropriate that another Englishman succeed Phillips as artistic director of Canada's largest theatre institution. Appointed artistic director of Tarragon Theatre in 1982, Kareda has continued to nurture the careers of Canadian playwrights while also continuing to write wonderfully expressive and perceptive music and opera reviews on a freelance basis.

36 Anton Wagner But the perceived need to create an original indigenous theatre and drama was only one of several major characteristics common to the critics analysed in the 'Cultural Nationalism' section. Perhaps the most important of these common characteristics was that the critics' sense of community was based on a humanist world vision. They echoed Matthew Arnold's belief that culture is a perfection 'of our humanity proper, as distinguished from our animality/ that culture consists of 'a harmonious expansion of all the powers which make the beauty and worth of human nature' and that art was essentially 'a criticism of life.' We hear such Arnoldian echoes in Cohen's belief that 'knowledge, and nothing else, is the criterion for criticism/ that the critic 'must strive to reawaken in people their dormant appreciation of beauty and genuine feeling,' that the 1951 Massey Report embodied 'all that is best from other lands and peoples,' and that theatre should comment 'thrillingly and perceptively on the reality of life.' This common humanist vision also accounts for the preference of critics from Charlesworth to Rubin for the classical tradition of English acting and for subsidized theatre as opposed to what they perceived as the commercial vulgarity of the American stage. The liberal-humanist world-view of these critics led them to perceive human nature - like goodness, truth, and beauty itself - to be universal, unchanging, and ahistorical and to favour playwrights such as Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen, Shaw, O'Casey, and contemporary realistic dramatists who expressed optimism about the human condition. Cohen, like Sandwell before him, deplored O'Neill's pessimism and his failure to portray 'real' people - a term also frequently used by Oscar Ryan - and attacked the Theatre of the Absurd and playwrights such as lonesco, Beckett, Genet, Pinter, Ugo Betti, and Arthur Kopit. This preference for realism and affirmative human values in turn privileged the 'real' characters of Canadian playwrights such as Robertson Davies, James Reaney, and David French as opposed to the perceived nihilism and decadence of works such as Michael Hollingsworth's Clear Light and Ken Gass's Winter Offensive. Another major characteristic common to the critics of the cultural-nationalist period - as Ira Levine notes in his essay on Don Rubin - is 'a love of place' and 'a celebration of Canada as a people, a community, a culture, and a heritage.' This desire to create a national identity through cultural expression led these critics, particularly after the Second World War, to champion not only government support for the arts but also to project a unified national vision of the country. Whittaker, like Sandwell before him, thought that theatre could become a bridge between English and French Canada, 'helping our two solitudes, finally, to touch one another.'78

English-Canadian Theatre Criticism 37 Nathan Cohen similarly believed that Canadian playwrights should dramatize the major issues facing the nation. Reviewing Gratien Gelinas's Yesterday the Children Were Dancing at the Charlottetown Festival in 1967, he called Gelinas's drama about Quebec separatism 'a play of utmost significance' and 'the most jolting play in the experience of the Canadian theatre.' Gelinas, Cohen stated prophetically, 'boldly points out what most people of goodwill are frightened to admit: That within Quebec separatism is a growing powerful force. Despite the present euphoria, the revolution which began after the death of Maurice Duplessis was a bourgeois (a middle-class) revolution, and is the forerunner of a revolution not for equality and special status within Canada, but for a "free, an independent Quebec."'79 A week earlier Cohen had declared on CKFM Radio that 'regionalism has been a handicap to our evolution and unification in any true sense ... [I]t is only by finding ways and means to unite our regional and national loyalties that we can achieve a true nationhood.'80 For Don Rubin, Canadian playwrights increasingly began 'to speak with their own voices' following Centennial year 1967. By publishing Canadian plays during his editing of the quarterly Canadian Theatre Review from 1974 to 1982, Rubin gave national and international prominence to the playwrights emerging from the alternative-theatre movement of the 19705. Some of these works, such as Michael Cook's Head, Guts and Sound Bone Dance, James Reaney's Sticks and Stones: The Donnellys, Part One, Rick Salutin's 1837, the 25th Street House Theatre's Paper Wheat, W.O. Mitchell's The Black Bonspiel of Wullie MacCrimmon, and Sharon Pollock's Blood Relations, became classics of Canadian drama. In all, some two dozen playwrights from every region of the country were given a national profile and had two to three thousand copies of their works circulated at a time when publishing possibilities for Canadian plays were still severely limited. In order to place - like Lawrence Mason - Canadian theatre and drama in an international context, Rubin also published a number of non-Canadian works: Tadeusz Kantor's The Dead Class, Eric Bentley's Lord Alfred's Lover, the Japanese My Beatles by Sato Makoto, and the Argentinean The Games They Play (At Siesta Time) by Roma Mahieu. By the end of his editorship of CTR in 1982, Rubin believed that Canada had developed a mature dramatic literature that was not only being produced at home but being seen abroad as well. 'Clearly, Canada's theatre has become truly international. The days of everyone else's nationalism passing in and out of this country without anything being given in return are happily over.'81

38 Anton Wagner Particularism and Tribes But even a strongly nationalist critic such as B.K. Sandwell had already questioned the possibility of a single national theatre and vision of Canada in 1914. In his Montreal Herald dramatic column, he suggested that the theatre in Canada 'is now, and for many years must be, a local affair' and that 'neither Ottawa, nor Montreal, nor Quebec, nor Toronto, nor Winnipeg, is the expression of Canada.' In the early 19805, just as the nationalist alternative-theatre movement with its initial centre of activity in Toronto - seemed to have reached its crest, a post-nationalist critical phase was already beginning to make itself felt. Robert Wallace, editor of the Canadian Theatre Review from 1983 to 1988, broadened Don Rubin's prior strongly nationalistic concerns to include marginalized voices from the francophone, native, feminist, lesbian, gay, and multicultural communities.82 His 1986 'Garrison Theatre' theme issue on minority-language theatre in Eastern Canada took as its departure Northrop Frye's ideas on the garrison mentality in the Canadian imagination and the difficulty for the individual to construct his or her individuality apart from the group. As Frye stated, '[T]he real terror comes when the individual feels himself becoming an individual, pulling away from the group, losing the sense of driving power that the group gives him, aware of a conflict within himself/83 Such conflict between a collective group solidarity and individual identity applies to critics as well. Except for one slightly odd column about body tights worn by dancers, for example, a reader would never guess from Roly Young's columns in the Globe and Mail from 1936 to 1948 that Young was gay.84 Questions of sexual identity were not easily discussed in polite society or in newspaper columns until the 1970s.85 In 1967, in the Globe and Mail, Herbert Whittaker reviewed the New York world premiere of Fortune and Men's Eyes, John Herbert's autobiographical drama about homosexual victimization and rape in a Guelph prison for young offenders. (The play had been workshopped at the Stratford Festival in 1965, but was not publicly produced because of its controversial subject matter.) While Whittaker referred to the off-Broadway Actors' Playhouse production as 'exciting theatre,' he also called Herbert's play '[T]he art of washing our dirty linen in the neighbor's yard/ 86 Nathan Cohen, in the Toronto Star, also felt that Fortune and Men's Eyes 'lifts the carpet and shows what is underneath' (20 Oct. 1967). Yet echoing Fred Jacob's comments on Merrill Denison's The Prize Winner, Cohen critically endorsed Herbert's drama: 'the situations have the ring of basic truth.

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The characters are, in their essence, accurately observed' (17 April 1967). He later wrote that Herbert 'draws directly on what he has seen and heard ... for inspiration ... What was really shocking was that the author obviously was writing from his own experience. When you look over the original plays staged by the half-dozen professional native theatres in Canada ... one thing which hits you is how seldom the author bases himself on his own involvements and observations, or how rarely he takes for his point of artistic departure the social tensions of life in his own backyard/87 For Cohen, Fortune and Men's Eyes presented 'a truly critical challenge. It asks deeply disturbing questions about long-established personal and social assumptions. It does not enrich our vision. It undermines it.'88 Once John Herbert had successfully broken the unified vision of Canadian society - and Fortune had been produced in forty languages in over one hundred countries - it became somewhat easier for others to follow. Robert Wallace publicly came out as a gay playwright in the 1976 homosexuality and the theatre issue of the Canadian Theatre Review. Describing the 1975 New York premiere of his drama No Deposit No Return, starring Saul Rubinek, Wallace suggested that it was 'very important that gay playwrights have the opportunity to write for gay audiences: too often we use a play to explain ourselves to straight people, forfeiting the subtlety and resourcefulness which would be meaningful to a gay audience for a more simplistic approach. Gay drama that is valuable as interesting, informative and innovative theatre will develop in this country only when playwrights address themselves to gay audiences, ignoring the commercial (usually censorial) requirements of straight theatres. This may demand the development of patently gay theatres.'89 By 1985 Sky Gilbert's Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, founded in 1979 as an experimental company staging innovative Canadian works, emerged as a company primarily dedicated to the production of work by and about lesbians and gay men.90 Robert Wallace described the transformation of his own critical perception from a Canadian nationalist to a post-nationalist viewpoint in his 1990 collection of essays, Producing Marginality: Theatre and Criticism in Canada. In his preface, 'Being Particular/ he observed, '[M]y primary interest in the theatre has always been Canadian work. While this is still the case, I no longer can define "Canadian" as I used to. The vague but passionate belief in national identity that I once held has been undermined by my knowledge that hundreds of different communities contribute to a growing diversity of art and opinion across the country. Quite simply, the particularities that separate these communities now seem stronger to me than the commonalities that bind them together/

40 Anton Wagner Wallace concluded that for him the belief in universal truths and values was no longer possible. 'To be particular is to hold points of view that often are made invisible by the dominant discourse. I believe that theatre that announces and affirms such particularity is necessary to the survival of Canadian culture.'91 In contrast to the critics in the 'Cultural Nationalism' section, the critics discussed in 'The Post-Nationalist Period' are marked by their diversity depending on the particular locale, time, viewpoint, and personality of the critic. In his essay 'Subverting Modernisms in British Columbia/ James Hoffman traces the emergence of Christopher Dafoe's postmodern critical perspective at the Vancouver Sun out of the severe social, economic, and political disruptions in British Columbia in the late 19605 and early 19705. Dafoe's support of ethnic, racial, gender, and cultural diversity in opposition to an authoritarian white establishment and his emphasis on self-representation, multiplicity of meanings, and double coding can be seen to varying degrees in the reviews of the other critics analysed in The Post-Nationalist Period.'92 Like Dafoe, Brian Brennan at the Calgary Herald attacked the complacency of the conservative middle class while at the same time resisting the artistic hegemony - what he called 'received big city opinions' - of New York, London, and Toronto. Unlike the post-Second World War culturalnationalist critics, Brennan's critical reaction to Canadian plays was much more ambivalent, however. As Diane Bessai notes in her essay, Brennan's 'strongest tendency was to attack rather than nurture/ That description also applies to Gina Mallet at the Toronto Star. Her reviews were often as pungent and critical as Nathan Cohen's, but without Cohen's genuine love for the indigenous theatre and Canadian national culture he was attempting to stimulate. Mallet vehemently opposed Canadian cultural nationalism and its privileging of the Canadian playwright, believing that 'all theatre is international.' She also questioned government funding for theatre companies, convinced that subsidy encouraged mediocrity rather than rewarding excellence. Unlike Brennan, Mallet never became a part of the community in which she worked. Alan Filewod observes in 'The Iconoclast Sceptic on the Beat' that, for Mallet, 'New York was the epicentre of ... cosmopolitan culture and Broadway its most important expression.' Marianne Ackerman, reviewing for the Montreal Gazette during the Quebec post-nationalist mid-1980s, rejected that New York Broadway model. She instead called on anglophone playwrights and theatre artists to articulate the political and cultural concerns of the disempowered anglophone minority. As Leanore Lieblein describes in her essay, a prime area of concern for Acker-

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man - as for B.K. Sandwell at the beginning of the century - was creative cultural contact between anglo- and francophone artists and the general public, an aim Ackerman pursued further as a playwright and founding artistic director of Theatre 1774 in 1989. Robert Nunn's essay on Ray Conlogue's theatre criticism at the Globe and Mail analyses the conflict between Conlogue's liberal humanism and belief in universal values with post-nationalist 'particularist' forms of theatre. Unlike Gina Mallet, Conlogue was highly critical of commercial productions like The Phantom of the Opera and of the corporate board-of-directors mentality that has become increasingly the norm even at non-profit regional theatres such as the Canadian Stage Company in Toronto. Like Marianne Ackerman, Conlogue has a strong belief in theatre as communal selfexpression and in government support for the arts. As Robert Nunn points out, Conlogue's difficulty with 'particularist' forms of drama such as gay and feminist theatre is not only that, like Gina Mallet, he feels himself excluded from their particular communities, but also that universal humanist values and uniform critical standards appear no longer appropriate for evaluating post-modern productions and even conventional theatre forms presented by previously marginalized minority communities. Conlogue's 25 August 1990 interview with Robert Wallace, 'Reviewing the Critic's Role in Canadian Theatre/ can be seen as a transition point between traditional criticism based on the liberal humanism of critics from the cultural-nationalist era and criticism in the subsequent post-nationalist period. As Conlogue stated in his column, Wallace believes 'that women, blacks, natives and indeed every identifiable portion of Canadian society has a different view of what is true.' Therefore, 'it is wrong for any critic to pretend to identify absolute quality, good or bad, in a work of art. "As a critic," says Wallace, "I feel more comfortable saying," "I like this" than saying, "This is good."'93 This 'particularist' viewpoint became the de facto rule of theatre criticism in English Canada in the 19905. With the 1987 transfer of Jamie Portman to Ottawa as the Southam News arts correspondent and Ray Conlogue's transfer to Montreal in 1991 as the Globe and Mail's Quebec arts correspondent, the last of the major critical voices from the 19805 championing universal human values and artistic standards have been largely silenced. For the first time in over a century, the theatre critic no longer appears to play a major national role in the discussion and development of English-Canadian theatre. This absence of strong national critical voices can be traced to the breakdown in the traditionally mediative role of the critic between the theatre and his or her audience and community. Bertram Brooker had already suggested

42

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in the introduction to his Yearbook of the Arts in Canada 1928/1929 that one of the impediments to artistic creativity in Canada was the fact that 'that rapprochement between audience, critic and artist which is necessary to the establishment of an art, native or otherwise, has ... been very difficult, if not impossible, in Canada, up to the present time/ 94 Vincent Tovell similarly observed in Here and Now in 1947 that 'theatre only emerges at the vortex of a culture, in an intense atmosphere where issues are sharply contrasted and feelings run high/95 As the contributors to this volume note in their essays, in 1962 Nathan Cohen affirmed that theatre needed to be 'an organic part of the community soul/ Only eight years later, Christopher Dafoe perceived Vancouver as a city 'uncertain about its soul/ In 1981 Brian Brennan still defended the many theatre critics across the country who were 'actively, productively shaping the direction in their own communities' and referred to his own 'small but useful role to play in theatrical life of my community/ Marianne Ackerman, faced with the political and cultural polarization in Quebec in the mid-1980s, came to believe that theatre should be based on a 'sense of engagement with social issues/ that the theatre 'is a place where a community can gather to discuss and relive common experience/ and that 'drama, more than any other art form, should thrive in a community that has undergone a serious trauma/ Ray Conlogue - as Robert Nunn analyses in his essay Theatre: Transgression or Tribal Celebration?' - also saw theatre in the 19805 as a site of communitas and drama as a collective ritual that serves as an affirmation of community. But the fragmentation of traditional audiences from a collective entity into 'particularism minorities led Conlogue to change his belief in a Canadian political or cultural collectivity as well. Never - unlike Ackerman feeling himself part of Quebec society, his reviews of French-language theatre and drama in Quebec from 1991 to 1998 are not strongly rooted in a Canadian social or imaginative context. They might as well be filed from another country. Under the increasing cosmopolitan influence of international film, television, and mega-musicals that acknowledge no national borders or communities, audiences and many critics in the 19905 abandoned B.K. Sandwell's conviction that the inspiration for theatre in any community must inevitably come 'from the community itself and from the believers in the power of that community to express itself in the drama/ Fearful of offending any segment of society through negative reviews, many theatre critics in the non-academic press have once more become largely consumer reporters, without providing in-depth analysis of dramatic structure and performance values or

English-Canadian Theatre Criticism 43 addressing larger aesthetic, cultural, and political questions. Such a diminishing of the critic's role is partly the result of the anti-authoritarianism prevalent in society during this post-nationalist period. The fact that theatre in English Canada has become increasingly market-driven by large-scale British and American commercial productions with their vast advertising budgets has made the critic superfluous - and even a hindrance - in the eyes of commercial producers and their media clients. As David Diamond of Vancouver's Headlines Theatre commented in 1997, '[T]he so-called professional theatre scene in this country has terribly failed the public ... It provides entertainment that has no connection, no relevance to us, and is doing the nation a deep disservice by no longer being the vehicle through which communities can express themselves.'96 A Circle with Nothing in It One nineteenth-century drama that strongly appealed to Robertson Davies was Bulwer-Lytton's Richelieu; or, The Conspiracy. First staged in 1839, the play provided a star vehicle for William Charles Macready and later Henry Irving as the great cardinal in conflict with King Louis XIII. In this struggle between temporal and ecclesiastical power, Davies saw Richelieu as an archetype of the Wise Old Man, the Wizard who possesses supernatural powers. When courtiers try to abduct the cardinal's ward Julie to become the king's mistress, he draws a magic circle around her with his sword and dares the king's courtiers to violate its divine power: Mark where she stands, around her form I draw The awful circle of our solemn church! Set but a foot within that holy ground, And on his head - yea, though it wore a crown I launch the curse of Rome!97

For two centuries, Canadian artists and critics have also attempted to fortify vulnerable social garrisons by drawing an imaginative outer circle around what E.K. Brown called 'the great good place.' They drew artistic inspiration and spiritual strength from the land around them and saw in it a reflection of the divine. For Arthur Lismer, the Canadian landscape was 'home land, stirring the soul to aspiration and creation. The physical universe exists to the artist as to the religious devotee as a means to ecstasy.'98 For Roy Mitchell, theatre was 'our Gateway to the Divine.'99 Members of the Group of Seven and other artists and critics such as Roy Mitchell, Bertram

44 Anton Wagner Brooker, Herman Voaden, Augustus Bridle, and F.B. Housser perceived the artist as a priest-like, visionary seer rather than simply as a craftsman. They saw the natural environment as a stimulus to artistic creativity that would lead to a national consciousness that would not be narrowly parochial but would be based on, and embody, universal experiences.100 In 1985 Robert Wallace could still title his essay on regionalism and Canadian drama 'Writing the Land Alive: The Playwrights' Vision in English Canada/ 'Sifting through the layers of international influence to uncover the seed-bed of their art/ Wallace concluded, 'our playwrights offer a vision of culture that nurtures the land, not flattens it/101 Robertson Davies, in the looth-anniversary issue of Saturday Night, could still ask in 1987, '[T]he soul of Canada - does the idea seem strange to you? Does it embarrass you to have it mentioned?' Davies affirmed, 'I am convinced that Canada has a soul ... Can you seriously think that Canada, unlike every other country in the world, lacks an essence that is the outcome of the history it has undergone, the races who have lived in it, the unique land and climate that are its geographical being?'102 Only nine years later Globe and Mail columnist Michael Valpy, in an article entitled The Land Has Lost Its Spiritual Awe for Canadians/ suggested that 'Canadians, having had their governments and public values shaped solely by money, are now monetizing their country ... [T]he very technology that crowds us together has unglued us. Canadians no longer contemplate their land with spiritual awe. The land has lost its enticing mystery, its beckoning adventure into the unknown' (11 July 1996). The same year Ray Conlogue wrote in Impossible Nation that not only had English Canadians 'not bonded with our country as a whole/ but they had culturally and imaginatively not bonded with their urban environment as well. 'One can begin with the public presence or absence of artists, whose task, in the words of singer Marie-Claire Seguin, is to "name" a place. Toronto has not much been loved by its citizens or artists; it has not, in the sense Seguin intends, been "named" by those who live in it... Torontonians, like English Canadians generally, are still unable to make the gestures of self-recognition.'103 By the 19905 the creative possibilities resulting from the imaginative union of artist and audience, identification with the landscape, love of country, and strong critical, editorial, and government support for indigenous artistic expression that existed in the 19705 and early 19805 had dissipated. When he retired from the Calgary Herald in 1988, Brian Brennan felt his paper no longer had a serious commitment to coverage and criticism of the arts. 'We're turning into the print equivalent of Entertainment Tonight. Where is the perspective? Where is the context?' he asked in the Canadian

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Theatre Review.'104 Louise Bresky, arts reviewer for CBC Radio in Calgary since 1964, similarly stated of this pandering to the popular taste of mass audiences: 'I still refuse to insult the listener, whoever that person might be today, by going along with my producer's argument recently that the sole function of a reviewer is to tell the listener whether to pay money and see the show, or to stay away. I have never thought of myself as a consumer rating service, and to reduce criticism to that level is an offence to the listener/105 Robert Wallace, in his editorial introduction to this 1988 'Critical Practice in Canada' theme issue of CTR, concluded that the current devaluation of theatre criticism by the Canadian media establishment is only possible in a climate that simultaneously marginalizes cultural production as an elitist activity and necessitates that it prove itself in the commercial marketplace. In such a climate, the theatre critic is faced witb the impossible dilemma of evaluating performances for a 'general public' that no longer exists; the contemporary theatre audience, if it can be typified at all, is an heterogeneous mix of minority interest groups whose very attendance at the theatre positions it on the periphery of mass culture.106

By 1996 Mira Friedlander, a member of the board of directors of the Canadian Theatre Critics Association and editor of the CTCA's Newsletter, suggested in an article entitled 'A Dying Art?' that 'arts criticism, as it applies to journalism, is dead or, at the very least, dying' (October 1996). The Changing Scene But like the phoenix, strong critical voices always rise out of the ashes. '"Theatre is dying," a weary director tells an unemployed actor in David Rubinoff's Stuck, which played last year at Theatre Passe Muraille. "But I'm just getting started," comes the reply.' So began a self-profile by Kate Taylor for the January 1998 CTCA Newsletter. The Globe and Mail's theatre critic since 1995, Taylor has been an articulate supporter of Canadian theatre and drama with a strong vision of what that indigenous theatre should be. She has written about the continued difficulty of even established playwrights such as George F. Walker in making a living from their craft, noting, '[Tjhat affects the plays audiences see - and don't see - on stage' ('Canadian Playwrights Live Low on the Hog,' 23 May 1998). Yet she has also been extremely blunt about playwrights, directors, actors, and production companies that fail to meet her critical standards. 'This script is a disaster and its production a disgrace/ she wrote of James W.

46 Anton Wagner Nichol's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, co-produced by the Manitoba Theatre Centre, Toronto's Canadian Stage, Theatre Calgary, and the Vancouver Playhouse (Ts There a Doctor in the House?' 20 Jan. 1996). She found Robert Lepage's Geometry of Miracles, staged at the du Maurier World Stage Festival, 'half-baked/ noting that 'Lepage has been called a magician, and there are flashes of theatrical magic here, but mainly Geometry of Miracles plays to his weaknesses, making him appear an intellectually pretentious director entranced with trickery' ('Cold Geometry a Rickety Structure of Abstract Ideas/ 18 April 1998). In her 1998 CTCA self-profile, Kate Taylor indicated of her critical response, '[I]f there is one thing that I'm looking for ... or at least one thing that good plays have in common - it is the production's ability to impart a sense of shared humanity ... [O]n the best nights, I leave my job the way you leave a good party, buoyed up with a sense of belonging.' It was this lack of emotional contact and sense of a shared humanity that led her to call the English-language premiere of Michel Tremblay's Marcel Pursued by the Hounds at the Tarragon Theatre a 'minor work.' Tn this exquisitely designed but emotionally muffled production, the meeting of the other-worldly and the mundane is singularly powerless ... Tremblay's two worlds should fuse like molten metal. Here, the lead is cold' (16 Jan. 1998). Taylor has criticized Canada's biggest producers, calling Garth Drabinsky's Livent production of Sunset Boulevard 'so obese it threatens to explode ... Only on stage can you create those moments where performers and audience miraculously bond in some precious communal experience of the human condition. There is none of that in the overproduced Sunset Boulevard', indeed there's barely a flicker of real emotion' ('Drama with No Trace of Emotion,' 16 Oct. 1995). During her first three years as the Globe and Mail's theatre critic, Taylor has questioned the artistic mandate of both the Stratford Festival and Canadian Stage in Toronto. Reviewing the Stratford opening in 1998, she suggested that 'like the beast sacrificed by a Roman soothsayer and found to have no heart, the Stratford Festival production of Julius Caesar appears as an ominous sign ... On Monday night, the venerable festival launched a new season that owes as much to Broadway as it does to the Bard: In an opening week chock-full of contemporary commercial dramas, this confused ]ulius Caesar is one of only two main-stage Shakespearean productions. Its bloody entrails reveal that the increasingly populist festival is losing its grip on its classical mandate' (This Julius Caesar Bodes 111,' 3 June 1998). But Taylor's strongest attacks have been against the programming and artistic direction of Canadian Stage, the 1988 merger of the former 'alterna-

English-Canadian Theatre Criticism 47 tive' Toronto Free Theatre and Ontario's regional theatre, CentreStage. Toronto Free Theatre had defined its mandate in a 1977 policy statement that declared: '[T]he creation of a national theatre, in the spiritual rather than the physical sense, must be our ultimate goal. Toronto Free Theatre has something to give the country: the plays, and our techniques for developing the plays. For it is only the plays, and the recreation of Canadian plays across the country, that will ultimately tie us together/107 The merger of Toronto Free Theatre and CentreStage created the thirdlargest theatre company in the country (after Stratford and Shaw), with an annual budget of over $6 million and a primary focus on the development and production of new Canadian plays as well as the international repertoire. But $3 million in joint debt soon led Canadian Stage to produce on its main stage what Taylor called 'a long line of British and American dramas, comedies and musicals, some good, many bad, that have made the company indistinguishable from the less ambitious non-profits in smaller cities/ She entitled her review of A.R. Gurney's Later Life 'Prostituting Canadian Stage,' subtitled 'Another Flimsy U.S. Comedy Raises the Question Whether Public Funds Should Be Spent on These Productions' (6 Jan. 1996). In her review, Taylor called on the company's artistic director Bob Baker to 'stand up on the so-called Canadian Stage and, in place of his obligatory openingnight thank-you to his corporate sponsors, declare that theatre in this country is dead/ She added: '[Increasingly I doubt the formula whereby the non-profits are in effect producing their own commercial theatre to subsidize themselves/ Taylor's review brought protests from Richard Monette, artistic director of the Stratford Festival, as well as from Sarmite Bulte, chair of the Canadian Stage board of directors. Bulte charged that 'with one stroke of a pen and allegations of prostitution, not only has Ms. Taylor put the company's public-sector funding at risk, but our ability to raise private-sector funds in a Canadian corporate world that is weary of sponsoring anything that is perceived as potentially controversial or scandalous, is also now being eroded/108 Following the resignation of artistic director Bob Baker in 1998, Taylor once again expressed the hope that 'Canadian Stage is about to emerge from artistic torpor to become the big theatre it should be rather than the bloated one it is' ('Canadian Stage Has Lost Its Artistic Direction,' 7 March 1998). Tf we need Canadian Stage, however, it is not only to bring the best international work to Toronto - commercial producers often do that anyway - but also to develop and stage new plays. With the Stratford Festival largely abandoning its sporadic staging of new work and the Shaw Festival absent from the field, an investment from the third-largest theatre in the country is cru-

48 Anton Wagner cial/ Two weeks later the Globe and Mail quoted the newly appointed artistic producer Martin Bragg announcing that 'the board decided that Canadian Stage needed to take a national role ... and become an exporter of Canadian theatre.' The article reported that 'the company's upcoming season is heavy on classic Canadian plays. Bragg said that this was a response to criticism that Baker's previous seasons were weak on Canadian work and full of predictable New York hits ... [I]t is now a top priority to generate plays which will be saleable in the international market.'109 The Critic in the New Millennium Theatre criticism - indeed theatre itself - once mattered in the cultural life of the nation. In the 19905 the notion of Canadian nationhood itself came to be questioned as the country divided into regional political parties and allegiances. In the struggle for the political survival of the nation, the arts in English Canada have been conspicuous by their silence. As these essays in Establishing Our Boundaries indicate, criticism has had specific functions throughout the history of theatre in Canada, depending on local artistic and cultural conditions. Paradoxically, just as the Canadian public is about to be inundated by the cultural products and viewpoints of hundreds of direct-broadcast satellite and specialty cable channels, theatre in English Canada has once again become a closed garrison in which many critics no longer dare to say publicly what many others think in private. As one writer noted in the Globe and Mail in 1995, '[WJhat Canadian culture needs right now is fewer friends smothering it with kindness and a few more enemies provoking it into greater maturity.'110 In his 1869 study Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold proposed the thesis that England, despite its material progress, was cut off from the modern spirit found on the European continent and therefore represented a state of cultural anarchy.111 Canada in the 19905 pursued a similar materialist path and largely isolated itself - with the exception of the mega-musicals - from the kind of international artistic and cultural stimulation that leads to new artistic discoveries and forms of expression. With few exceptions, professional theatre in English Canada has yet to discover the artistic stimulus of performance styles and dramatic literatures from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. For Matthew Arnold, the development of new artistic forms was directly linked to the 'current of fresh ideas' provided by genuine criticism. As he states in 'The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,' a period of 'true creative activity ... must inevitably be preceded amongst us by a time of criticism.'112

English-Canadian Theatre Criticism 49 At the conclusion of their essay, Jennifer Harvie and Richard Paul Knowles suggest that it is ultimately theatre audiences that must determine what kind of theatre - and hence also what kind of theatre criticism - we really want. The essays included in Establishing Our Boundaries present a number of different types of critics, critical perspectives, and personalities from which we can begin to construct the theatre critic of the future. Charles Handscomb's cultural flag-waving at the beginning of the century and the kind of self-conscious patriotism that B.K. Sandwell warned against in the 19305 are clearly past history and inappropriate for the present. But we can only speculate about the next critical phase after post-nationalism and what the critical aesthetic and beliefs of the critic of the future will be. Will he or she share Gina Mallet's aloof cosmopolitan viewpoint that all art is international or will he or she be a passionately engaged critic like Nathan Cohen, Oscar Ryan, Don Rubin, Urjo Kareda, and Marianne Ackerman, examining the relationship of theatre to its particular social and cultural milieu? Will he or she encourage the staging of Canadian plays but call for much stronger dramaturgy in their production? We can only speculate whether a genuine 'love of country' will ever again become a respectable critical sentiment and whether the critic of the future will be a critic as activist, staking out strong, proactive positions on specific issues affecting Canadian theatre and society. Or will theatre criticism once more become mere journalistic reporting for increasingly fragmented audiences? Will theatre become merely a disposable cultural product for instant consumption or will critics, like Lawrence Mason, address the spiritual dimension of artistic activity? Will the critic of the future, like Jamie Portman and Ray Conlogue, battle for continued and increased arms-length government funding and, like Sandwell, Ackerman, and Conlogue, report on theatrical and dramaturgical developments in Quebec? Will the critic of the future call for closer ties with the electronic media and the electronic information highway, which can either overwhelm us with the ideology, viewpoints, and cultural products of others or provide us with the opportunity of exporting our best artistic creations to the rest of the world? The 250- to 500-channel digital universe with its 'death star' direct-broadcast satellites presents a greater challenge to the creation and distribution of indigenous culture than did the monopolistic control of the New York Theatrical Syndicate at the beginning of the twentieth century. Will we have critics like Hector Charlesworth, B.K. Sandwell, and Nathan Cohen who, for all their limitations, will be able to articulate the artistic, economic, and political challenges facing Canadian theatre and culture in the new millennium?

50

Anton Wagner

NOTES 1 Robertson Davies, 'Canadian Nationalism in Arts and Science/ Proceedings and Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, series 4, vol. 13 (Ottawa: Royal Society of Canada, 1975). Reprinted in Robertson Davies, The Well-Tempered Critic: One Man's View of Theatre and Letters in Canada, ed. Judith Skelton Grant (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1981), 266, 263 2 See 'Garth Drabinsky's Curtain Call' and 'Phantom of the Ford Centre?' Globe and Mail, 30 May 1998, Bi, 819 and 18 April 1998, Cio. At the same time, Ed and David Mirvish announced they were selling the money-losing Old Vic Theatre in London, which they had purchased in 1982. See Gina Mallet, Toronto's Lacklustre New Theatre/ Globe and Mail, 9 May 1998, D6. See also 'Another Curtain Falls on Drabinsky/ Globe and Mail, 15 August 1998, Bi, 65 and 'Drabinsky's Downfall/ Toronto Star, 16 August 1998, Bi, 85, B6. Drabinsky was fired by Livent in November 1998. 3 E.K. Brown, On Canadian Poetry (Toronto: Ryerson, 1943), 13, 14 4 Ray Conlogue, Impossible Nation: The Longing for Homeland in Canada and Quebec (Stratford, Ont.: Mercury Press, 1996), 30, 137 5 The Globe critic added that 'much as a Pharisaical generation may need the teaching of such men ... fascinating and human and sweet as may be a Tess of the d'Urbervilles or a Trilby of the Paris demi-monde, the reader of novels and the spectator of plays begins to long for the restoration of the heroine of stainless morals and womanly - the word will slip from the pen still - purity.' See 'Music and the Drama/ Toronto Globe, 7 April 1896, 4. For an overview of Bernhardt's 13 visits to Canada between 1880 and 1918, see John Hare and Ramon Hathorn, 'Sarah Bernhardt's Visits to Canada: Dates and Repertory/ Theatre History in Canada 2:2 (Fall 1981), 93-116. 6 'Gilbert Parker, The Novelist Banqueted at the National Club/ Toronto Globe, 7 April 1896, i 7 Ibid., 4 8 See John Ripley, ed., Gilbert Parker and Herbert Beerbohm Tree Stage The Seats of the Mighty (Toronto: Simon & Pierre, 1986). 9 'Gilbert Parker Banqueted/ 4 10 Judith Skelton Grant, Robertson Davies: Man of Myth (Toronto: Penguin, 1994), 135. Davies describes his reaction to Rice's Street Scene in his essay 'Jung and the Theatre' in his One Half of Robertson Davies (Toronto: Macmillan, 1977), 146-7 11 Urjo Kareda, 'Robertson Davies Enjoying Continuous Rediscovery/ Toronto Star, 18 Oct. 1973, F3 12 Susan Stone-Blackburn, Robertson Davies, Playwright: A Search for the Self on the Canadian Stage (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1985), 9

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13 'John Martin-Harvey/ Peterborough Examiner, 23 May 1944. Reprinted in The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies, ed. Judith Skelton Grant (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1979), 29 14 See Patrick O'Neill, The British Canadian Theatrical Organization Society and the Trans-Canada Theatre Society/ Journal of Canadian Studies 15 (Spring 1980), 56-67. See also L.W. Conolly, 'Martin-Harvey in Canada/ in Eric Salmon, ed., Bernhardt and the Theatre of Her Time, 225-42 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1984). 15 See Robert G. Lawrence, 'John Martin-Harvey in Canada/ Canadian Drama 6:2 (Fall 1980), 234-41 16 'Maintains Strong Appeal/ Toronto Evening Telegram, 12 Jan. 1926, 25 17 Robertson Davies, World of Wonders (Toronto: Macmillan, 1975), 291-2. Judith Skelton Grant names the anonymous Telegram critic in Robertson Davies: Man of Myth, 133. 'Edward W. Wodson of the Evening Telegram, who wrote under the curious pseudonym "Yenmita," loved everything/ 18 On Bridle see Anthony Stephenson, Theatre Criticism/ in Ann Saddlemyer and Richard Plant, eds, Later Stages: Essays in Ontario Theatre from the First World War to the 19705 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 402-4. In Robertson Davies: Man of Myth, Judith Skelton Grant writes that Augustus Bridle of the Toronto Daily Star raved incomprehensibly' (133). 19 Augustus Bridle, Theatres of Old London Compared to New York's: London Reviewers Show Strange Neglect of Sir John Martin Harvey/ Toronto Star, 16 Jan. 1926, 8 20 Robertson Davies: Man of Myth, 133 21 Hector Charlesworth, 'Music and Drama/ Saturday Night, 16 Jan. 1926, 6 22 Davies describes the strong effect of Martin-Harvey on him in his 'Mixed Grill: Touring Fare in Canada, 1920-1935,' in L.W. Conolly, ed., Theatrical Touring and Founding in North America (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1982), 41-56. 23 Bill Graham, 'Sir John Martin-Harvey: The Last Imperial Envoy/ Theatre Research in Canada 14:1 (Spring 1993), 102 24 Fred Jacob, 'Waiting for a Dramatist/ Canadian Magazine 43 (June 1914), 143, 142. Edgar Selwyn's Pierre of the Plains, adapted from Gilbert Parker's novel Pierre and His People, successfully premiered at the Hudson Theatre in New York, 12 Oct. 1908. 25 Merrill Denison, 'Retort Courteous From Bon Echo/ Toronto Mail and Empire, 20 April 1932, 8. Hector Charlesworth, commenting under his pseudonym Touchstone' on the poor quality of American commercial touring productions, had already suggested in the 5 June 1897 Toronto Evening News that 'the outlook is dark at present, and perhaps the only future for the theatre lies in Government subsidies, as in France/ Public debates about government subsidies for Canadian

52 Anton Wagner theatres intensified in the late 19205 when the decline of 'the road' and the decrease in touring houses began to deprive Canadians of professional productions from abroad. Only a year after the demolition of Ottawa's only legitimate touring house, the Russell Theatre, in 1928, Duncan Campbell Scott and others associated with the Ottawa Little Theatre suggested the federal government appoint a royal commission to consider the feasibility of the government subsidizing 'theatres throughout Canada for the production of a national drama.' See William Arthur Deacon, 'National Drama for Canada by Government Subsidies' and 'A Subsidized Theatre for National Drama/ Toronto Mail and Empire, 16 Nov. 1929; Merrill Denison, 'Canada Can Have No National Theatre/ Toronto Star, 19 Nov. 1929; and Herman Voaden, 'Government-Owned Theatres?' Toronto Globe, 30 Nov. 1929. 26 'Toronto Theatre-Goers Right in Their Preferences/ Mail and Empire, 16 April

1932' 6 27 M. Colbourne, 'A Tour across Canada/ New York Times, 28 Jan. 1940, section 9, i 28 'Colbourne Is "Just Peeved" Answer by Little Theatre/ undated clipping, cited in Anton Wagner, 'Elsie Park Gowan: Distinctively Canadian/ Theatre History in Canada 8:1 (Spring 1987), 69 29 Wayne E. Edmonstone, Nathan Cohen: The Making of a Critic (Toronto: Lester and Orpen, 1977), ^9- David McCaughna makes this same assessment in his 'Nathan Cohen in Retrospect/ Canadian Theatre Review 8 (Fall 1975), 27. See also Allan M. Gould, 'Homage to Cohen/ Toronto Life, March 1981, 62. 30 Martin Knelman, 'Fighting Words/ Weekend Magazine, 24 March 1979, 23 31 This collection of essays was made possible by a research grant of $50,000 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The grant enabled 27 scholars at 17 universities across Canada to hire research assistants to photocopy the body of newspaper reviews of critics from microfilm and then to analyse this published criticism. Almost all the members of this Canada-wide study belonged to the Association for Canadian Theatre Research, founded in 1976. Because of space limitations, not all the essays resulting from this research project could be published in this volume. See for example James Noonan, 'The Making (and Breaking) of a Regional Theatre Critic: Audrey Ashley at the Ottawa Citizen 1961-1985,' Theatre Research in Canada 17:1 (1996), 83-118. A preliminary bibliography and data bank of 17,000 theatre reviews by Marianne Ackerman, Audrey Ashley, Brian Brennan, Augustus Bridle, Ray Conlogue, Urjo Kareda, Gina Mallet, Lawrence Mason, Samuel Morgan-Powell, Jamie Portman, Oscar Ryan, B.K. Sandwell, Herbert Whittaker, and Max Wyman is available in an electronic format from Dance Collection Danse in Toronto. 32 Anthony Stephenson, in Theatre Criticism' in Later Stages, 393-423, discusses the work of over 40 critics from Ontario alone. Many of these, such as Robertson

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33

34 35 36 37

38 39

40 41 42

43 44

45 46 47

53

Davies, Mavor Moore, John Fraser, Martin Knelman, Ronald Bryden, and Robert Cushman, warrant essays of their own. Book-length studies are also needed of French-language theatre criticism in and outside of Quebec and of the relationship between academic criticism and theatre production and dramatic writing. Frederic Robson, 'The Drama in Canada/ Canadian Magazine, 31 May 1908, reprinted in Don Rubin, ed., Canadian Theatre History: Selected Readings (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1996), 15 Ibid., 14 See B.K. Sandwell, Montreal Herald, 19 Dec. 1908. The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (Glasgow: Oxford University Press, 1971), vol. i, 605; vol. 2, 2530 Lawrence Mason, introduction to '"Technique: An Issue Defined": A Non-Technical Discussion of Dramatic Criticism by W.A. Darlington, Published in London Last Summer/ Globe, 2 April 1927, 8 Christopher Newton, Theatre: The Verminous Critics Criticized/ Saturday Night, December 1966, 54 Northrop Frye, 'Conclusion/ Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English, gen. ed. Carl F. Klinck (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965); repr. in Northrop Frye, The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (Toronto: Anansi, 1971), 225-6 Moira Day, '"The Country Mouse at Play": Theatre in the Peace River District 1914-1945,' Theatre History in Canada 12:2 (Fall 1991), 119, 128 Bronwyn Drainie, Living the Part: John Drainie and the Dilemma o/ Canadian Stardom (Toronto: Macmillan, 1988), 130 Isabel Vincent, 'Director Has Harsh Words for Media/ Globe and Mail, 2 Nov. 1990 and Robert Crew, 'Scorn Drama Critics If You Wish, But It Benefits No One/ Toronto Star, 26 June 1993. See also Jo Anne Claus, 'Editorial Freedom Lost in New Brunswick: The Demise of a Theatre Critic/ Critically Speaking: Newsletter of the Canadian Theatre Critics Association 2:1 (Jan./Feb. 1995). 'The Ghastly "Ghosts,"' Manitoba Free Press, 10 March 1904 For Stewart's editing and theatre criticism in Stewart's Quarterly (1867-72), the Saint John Daily News (1872-5) and the Watchman (1875-7) in Saint John, and the Morning Chronicle (1879-96) and the Quebec Mercury (1898-1902) in Quebec City, see Carol W. Fullerton, 'The Theatre Criticism of George Stewart, Jr./ Theatre History in Canada 9:2 (Fall 1988), 147-56. B.K. Sandwell, The Privacity Agent and Other Modest Proposals (London, Toronto: J.M. Dent, 1928) Herbert Whittaker, 'Critic on the Crest of the New Wave/ Theatre Canada 14 (Jan./Feb. 1961), 6 See Anton Wagner, 'Infinite Variety or a Canadian "National" Theatre: Roly

54 Anton Wagner Young and the Toronto Civic Theatre Association, 1945-1949,' Theatre History in Canada 9:2 (Fall 1988), 173-92. 48 Robert Fulford, 'Cohen and The Critic in the Country of the Bland/ Canadian Notes & Queries 47 (1993), 3, 6 49 Knelman, 'Fighting Words/ 23 50 Sandwell's criticism at the Montreal Herald beginning in 1900 in turn influenced Samuel Morgan-Powell's reviewing at the Montreal Star, beginning in 1907. Morgan-Powell was Herbert Whittaker's mentor in the 19305. 51 See Robertson Davies, 'My Early Literary Life/ Saturday Night, August 1988, 39; repr. in R. Davies, The Merry Heart: Selections, 1980-1995 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1996), 153. 52 Cited in Chris Raible, Muddy York Mud: Scandal & Scurrility in Upper Canada (Creemore, Ont.: Curiosity House, 1992), 178 53 My discussion of Winnipeg theatre is based on David Spector, 'From Frivolity to Purposefulness: Theatrical Development in Late Nineteenth-Century Winnipeg/ Canadian Drama 4:1 (Spring 1978), 40-51 and Douglas Arrell, '"High Art They Called It": The Theatre Criticism of C.W. Handscomb of the Manitoba Free Press,' Canadian Drama 5:2 (Fall 1979), 235-55. P°r erra ta in the publication of this article, see the Association for Canadian Theatre History Newsletter 4:2 (March 1981), 21. See also Carol Budnick, 'Theatre on the Frontier: Winnipeg in the 18805,' Theatre History in Canada 4:1 (Spring 1983), 25-40. 54 Spector, 'From Frivolity to Purposefulness/ 43, 44 55 Budnick, 'Theatre on the Frontier/ 29-30 56 Spector, 'From Frivolity to Purposefulness/ 45 57 Ibid., 48 58 Lawrence Mason, 'At Mr. Parkhurst's Desk: Some Musings after Four Months' Incumbency/ Toronto Globe, 14 Feb. 1925, 6. In his obituary of Parkhurst, Hector Charlesworth commented, 'He was at one time, I think, too great a believer in the old newspaper adage of "letting the reader read between the lines" - a principle which appealed to his uncensorious temperament. My own experience has been that it is difficult enough to induce many readers to read the written lines intelligently without asking them to read between them.' See The Death of Mr. Parkhurst/ Saturday Night, 21 June 1924, 6. 59 Cited in Anton Wagner, 'Whittaker, Herbert/ in William Toye, ed., The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1983), 828 60 Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism ist series, ed. Sister Thomas Marion Hoctor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 28 61 See Augustus Bridle, The Story of the Club (Toronto: Arts and Letters Club, 1945), 10. Bridle was the first president of the club and theatre critic for the Toronto Star 1922-52.

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62 See Peter Larisey, Light for a Cold Land: Lawren Harris's Work and Life - An Interpretation (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1993). Harris's wealth derived from his father's Massey-Harris farm-machinery manufacturing fortune. 63 See 'Bertram Brooker and Emergent Modernism/ a special issue of Provincial Essays 7 (1989). 64 See Renate Usmiani, 'Roy Mitchell: Prophet in Our Past/ Theatre History in Canada 8:2 (Fall 1987), 147-68. 65 Bernard K. Sandwell, The Annexation of Our Stage/ Canadian Magazine 38:1 (Nov. 1911), 23 66 Bernard K. Sandwell, 'Our Adjunct Theatre/ in Addresses Delivered before the Canadian Club of Montreal: Season 1913-1914 (Montreal: The Canadian Club, 1914), 98 67 Ibid., 100 68 For a discussion of the competition between local stock companies and touring productions, see Yashdip Singh Bains, 'Popular-Priced Stock Companies and Their Repertory in Montreal and Toronto in the 18905,' Canadian Drama 12:2 (1986), 332-41. 69 See Lawren Harris, 'Winning a Canadian Background/ Canadian Bookman 5 (Feb. 1923), 37; Arthur Lismer, 'Canadian Art/ Canadian Theosophist 5:12 (15 Feb. 1925), 177-9; Herman Voaden, ed., Six Canadian Plays (Toronto: Copp, Clark, 1930), xxi; and Anton Wagner, 'Herman Voaden and the Group of Seven: Creating a Canadian Imaginative Background in Theatre/ International Journal of Canadian Studies 4 (Fall 1991), 145-64. 70 Six Canadian Plays, xv, xxiv. Lawren Harris's essay 'Creative Art and Canada' was published in the December 1928 McGill News; repr. in Bertram Brooker, ed., Yearbook of the Arts in Canada 1928/1929 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1929), 179-86. 71 'Harold Nelson in Quo Vadis/ Manitoba Free Press, 10 Oct. 1903; cited in Arrell, '"High Art They Called It,"' 253. 72 See Reg Skene, 'Walker, Corliss Powers' and 'Walker Theatre' in Eugene Benson and L.W. Conolly, eds, The Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1989), 585-6 and 588-90. 73 Anton Wagner, 'Gwen Pharis Ringwood Rediscovered/ Canadian Theatre Review 5 (Winter 1975), 64 74 Roy Mitchell, Creative Theatre (New York: John Day, 1929; Westwood, NJ: Kindle Press, 1969), 143 75 B.K. Sandwell, 'At the Theatre/ Saturday Night, 15 Aug. 1936. In his review, Sandwell describes himself as 'a violent Eliotite' and states, '[F]or me, "Murder in the Cathedral" is the most important poetic drama written in English in the twentieth century.'

56 Anton Wagner 76 Nathan Cohen, 'Theatre Today: English Canada/ Tamarack Review 13 (Autumn *959)/ 32 77 Edmonstone, Nathan Cohen, 107 78 Herbert Whittaker, 'Whittaker's Montreal: A Theatrical Autobiography, 19101949,' ed. Rota Herzberg Lister, Canadian Drama 12:2 (1986), 328 79 '"Jolting" Is the Word for The Children/ Toronto Star, 6 July 1967 80 CKFM, 30 June 1967. Cited in Edmonstone, Nathan Cohen, 4 81 'Upfront/ Canadian Theatre Review 34 (Spring 1982), 7. Rubin was also one of the few critics teaching theatre and criticism. Three of his former York University students (Anton Wagner, Alan Filewod, and Mayte Gomez) are contributors to this volume. A fourth, Mira Friedlander, won a Nathan Cohen Award for best theatre criticism in 1993/94 and 1997 and was elected president of the Canadian Theatre Critics Association in 1998. 82 See Alan Filewod, 'Undermining the Centre: The Canon According to CTR,' Theatre History in Canada 11:2 (Fall 1990), 178-85. 83 Northrop Frye, 226. Cited in Robert Wallace, 'Garrison Theatre/ Canadian Theatre Review 46 (Spring 1986), 4 84 See the Douglas Wilson scrapbook, 'Roly Young Globe and Mail Entertainment Features' in the Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library. 85 Reviewing Carl Van Doren's The Portable Walt Whitman in the Peterborough Examiner in 1945, Robertson Davies noted that Whitman 'had many intimate friendships with young men, usually powerful uneducated persons, and there is an insistence on such friendship in his poetry which raises the second question: Was Whitman sexually inverted? If so, he dealt with his personal problem in a manner which greatly enriched his poetry.' 'Walt Whitman/ Peterborough Examiner, 26 Sept. 1945; repr. in The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies, ed. Judith Skelton Grant (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1979), 35 86 'Fortune and Men's Eyes/ Globe and Mail, 4 March 1967; repr. in Whittaker's Theatre, ed. Ronald Bryden with Boyd Neil (Toronto: Whittaker Project, 1985), 117 87 Introduction to 'John Herbert/ in Canadian Writing Today, ed. Mordecai Richler (Middlesex, Eng.: Penguin, 1970), 211-12 88 Toronto Star, 17 April 1967; cited in Allan Mendel Gould, 'A Critical Assessment of the Theatre Criticism of Nathan Cohen with a Bibliography and Selected Anthology/ Ph.D. dissertation, York University, 1977, 204-5 89 Robert Wallace, 'Image and Label: Notes for a Sense of Self/ Canadian Theatre Review 12 (Fall 1976), 32. Despite the fact that No Deposit No Return had received a professional New York production and Wallace was a member of the Playwrights Co-op, the Co-op, fearing obscenity laws existing at the time, refused to publish the play because of its perceived decadent homosexual and sexual subject matter.

English-Canadian Theatre Criticism 57 90 See Robert Wallace, 'Theorizing a Queer Theatre: Buddies in Bad Times/ in Per Brask, ed., Contemporary Issues in Canadian Drama (Winnipeg: Blizzard, 1995), 136-59. 91 Robert Wallace, Producing Marginality: Theatre and Criticism in Canada (Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1990), 9, 12. See also his 'Making Out Positions: An Introduction,' in R. Wallace, ed., Making, Out: Plays by Gay Men, (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1992), 11-40 and Theorizing a Queer Theatre.' 92 For a discussion of postmodern critical perspectives, see the theme issue on criticism, Canadian Theatre Review 57 (Winter 1988), particularly Paul Leonard, 'Critical Questioning' and Ann Wilson, 'Deadpan: Ideology and Criticism/ See also Richard Paul Knowles, 'Otherwise Engaged: Towards a Materialist Pedagogy/ Theatre History in Canada 12:2 (Fall 1991); and Denis Salter, The Idea of a National Theatre' and Richard Paul Knowles, 'Voices (off): Deconstructing the Modern English-Canadian Dramatic Canon/ in Robert Lecker, ed., Canadian Canons: Essays in Literary Value (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991). See also Denis Salter, 'On Native Ground: Canadian Theatre Historiography and the Postmodernism/Postcolonialism Axis' and Susan Bennett, 'Feminist (Theatre) Historiography / Canadian (Feminist) Theatre: A Reading of Some Practices and Theories/ Theatre Research in Canada 13:1/2 (Spring/Fall 1992). 93 Ray Conlogue, 'Reviewing the Critic's Role in Canadian Theatre/ Globe and Mail, 25 Aug. 1990, C9 94 Yearbook of the Arts in Canada 1928/1929, 7 95 Vincent Tovell, Theatre in Canada/ Here and Now i (Dec. 1947), 80-1 96 Elizabeth Renzetti, Theatre of the Oppressed/ Globe and Mail, 3 May 1997 97 Bulwer-Lytton, Richelieu, Act III, Scene II; cited in 'Jung and the Theatre/ in One Half of Robertson Davies, 155-6 98 Lismer, 'Canadian Art/ 179 99 Creative Theatre, 12 100 See Anton Wagner, 'Herman Voaden's "New Religion,"' Theatre History in Canada 6:2 (Fall 1985), 187-201. 101 In Anton Wagner, ed., Contemporary Canadian Theatre: New World Visions (Toronto: Simon & Pierre, 1985), 80 102 Robertson Davies, 'Keeping Faith/ Saturday Night 102:1 (Jan. 1987), 187 103 Impossible Nation, 135,136 104 Brian Brennan, The Exigencies of Survival/ Canadian Theatre Review 57 (Winter 1988), 25 105 Ibid., 26 106 Robert Wallace, 'Critical Practice in Canada/ Canadian Theatre Review 57 (Winter 1988), 3

58 Anton Wagner 107 Judith Rudakoff, Toronto Free Theatre/ Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre, 557 108 Sarmite D. Bulte, 'Canadian Stage Fulfilling Its Mandate/ Globe and Mail, 17 Jan. 1996, Ai3- See also Richard Monette, 'Away with "This Cost-Analysis Approach to Theatre Criticism/" Globe and Mail, 16 Jan. 1996, Aai. 109 Ray Conlogue, 'Canadian Stage Company Names New Leader/ Globe and Mail, 23 April 1998, C3 no Michael Coren, 'Parting Words from a Critic/ Globe and Mail, 27 Feb. 1995 111 See E.K. Brown, Matthew Arnold: A Study in Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 118. 112 Culture and Anarchy, 18. Arnold notes further that 'in the Greece of Pindar and Sophocles, in the England of Shakespeare, the poet lived in a current of ideas in the highest degree animating and nourishing to the creative power; society was, in the fullest measure, permeated by fresh thought, intelligent and alive. And this state of things is the true basis for the creative power's exercise, in this it finds its data, its materials, truly ready for its hand.' Ibid., 12

PART ONE: EDITOR-CRITICS

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2 From Puffery to Criticism - William Lyon Mackenzie, Joseph Howe, and Daniel Morrison: Theatre Criticism in Halifax and Toronto, 1826-1857 PATRICK B. O'NEILL In her introduction to Early Stages: Theatre in Ontario, 1800-1914, Ann Saddlemyer observed that although 'many of the early newspaper notices of theatre productions tended to be more puffery than appraisal, dramatic criticism was not unknown even during the early years.'1 Although such newspapermen as William Lyon Mackenzie at the York Colonial Advocate (1826-33), Joseph Howe at The Novascotian (1827-40), and Daniel Morrison at the Toronto Daily Leader (1854-7) did produce insightful commentary on the theatre, their work was, however, in the minority. Before Confederation (as ever), editors and journalists were subject to the pressures of the market place and the newspaper conventions of the day. The dominant convention in theatrical matters was the practice of puffery, which is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as 'inflated laudation usually from internal motives especially by way of advertisement/ The tradition of publishing theatrical criticism in newspapers on a regular basis was not established in British North America until after mid-century. Until then, most theatre notices in the newspapers throughout North America consisted of paid puffs - press releases - manufactured by the theatre managers to create interest and promote attendance at their productions. Editors received contracts for the printing of playbills and handbills, along with season passes for themselves and their families; in return they reprinted favourable 'puffs' from other locations. Bedevilled by financial insecurity, newspapers in British North America survived through advertisements, which consumed between one-half and two-thirds of the column inches, and through the printing contracts that accompanied those advertisements. Contracts for theatrical, musical, or circus events (which included the printing of playbills and daily handbills) were eagerly sought by the proprietors of colonial papers. Only the financial secu-

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rity of a healthy circulation list would leave an editor free to write the 'truth' regardless of its offence to the advertiser, that is, the theatre manager. Such conditions did not emerge in Canada until the rise of a daily press in the 18503 and 18605. It was not until mid-century that burgeoning metropolitan centres in the colonies ensured the population base to support daily newspapers, that the busy retail trade of these cities enhanced the all-important advertising revenues, and that the ever-growing network of telegraph lines furnished editors with daily news stories. Before the War of 1812, British North American newspapers were timid publications that reflected their proprietors' interests primarily in printing rather than news gathering and dissemination. Not surprisingly, few theatrical notices found their way into print. In the extant copies of the Quebec Mercury before 1812, of the 193 notices of theatre productions only eight2 contain any commentary upon the theatre; most of the remaining are merely advertisements. Similarly, in all the extant newspapers for the same period published in Halifax only eight3 comments on the theatre originate with the editors, and those comments are not much longer or informative than the first one written by Anthony Henry, which appeared in 1773: 'On Friday last (23 April) was perform'd by the Gentlemen of the Army and Navy, a Play for the Benefit of the Poor, at which was a considerable Collection, which is to be distributed to the indigent Families, and other old and poor people by the Minister and Church-wardens of this Place.'4 Such editorial comment, written by the editors, provides us with little knowledge of the theatre practices of the day, and indicates no desire on the editor's part to offer real criticism. Given their brevity, such comments escape the charge of puffery; not so, however, with the material 'communicated' and published in the newspapers. In 1768, Mills and Giffard's company that had been performing in North Carolina was forced to abandon the area when William Verling, formerly of David Douglass's American Company, organized the second Virginia Company of Comedians in opposition to Mills and Giffard. Subsequently, Mills and Giffard were denied permission to perform in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. When they arrived in Halifax in August, calling themselves the American Company of Comedians, a debate in the Nova Scotia Gazette (which carried their advertisements and which for the most part favoured the company and its right to perform) preceded their first appearance. The pro forces found voice in Theatricus,' a member of the company, whose two letters were published.5 Speaking for the nays, 'A Shopkeeper' complained that his first letter was severely edited and his second letter ignored.6 One suspects that editor Robert Fletcher probably was governed by the printing contracts he received from the company.

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Following the War of 1812, and until the middle of the century, the practice of puffery became more blatant. Typically, this period is characterized by at least two newspapers in every major centre, one pro-government and one reform, and neither agreeing with the other on any matter of consequence. Newspapers lavished attention on the actions of their friends, 'turning a blind eye to their peccadilloes, while mangling the speeches, distorting the aims, abusing the leaders, and trumpeting the sins of the enemy/ Or so tt least writes Paul Rutherford in The Making of the Canadian Media, observing that newspapers 'refused to publish letters which clashed with the proprietor's views. As well, editors or their friends did write under pseudonyms letters purportedly from concerned readers so as to ensure an airing of the right opinions/ 7 Given the primary purpose of newspapers at the time, as mediums of advertising and promotion, it is difficult to accept the various letters published in the newspapers as unbiased, critical analysis of theatrical practices, and not mere puffery. An examination of a series of letters published in the Halifax Free Press and the Acadian Recorder between 1816 and 1819 illuminates the editorial practice of puffery as it was practised in British North America. The divided critical opinion regarding the talents of Mrs Young, the leading lady of Price's company, underwent a one hundred and eighty degree change simultaneously in both the Free Press and the Acadian Recorder. In 1817, 'Veritas' in the Free Press responded favourably to Mrs Young's performance in The Stranger. Tn the concluding scenes of the play, there was nothing lost by Mrs Young of the genuine spirit and manner which the author intended to give the character of Mrs Haller/8 On the same occasion, 'Peeping Tom,' in the Acadian Recorder, considered 'Mrs Young's performance upon the whole a monotonous display of "grievous lamentations" interspersed with the white handkerchief. This lady would do herself a service to study the modulations of her voice. In the character of Mrs Haller, she presented throughout such an unvaried quivering shake of the voice that its effect on the ears of the audience was more like proceeding from the impulse of terror than from repentant sensibility/9 In June of 1818, however, Mr Charnock, Mr and Mrs Young, Mr Placide, and Mr Moss broke from Price's company to establish a competing company at the Amateur Theatre. Price had placed his advertisements with the Free Press, but the second company chose to advertise with the Acadian Recorder. The members of the new company, including Mrs Young, no longer received as favourable notice from the Free Press, and 'Peeping Tom,' in the Acadian Recorder, reversed his assessment, writing soon after the split of the company that, 'as Lucy Bertram, in Guy Mannering, I think she [Mrs Young] is deserving greater praise than what Dramaticus [of the Free Press] allows/10

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Newspapers were media of advertising and promotion, and positive commentary was directly linked to the placement of advertisements for productions. In short, editors who had printing contracts supported the theatre, and those who failed to receive the contracts did not. The practice of puffery is undeniable in British North American newspapers, and was openly recognized by the press of the day. The Halifax Sun freely admitted, while decrying the 'indiscriminate puffery' that E.H. Sothern was receiving, 'for money or money's worth, anybody might get anything put into a newspaper.'11 Visiting performers were expected to consign their printing business to the local press. Editors themselves admitted a relationship between good reviews, or bad reviews, and printing contracts, as the Acadian Recorder revealed in 1850: 'Those who can puff for a sordid motive any public exhibition, will doubtless withhold their approbation without a corresponding incentive.'12 By common assumption theatre managers and newspaper editors traded favours. Various writers in recent years, such as Leslie O'Dell in 'Amateurs of the Regiment, 1815-1870' and Hermann Goodden in Curtain Rising: The History of Theatre in London, have specifically noted a change in the attitude of the press toward theatre performances after the emergence of the daily newspapers: Goodden notes succinctly that 'by the 18605, with a population approaching 15,000, an unmistakable note of impatience creeps into many of the press reviews of garrison theatricals.'13 Before this time, with few exceptions, most newspaper notices on theatre were primarily vehicles for advertising and promotion. Nevertheless, William Lyon Mackenzie, Joseph Howe, and Daniel Morrison each demonstrate that not all editors of the time followed the accepted theatre practice of puffery. Dramatic notices in their newspapers reveal unbiased, critical analyses of the theatre practices of the day from which they derive many similar conclusions. Born on 12 March 1795 near Dundee, Scotland, William Lyon Mackenzie came to Canada in 1820.14 After working in a variety of businesses, he settled in Queenston and began publishing the Colonial Advocate on 18 May 1824, but quickly ran into financial difficulties. He relocated his paper to York (renamed Toronto in 1834), where it vigorously attacked Tory politicians and policies. In response, on 18 June 1826, fifteen young Tories raided his office, destroyed his press, and threw his type into the harbour. The subsequent trial of eight of the participants placed Mackenzie and the Colonial Advocate at the centre of the Reform movement. The Advocate continued as Mackenzie's voice for Reform until he ended his connection with it in 1834. With his emphasis always on political reform, William Lyon Mackenzie devoted less space to theatrical matters than Howe and Morrison. Indeed, Mackenzie's earliest comment on the theatre has more to do with

Theatre Criticism in Halifax and Toronto, 1826-1857 65 politics than aesthetics. In it, he attacked itinerant companies on financial grounds. Since American strolling players removed hard currency from the local communities, Mackenzie and other editors objected in their columns to these companies: 'A company of play-actors have been wiling the villagers of Niagara out of their money and time - we hope they may not come here [Queenston], and wish them no good luck, if they do come.'15 Within one year of writing this, however, Mackenzie apparently reversed his position and accepted the printing contract for playbills from 'Messrs. Gilbert, Davis, and Trowbridge, managers of the Theatre Rochester' for their 1825-6 winter season at York. With the contract firmly in place, Mackenzie 'for the first time in America, essayed to drive dull care away in a Theatre,' and undertook his first theatrical review. Mackenzie confessed that his actions may be seen as 'contrary to our own consistent declaration against players in general as expressed in last year's Advocate,' but he offered no apology for this editorial change toward the theatre.16 Puffery in payment for the advertising contract is the simple explanation, but such a charge is perhaps not totally justified. Faced with thin houses, the theatre managers had first requested Sir Peregrine Maitland to bespeak the house in order to increase patronage, but he refused to visit the theatre.17 When this plan failed, Davis next appealed directly to the citizens of York. Since navigation on Lake Ontario had closed owing to the freezing of Toronto harbour, and since 'to remove his Company and effects, by land, would be attended with an expense too enormous to be thought of/ Davis, through the pages of the Colonial Advocate, threw himself 'on the generosity of a British Public, which has been seldom appealed to in vain.'18 The call was heard and a list of the prominent citizens who attended the performances on 26 December was included in Mackenzie's review of the company. An analysis of Mackenzie's reviews of the performances, however, clearly demonstrates that his reviews were not mere puffery, for they contain perceptive insights into the Rochester theatre company's strengths and weaknesses. As a regular theatre patron in Dundee, Scotland, and in London, where he had often seen Edmund Kean perform at the Drury Lane Theatre, Mackenzie offered comparative criticism to the company's productions at York. Not surprisingly, he compared the Davis and Kean Richards: 'We would say that Davis was at home in the hump-backed Gloster. At times, 'tis true, his voice was loud where Kean's deep, and any approaches to rant in playing such a character should be carefully guarded against; but Davis's person and voice had a resemblance to Kean's, the height of the two is about the same - and in the scene where the usurper tells Lady Anne how cordially he hates her, his acting was really beyond our praise. Upon the whole, we were highly gratified with the performance.'

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But if he was satisfied with Davis's performance, the women of the company did not fare as well in his comments on The Miller and His Men: As to the ladies, ... if the manager would choose his loving maidens from among the females beyond eight years of age, and give Mrs Gilbert the hint to bestow on her pretty face certain appropriate streaks, and on her hair a little hair-powder, when she condescends to appear as the representative of wintry three-score, it would, we think, be well enough. The chief beauty of an opera is its close resemblance to scenes in real life; and the strength of a company is shewn to great disadvantage when young women won't grow old, and babies play the parts usually allotted to their mothers.19

Mackenzie's desire for appropriate physical casting marks the beginning of the demand for verisimilitude - that is, appropriateness - in Canadian dramatic criticism. Having received their printing business, Mackenzie recognized a certain obligation to support the actors, but it is clear that he believed that he must offer a thoughtful and honest critical perspective in his reviews. In so doing, he transcends the charge of puffery, and bases his criticism on a demand for verisimilitude, a demand that will be echoed in the criticism of Howe and Morrison. Two years later, an unfortunate incident that would have many repercussions on the theatrical life of York marred the visit from Buffalo of A.A. Archbold's company, which performed in York for a season between 12 April and 13 June 1828. Charles French, a printer by trade and a former apprentic with Mackenzie, accosted and murdered a labourer named Edward Nowlan after both had witnessed a production on 4 June. French drank heavily before, during, and after the performance. At some point in the evening Nowlan had threatened French's life in retaliation for the evidence given by French against those who destroyed Mackenzie's press and type. After the performance, as Nowlan walked down King Street, French pulled a gun and shot the former through the chest. The regrettable incident provides the most likely reason for Mackenzie's virtual avoidance of the theatre thereafter. Drinking during theatrical performances constituted the social norm and,, indeed, many of the audience arrived intoxicated. On 28 June 1828, William Lyon Mackenzie addressed such notoriously loose behaviour at theatrical productions. He observed that the 'company of theatrical performers, now in York, profess to open their house at seven in the night, but seldom or never begin until 9 or 10 - thereby introducing irregular habits among our youths,' and noted further that the lack of proper police supervision of the streets and taverns near the theatre had created in this area of York 'hotbeds of vice and infamy.'20 After the death of Nowlan and the execution of Charles French,

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Mackenzie wrote no more favourable notices of theatricals, but rather chose to attack theatricals in the editorial pages of the Colonial Advocate for their effect upon the morality of the community.21 When he became Toronto's first mayor in 1834, he took steps to control the theatre. One of the first laws sponsored by Mackenzie and passed by the city council of Toronto provided that the managers of theatres must buy a licence at a cost of two pounds per annum and that the city council had the right to refuse or revoke such licences.22 Although Joseph Howe did not sponsor similar legislation when he entered political life, he frequently decried misbehaviour in the streets and theatres of Halifax during nights of performances. One of the first such comments appeared in The Novascotian on 26 August 1828, two months after the death of Nowlan in York: 'We would suggest to our Magistrates, and Police Officers, the propriety of keeping peace and decorum in the streets adjoining the Lodge, on the next evening; because the performance on Monday was repeatedly interrupted by all kinds of discordant noises; and several persons effected an entrance to the Hall through the back windows, and others threw dirt and offal in, to the great annoyance both of the Singer and the audience. This is not as it should be - what are the public officers for if tranquillity is not to be preserved?' The decision of Mackenzie to focus his interest and comments upon matters tangential to the performances is understandable after the death of Nowlan and the execution of French; curiously, after his first year as editor of The Novascotian, Joseph Howe followed a similar editorial policy to Mackenzie's and more or less ignored performances in Halifax. In 1818, at the age of thirteen, Howe had begun to assist his father, John Howe, who was postmaster general and editor of the Halifax Gazette.2?1 Howe continued to work in the family business, mainly under his halfbrother John, until late in 1826.24 Early in 1827 Joseph Howe entered into partnership with James Spike and together they published The Acadian and General Advertiser. The partnership dissolved before the end of the first year of operation when Howe purchased The Novascotian from George R. Young. During his tenure as sole proprietor and editor from January 1828 until the sale of the paper in December 1841, and again as editor from May 1844 to April 1846, Howe made The Novascotian the ablest newspaper in British North America. He himself became the first and foremost journalist in preConfederation literary history.25 He accomplished this by modelling his paper on concepts nurtured during the glory days of eighteenth-century English journalism, as reflected in the pages of The Tatler, The Spectator, and The Rambler, whose contributors

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included the legendary writers Richard Steele, Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson, and Oliver Goldsmith.26 In addition to publishing straight news, Howe viewed his paper 'as a review, as a miscellany, and as a moulder of public opinion and creator of popular literary and aesthetic taste/27 Yet despite this announced desire to raise the aesthetic taste of Haligonians, Howe devoted little column space to theatrical and musical events in Halifax. Most studies of Joseph Howe the editor focus on the political aspects of his writing. Certainly his place in Canadian history dictates the study of his transformation from a youthful editor/observer into an active participant in the government of Nova Scotia. His growing interest in politics may have limited his participation as a theatrical reviewer, and this offers a simple explanation for the lack of theatrical and musical reviews in The Novascotian. When a correspondent called Howe to task in 1838 for not reviewing an amateur performance, Howe replied that his 'time [was] just now too much occupied with those who are "fretting and strutting" on a more extensive stage, to leave leisure to theatrical critiques/ 28 Between 1828 and 1836, Howe's writing, like Mackenzie's, became increasingly political,29 but to credit the lack of 'theatrical critiques' merely to his political agenda ignores other relevant factors - the nature of theatrical criticism of the time, Howe's stated commitment to the aesthetic development of Nova Scotia, and his apparent attendance at theatrical events in Halifax and elsewhere.30 The question remains: if Howe attended the theatre, why did he make only passing notice or ignore it completely for most of his career as editor of The NovascotianP'' From the evidence of his writings, Howe obviously had a personal desire to enhance the spiritual unity of Nova Scotia through the promotion of its literature and art, but he was unwilling to lower his standards in doing so. Howe, therefore, refused to follow the established practice of puffery, even when called to task by a visiting performer or by other Halifax papers. In response to a letter written in 1840 by P.P. White, a touring musician, in which he labelled Howe 'an obscure Editor' because he dared to publish comments contrary to those written by the 'principle critics of America,'32 Howe wrote that 'Halifax may be an "obscure" place, but mediocrity will not always go down in it - neither can the Yankee loathing practice of indiscriminate puffing be forced upon its Press/33 Twelve years earlier, Howe had voiced a similar position when Hart and Logan's company visited Halifax between September 1828 and April 1829. Although Howe had actively promoted the company before and immediately after its arrival, he took little notice of it thereafter. This apparent lack of interest provoked comment from other editors of the day. Howe replied to

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their criticism in The Novascotian on 26 November 1828: The amount of the charges brought against us may be summed up - that we did not continue week after week, to puff and praise them, in defiance of common sense, and the good taste of our readers/ This same piece reveals the basic rationale underlying all his reviews; namely, that he had 'no motive but one, to do our duty, and disabuse the public ... These people know that our good wishes were with them - but when, after several exhibitions, we found them far inferior ... compared to the Company we had here ten years ago, we could not but look to the future with dread, and wonder who could come next.' This particular piece by Howe elicited a letter from 'Senex,'34 published in The Acadian and General Advertiser by Howe's former partner, and addressed directly to Joseph Howe, which questioned his credibility as a theatre critic: 'What knowledge then could you have had of Theatricals, or what right could you have to set your puny opinions, in opposition to those, who have from experience or knowledge of the Drama, in which you must necessarily be deficient. Is it because your own vanity has been galled, that you meanly endeavour to avenge yourself; blush sir, for your conduct; learn to be candid and liberal.'35 Senex's criticism was without justification. In his youth, Howe was trained in fencing and dancing by Charles Stuart Powell, around whose family the theatre in Halifax revolved for over thirty years. His knowledge of theatre came from the Powells, Frederick Brown, and William Rufus Blake, all of whom were his friends. In addition, Howe probably began attending the theatre at an early age with his father on family theatre passes presented to John Howe as editor of The Gazette. Although Howe could have easily detailed his knowledge of the theatrical scene in Halifax and the practice of theatre elsewhere, he chose not to honour Senex's question. Howe also chose to ignore other errors raised by Senex in his letter: 'Mr Hart has only performed two characters of Placide's, ... Mr Logan has never performed a single character in which Charnock appeared. - Where then is the fairness of criticism, in such a case, you, sir, were then only TEN years old, when the former company performed.' Howe's brief response noted that those 'who think Hart equal to Placide, who has for many years sustained the first comic characters on the New York Stage, are welcome to that opinion. Mr H. had better not so far adopt it, however, as to make his appearance at the Park Theatre' (18 Dec. 1828). True to Howe's assessment, Hart never made it to New York and pursued an undistinguished career performing in 'frontier' theatres over the next few years. Howe's original review and brief response, however, provide a valuable indication of the criteria underlying his theatrical criticism. Senex had erro-

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neously thought that Howe was referring to Price's company that visited Halifax in 1816, but Howe's reference had been to Charles Betterton's company, which had performed in Halifax in 1818-19,3