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<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2>This may be the first Canadian review of
<EM>Establishing Our Boundaries: English-Canadian Theatre Criticism.
</FONT></EM></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2>Robert Fulford, "The drama critic's the
thing," <EM>Globe and Mail</EM>, July 17, 1999, D5. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2>If you happened to overhear a few conversations
about theatre in Toronto 30 years ago, you might have picked up the impression
that whatever was happening inside the minds of a certain two men sitting in
aisle seats was more interesting than anything going on the city's stages.
Sometimes that notion wasn't far from wrong.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2>The two minds in question were those of Herbert
Whittaker, drama critic of The Globe and Mail from 1949 to 1975, and Nathan
Cohen, drama critic of the Toronto Star from 1959 till his early death in
1971.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2>To the amusement and occasional enlightenment of
the public, Herbie and Nathan (that's what you always called them, to
demonstrate familiarity) played the theatrical equivalent of good cop, bad cop.
This neat analogy with detectives interrogating a suspect appears in
<EM>Establishing Our Boundaries: English-Canadian Theatre Criticism
</EM>(University of Toronto Press), edited by Anton Wagner, a book written by 17
academics about a couple of dozen critics, from the pre-Confederation era to the
1990s.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2>There's a certain kind of theatre criticism that
ends up being more memorable than its subject, despite its own best intentions,
and that was the case with Herbie and Nathan. People talked endlessly about
Herbie being too kind or Nathan being too cruel--and no matter how vapid the
play that week, or how impressive, this pattern repeated itself. To read Herbie
and Nathan on the same show was to experience a wonderful cognitive dissonance.
Experienced playgoers learned how to strike an average between their two
accounts.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2>It was Cohen who insisted on making it a
contest, by emphasizing his differences with Whittaker as often as possible.
Cohen considered himself the first real drama critic in the history of Canada,
but it was hard to know just how seriously to take anything he wrote. Could a
chronic name-dropper who carried a cane (one of his canes had a sword in it) be
saying anything interesting? In this case, the answer was Yes. Cohen's criticism
was full of life, and the theatre seemed more alive because he attended to it.
He also wrote expert gossip columns (his personal espionage system penetrated
the CBC in a way never since equalled) and he edited the Star's entertainment
section with a flamboyant urgency. He was a presence in Canadian culture, like
no arts journalist before or since. Mordecai Richler satirized him in a novel,
Rick Salutin later wrote a play about him, and actors from sea to sea cursed his
name. (Once he was in the grave, the same actors immediately began singing his
praises.)</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2>Don Rubin's article about Cohen in
<EM>Establishing Our Boundaries </EM>catches his startling range of interests
and something of his personality.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2>The article on Whittaker is another matter. Much
of the book is intensely academic (the introduction comes with 112 footnotes)
and some of the professor-authors posture as flagrantly as Cohen ever did.
Reading them, we sense that they feel obliged to follow a rigid system of
thought. They don't analyze these critics so much as rate them on a standardized
checklist. Were they imperialists? Racist? Sexist? How about
patriarchal?</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2>You might imagine that a sophisticated and
knowledgeable liberal such as Whittaker would easily pass scrutiny. You would be
wrong. Jennifer Harvie of the University of London and Richard Paul Knowles of
the University of Guelph, in their essay on Whittaker, catch him out, or think
they do. They focus on his belief in more or less universal values in the
theatre, not at all the sort of thing an earnest professor of 1999 can allow.
"The ideology masked by Whittaker's aesthetic agenda of producing a
Canadian national theatre in the tradition of the best of the so-called
civilized world is a liberal-humanist one in which goodness, truth and beauty
are seen to be universal," Harvie and Knowles write. Talk about fighting
words! Liberal-humanist, goodness, truth, beauty--could they say anything
worse?</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2>Whittaker, they decide, wrote imperialist,
patriarchal criticism. He reviewed Lorraine Hansberry's <EM>A Raisin in the Sun
</EM>not just as a play about blacks but as an exploration of conflicts that
touch people of all races. That makes our professors cross. To them, this is
like saying the play is not about what it's clearly about, it's about
"us," the white majority. Their use of "masked" is
especially revealing: Whittaker made his principles clear, but they disagree
with those principles--so that makes him "masked." They acknowledge,
"Whittaker's bias was certainly not intentional," which is like a jury
recommending mercy. (Whittaker, now a healthy 88, will no doubt enjoy this
article as another comic turn in the endless vaudeville of Canadian
culture.)</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2>Not all the essays sound the same note. A
persuasive piece by Denis Johnston about Urjo Kareda at The Toronto Star in the
1970s explains how he recognized the vitality of the new Canadian theatres and
helped bring them to life with his shrewd and superbly written reviews. Like all
the best critics, he helped, as Johnston puts it, "to create a cultural
environment."</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2>But Robert Nunn's piece on Ray Conlogue, The
Globe critic from 1979 to 1991, plunges us back into academy-think. Nunn admires
Conlogue's avowedly socialist politics (how could he not, and maintain his own
status?) but Conlogue, too, carries the curse of universality. Nunn points out
that Conlogue likes gay, lesbian or feminist plays only when they have some
relationship with universal human experience. This is the approach that all
critics in the humanities took for granted until just the other day. Now it
draws nothing but angry frowns from academics committed to "the post-modern
discourse."</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2>This is not to suggest that <EM>Establishing Our
Boundaries </EM>is useless. It's annoying, overly solemn, and often pretentious,
but reading it will expand anyone's knowledge of our culture, our theatre, and
our journalism. The journalists it studies usually had to cobble their work
together at the last minute and didn't always reach much higher than minimum
standards of competence, but they made a valuable and often illuminating record
of the theatre they saw. To study their work is to understand the stumbling but
persistent development of public culture in a country where, not long ago, it
sometimes seemed a miracle to have any theatre at all. </FONT></DIV>
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