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<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2>Below is Martin Morrow's delightful <U>Calgary
Herald </U>review of <U>Establishing Our Boundaries: English-Canadian Theatre
Criticism. </FONT></U></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2>The 416-page hardcover collection of 18 essays
is available from Chapters for $42, 30% ($18) off the $60 University of Toronto
Press publication price. The Chapters website <A
href="http://www.chapters.ca/">www.chapters.ca/</A> promises free Xpresspost
shipping in Canada until October 31.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2>!@LKW=BOOKS; THEATRES; CANADA<BR>!@PAPER=Calgary
Herald<BR>!@PAGE=ES10 /
FRONT<BR>!@DATE=990710<BR>!@SECTION=Books<BR>!@EDITION=FINAL<BR>!@HEAD=Critique
of theatre critics reveals passion for subject <BR>!@BYLINE=Martin Morrow,
Calgary Herald<BR>!@ST=Review<BR>!@ILLUS=Photo: Establishing Our Boundaries:
English-Canadian Theatre Criticism, edited by Anton Wagner. University of
Toronto Press, 416 pages, $60. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2>As a theatre critic for a Canadian daily
newspaper who has been bashing out reviews regularly for over 10 years, I was
brought up short by Anton Wagner's Establishing Our Boundaries: English-Canadian
Theatre Criticism. The idea of having your hastily written, roughly reasoned,
written-on-deadline critiques gathered up and carefully analyzed by an academic
is a sobering thought. I've escaped such treatment in this book, but not my
Herald predecessors Brian Brennan and Jamie Portman, both of whom are among the
21 critics scrutinized in this survey of Canadian theatre criticism from the
early 19th century to the early 1990s. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2>Wagner's book, offering a series of essays by 17
Canadian theatre historians, examines how critical writing has reflected and
sometimes shaped the course of theatre in Canada. If actors are, as Hamlet put
it, 'the abstract and brief chronicles of the time,' then the critics are the
chroniclers of the chronicles, often providing the only record of past
performances. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2>Unfortunately, most reviewers then and now are
merely hacks, hewing to the popular tastes of the day and dispensing consumer
advice with no sense of the big picture. But as this study reveals, right from
our colonial beginnings there were critics who took the task seriously and saw
theatre's role in defining a nation's culture. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2>Clearly it's a job that carries with it some
historical responsibility and yet, ironically, the critics who see and write the
most, the daily paper scribes, are also the ones with the least time and
opportunity for in-depth reflection. It's hardly a surprise, then, that these
essays catch all the weaknesses of their subjects: contradictory statements,
sometimes in the same review; knee-jerk reactions; blind spots and blatant
prejudices. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2>But the virtue of daily reviewing is its
freshness; the immediate reactions of the most perceptive critics often make the
best reading. The no-guff notices filed by the brazen Gina Mallet during her
1976-84 run at the Toronto Star are still fun to peruse, even if, in her fierce
attacks on subsidized Canadian theatre, she often seemed to be breaking a
butterfly on a wheel. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2>Playwright-journalist Rick Salutin, echoing
Shaw, is quoted here as observing that criticism tells us more about the critic
than anything else. That's certainly the case with Mallet, and with Ray Conlogue
in his 1979-91 tenure as first-string critic at the Globe and Mail. Robert
Nunn's essay on Conlogue reveals the liberal-minded critic's persistent problems
with the emerging gay and feminist theatres in Toronto of the time, which
suggest something more than just a difference of taste. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2>The personalities that assert themselves in
these essays are the most entertaining aspect of the book and at times you wish
the essayists had loosened their academic stays and given us a bit more
colour--more biographical data, more details of the critics' relationships with
their theatre communities and, especially, more extensive quotes from their
work. Certainly, Wagner and his contributors have rounded up an intriguing cast
of characters: The rugged individualist Nathan Cohen, whom Richard Burton once
called 'the only brilliant critic in North America' (no doubt after receiving a
good review), whose doubts about the burgeoning Stratford Festival seem
strikingly prescient almost half a century later. The 'gentlemanly' Jamie
Portman, a Prairie classicist with a burning sense of purpose, who began his
career by nurturing Calgary's nascent professional theatre before going on, as a
national Southam correspondent, to tirelessly advocate government support of the
arts. The enthusiastic Urjo Kareda at the Toronto Star, who built up his city's
little alternative theatres, only to have his successor, the aptly named Mallet,
viciously knock them down. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2>Wagner's opening essay concludes with alarm
bells over the current state of Canadian theatre criticism, and who can dispute
the lack of courageous voices on the scene right now? But, as the book itself
shows, newspaper criticism is bound to the cycles that journalism goes through
and today's mainstream dailies, in their battle with other media for advertising
revenue, have largely devalued real criticism in favour of inoffensive coverage
and soft-core features that smack of the puffery that filled Canadian papers of
the last century. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2>It's a state that ought to alarm the theatre
practitioners themselves. As this valuable volume demonstrates, the true
critics, for all their foibles and quirks, have brought a passionate urgency to
their belief in the value of theatre that no amount of cheery promotional copy
will ever be able to duplicate.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 size=2>Establishing Our Boundaries: English-Canadian
Theatre Criticism, edited by Anton Wagner. University of Toronto Press, 416
pages, $60.<BR></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>