Calgary Herald Establishing Our Boundaries review

[Anton Wagner]

Below is Martin Morrow's delightful Calgary Herald review of Establishing Our Boundaries: English-Canadian Theatre Criticism. 
 
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 www.chapters.ca/ promises free Xpresspost shipping in Canada until October 31.

!@LKW=BOOKS; THEATRES; CANADA
!@PAPER=Calgary Herald
!@PAGE=ES10 / FRONT
!@DATE=990710
!@SECTION=Books
!@EDITION=FINAL
!@HEAD=Critique of theatre critics reveals passion for subject 
!@BYLINE=Martin Morrow, Calgary Herald
!@ST=Review
!@ILLUS=Photo: Establishing Our Boundaries: English-Canadian Theatre Criticism, edited by Anton Wagner. University of Toronto Press, 416 pages, $60. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

Establishing Our Boundaries: English-Canadian Theatre Criticism, edited by Anton Wagner. University of Toronto Press, 416 pages, $60.

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