"Defining national theater through criticism"

[Anton Wagner]

The following review of Establishing Our Boundaries: English-Canadian Theatre Criticism was published in the Winter 2000 issue of Critics Quarterly, the Newsletter of the American Theatre Critics Association. It was written by Carol Douglass, the editor of Critics Quarterly.

When we, as critics, search out and read books on theater criticism--books by G.B. Shaw, Irving Wardle, Frank Rich, John Lahr for example--it's often part of a studious effort to perfect our own craft by analyzing and absorbing exceptionally good writing and sound thinking. Likewise books on the theater itself, such as those by Robert Brustein and Peter Brook, are part of our ongoing education.

What makes Establishing Our Boundaries: English-Canadian Theatre Criticism, edited by Anton Wagner, singular is that it is not principally about either writing style or theater strictly as artistic expression. Rather, it is a history of the role theater criticism has played over the past 150 years in the development of Canada's indigenous theater.

Wagner--dramaturge, television producer and director, academic and editor--has collected 16 brilliant, analytical essays, adding two of his own, as well as an introductory essay. From the writing of such as theater historian Patrick O'Neill, theater scholar Ira A. Levine and McGill University theater studies professor Denis Salter come a detailed, illuminating chronicle of both theater criticism and Canadian theater itself.

Beginning with O'Neill's study of theater criticism in Halifax and Toronto, 1826-1857, during which time journalism about the theater evolved from crass puffery to considered commentary--rudimentary as it sometimes was--Establishing Our Boundaries leads the reader through 1998. Central to this evaluative history are the writings of individual critics. 

Levine devotes his essay, "The Critic as Cultural Nationalist," to the study of critic Don Rubin, a New Yorker who moved to Canada and who developed, in Levine's words, "a vision of the critic as an active participant in the nurturing of talented artists that would eventually determine and characterize his distinctive contribution to the contemporary Canadian theatre."

Essayists Jennifer Harvie and Richard Paul Knowles analyze critic Herbert Whittaker's espousal of national culture and national spirit; Salter sheds light on the role critic H.W. Charlesworth played in Canadian cultural nationalism. Boundaries is a uniquely informing, always interesting, book on a universal subject: cultural identity and the forces that form and are influenced by it.

Establishing Our Boundaries: English-Canadian Theatre Criticism, Ed. by Anton Wagner, c. 1999, University of Toronto Press 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://artsservices.uwaterloo.ca/pipermail/candrama/attachments/20000212/fc3ba83f/attachment.html>