Dog and Crow

Ian C. Nelson is Assistant Director of Libraries, University of
Saskatchewan; and Director, Saskatoon Gateway Plays, Regina Summer
Stage, and La Troupe du Jour.

Springate has been artistic director of the Playwrights Theatre Workshop
in Montreal and has been associated with work at the Necessary Angel
Theatre in Toronto (where Dog and Crow was first presented, in January
1988) and a number of experimental theatre companies (Montreal
Improvisational Theatre; Painted Bird Theatre; Le Nouveau Théвtre
Anglais de Montréal) indeed were founded by him. He is a dramaturge of
some repute—called in to workshop scripts at the Saskatchewan
Playwrights Centre, for instance—and a teacher (with the theatre
faculty of Concordia University). As a director, he has interpreted
plays by Mishima, Beckett, Shakespeare, Stoppard, and Bьchner.

Dog and Crow puts on the stage Ezra Pound and his British wife Dorothy,
Benito Mussolini and his mistress Claretta, and several Italian peasants
and communist organizers. The play is put together as a series of
historical scenes from the early 1930s to Il Duce’s defeat and
execution and Pound’s postwar incarceration in an asylum for the
insane. The scenes are short exchanges of thought and political attitude
in free verse, occasionally sparked with wit or tinged with pathos, but
seldom with any dramatic movement. The chronology is linear, with
vaguely parallel scenes between each set of players and two short
occasions of meeting. Most of the dialogue is taken up with expounding
the Fascist ideological position as an argument of each man with his
partner. The course of history itself provides the only gloss of
commentary or judgment.

This is a play in which the whole is rather less than the sum of the
parts. In other words, the author might well have crafted the
peasants’ story into an interesting piece with perhaps only a
peripheral view of Pound and Mussolini for context. Alas, as it stands,
the major figures take over, but not enough to make the play entirely
theirs. The final scene, with Pound institutionalized, is quite touching
but is fatally undermined by the polemic that has preceded it.

Several critics have noted a similarity between Springate’s Dog and
Crow and Krizanc’s Tamara. All have noted the superiority of the
latter.