At My Heart's Core and Overlaid

R. Kerry White is the director of theatre arts at Laurentian University.

Simon & Pierre has issued an attractive new volume of the two “old
chestnuts” of the Canadian theatre by Davies. The immediate question
is, why? True, such plays are difficult to obtain, and true, these two
plays are of genuine interest to students of early–1950’s theatre in
Canada, but are they so relevant to today’s theatre that republishing
is worthwhile?

The book contains a list of the first productions of Davies’s plays;
a brief biography, which inexplicably stops short at Manticore (1973); a
short introduction by Davies on the “theatricality” of the two
plays; and a one-and-a-half-page essay on “Our Changing Speech” by
Herbert Whittaker. It is this last piece that provides a clue to the
justification for republishing. Whittaker, in effect, states that this
new volume is an important document in Canadian social history because
Davies’s evocations of early Canadian speech patterns are valuable as
records. What the plays actually do, however, is evoke the perspective
of a white anglophone writing in the 1950s. From a postmodern
perspective, such works cry out for the long knives of deconstruction.