How Could You, Mrs. Dick?

Terry Goldie is an associate professor of English at York University and
co-editor of An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English.

Playscripts generally serve three purposes: as scripts for production,
as reading material, and as sources for study. In recent years, the
latter two functions have become more prominent, supported by both
mainstream trade publishers and by Canadian drama’s old friend
Playwrights Canada.

How Could You, Mrs. Dick? raises a few questions about this process.
The play is based on a famous 1940s murder trial in Hamilton. As the
cover blurb states, “Evelyn MacLean, beautiful, pleasure-bent, flush
with dark family secrets and mysterious money, seduces 40-year-old
Mennonite bachelor John Dick.” His dismembered torso is the evidence,
but who did the killing?

As a carefully crafted whodunit, the play has been quite successful on
stage. It has good dialogue and enough theatrical games to keep the
audience’s interest. Yet those same elements also confuse the
reader’s understanding of the story. If the interest of the play is
the whodunit, the purpose would be better served by a history, a novel,
or even a straightforward chronicle play. As to the third function, the
only truly innovative dramatic element is the bleeding torso on stage,
but it hardly achieves the vitality effected by the coffin in Joe
Orton’s Loot. How Could You, Mrs. Dick? makes for a fun night at the
theatre, but it does not make for an interesting publication.