Collective Encounters: Documentary Theatre in English Canada

David E. Kemp is a drama professor at Queen’s University and the
author of The Pleasures and Treasures of the United Kingdom.

Alan Filewod’s excellent book examines what has been one of Canada’s strongest cultural institutions of the last two decades — alternative theatre.

Filewod examines the growth of an important dramatic genre, the collectively created documentary play. Of tremendous importance during the late 1960s, the development of the documentary drama in Canada coincided with a major revival of cultural nationalism, and the publication of this book is indeed most timely when one considers the severe pressures that could be exerted on Canadian culture with the implementation of the Free Trade Agreement with the United States.

The collectively created documentary play was typically inspired by a distinctive community or a political issue; most plays began with a group of actors researching a specific issue on community and ended with a performance aimed at a specific audience. Essentially populist in nature, many of the works thus created became some of the best known and seen plays ever staged in Canada.

Alan Filewod examines, in detail, six landmark creations which deal with different aspects of the documentary drama. He explores the wide range of social, political, and cultural issues which inspired the creations and assesses their impact on their respective theatres and their role in Canada’s cultural development.

After an opening chapter which examines the evolution of documentary theatre in Canada, Filewod focuses on what was the first, and in some ways the most significant, of Canadian documentary creations — Theatre Passe Muraille’s The Farm Show. Directed by Paul Thompson, The Farm Show enabled the actors to analyse the community from within and the experiment was “a blueprint of how to do something in a place where nothing had been done.” It was The Farm Show in 1972 that initiated the dominant form of Canadian documentary. In 1974 Toronto Workshop Productions opened its adaptation of Barry Broadfoot’s Ten Lost Years, an anthology of oral memories of the Great Depression which was to become one of the most successful productions in the history of Canadian theatre. But Filewod does not confine his examination to Ontario. In a lively, insightful, and scholarly way he also focuses, in subsequent chapters, on Regina’s Globe Theatre production of No. 1 Hard, Saskatoon’s 25th Street Theatre’s production of Paper Wheat, Newfoundland’s Mummers Troup production of Buchans: A Mining Town, and Edmonton’s Catalyst Theatre production of It’s About Time.

The six plays examined in this book represent the major directions documentary theatre has followed in Canada but they are by no means the only productions Filewod examines. In this wide-ranging and perceptive study the author establishes the common patterns and growth of this most vivid and Canadian form of dramatic expression and also analyzes its significance within the broader theatrical mosaic.