Contemporary Canadian Theatre: New World Visions

Alexander Craig is a freelance journalist in Lennoxville, Quebec.

Obviously, a lot of thought and effort has gone into preparing and publishing this book. It starts, appropriately enough, with six writers providing chapters on different aspects of government and cultural expression. This is followed by various articles on theatre and drama across Canada, and sections on the “electronic media,” the “Canadian performing arts mosaic,” and the “emergence of the theatre professional.”

There is a lot of reading here. In his introduction, Wagner states: “the thirty-four essays which follow attempt to analyze the cultural environment in which Canadians have created theatre, drama, opera, and dance in various regions of the country and how their art has been disseminated to the public.” He then identifies the aim of these essays: “to trace the efforts of our theatre artists to create a distinctive Canadian dramatic speech, characters, themes, and a unifying historical-mythic background in place of the former European and American literary forms and dramatic styles which dominated our stages and our playwrights’ consciousness.”

This is an ambitious book. Generally the pieces are very well written — which befits a book prepared by the Canadian Theatre Critics Association. There are a lot of good illustrations, charts, plans and photos, and a 24-page bibliography. The editor, a native of Austria, and a banded-immigrant since 1969, wrote his doctoral dissertation at the University of Toronto’s Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama.

Yet, for whom is this book written? The working arts professional, one guesses. The cultural industries are said to be big employers in Canada. It is only to be hoped that this book sells as well as it deserves to.