Robertson Davies, Playwright: A Search for the Self on the Canadian Stage

Elizabeth Stieg taught English in Toronto.

For some time now, Robertson Davies has been the focus of a great deal of critical and popular attention. Most of this attention has been directed toward the novels, particularly the Deptford Trilogy and, more recently, Rebel Angels. Yet, as Susan Stone-Blackburn points out, Davies’s career as a dramatist extends from the 1940s to the present, and “throughout his life... his passion for the theatre has been manifest” (p.3).

If Davies’s plays have largely been eclipsed by his novels, Stone-Blackburn’s thorough and enthusiastic study should go some distance toward restoring the balance. Her chronological treatment of the plays allows her to set them in the context of an emerging Canadian theatre and to examine the extent to which Davies’s writing was influenced by his experience of the production and reception of his plays.

The themes that concern Davies the playwright are, not surprisingly, those with which he is also concerned as a novelist. In both media he “emphasizes the necessity to liberate the passionate self which he feels the Canadian characteristically conceals” (p. 128). Thus in the early plays, such as A Jig for a Gypsy and King Phoenix, both the rationalist intellectual and the conventional bourgeois are contrasted unfavorably with characters who embrace the intuitive and emotional aspects of their being.

Davies’s “search for the self” is, ultimately, the search for wholeness fuelled by the belief that “acceptance of [the]... uncivilized features of the human being, is essential to self-fulfillment” (p.132). In what is for me the most interesting chapter of the book, Stone-Blackburn examines General Confession in the light of the Jungian quest for wholeness, identifying the play as “a dramatization of one stage in the process of psychic growth towards a whole individual in whom the conscious and unconscious co-exist harmoniously” (p. 137). Ironically, General Confession, which she terms “Davies’s dramatic masterpiece,” has never been produced, and she suggests that “it may be the neglected masterpiece of Canadian theatre” (p.151).

Stone-Blackburn concludes by asserting that Davies’s plays, “written in the decades during which Canadian drama grew to maturity, give dramatic expression to a wise and witty man’s search...for himself” (p.227). In charting the dimensions and significance of that search, she has rendered an important service both to Davies and to his readers.