The Scenic Art

Gerald Noonan was Associate Professor of English at Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, and co-editor of A Public and Private Voice.

Hugh Hood’s Proustian re-creation of the Goderich genealogy takes a turn for the dramatic in this, the fifth of his projected twelve-part New Age epic. Protagonist Matt Goderich, out of Toronto’s Summerhill area of the ‘30s and out of four previous novels (The Swing in the Garden, A New Athens, Reservoir Ravine, and Black and White Keys), relates his association with Hart House drama, the genesis of the Stratford Festival, British theatre, and a climactic centennial extravaganza in eastern Ontario’s fictional Stoverville.

What is related is fascinating and convincingly authentic, an insider’s observations on the magic and reality of theatre. What is correlated is probably more important; the emergence of modern Canadian theatre is aligned with the shaping of contemporary Canadian consciousness.

Hood’s remembrance, and examination, of Canada’s past is here infused with great verve and vigour, in part, undoubtedly, because his protagonist is manipulating the building blocks and cornerstones, in fact, of our present-day culture. It’s a story, and history, largely untold, a comprehensive saga that includes the era of Robert Gill at Hart House; Crest Theatre; the tent-tilting, culture titillation of Stratford; the success of ex-patriates in England and Hollywood in movies and TV; and, as a finale, a merger of Canadian government, business, and art which Hood escalates into a panorama writ large on the bricks of Stoverville in 1967. Pearson and Trudeau make cameo appearances. A Calgary little-theatre group does “Who Has Seen the Wind?” and a Montreal group does a token French-language production that infuriates the adjudicator.

Matt Goderich is a practised observer of the passing scene (almost as practised as Hugh Hood), and his comment is salty and assumed. He will speculate on the natural national interest in watching TV’s Hockey Night in Canada, and the natural lack of interest in watching ballet, “the flower of that most repellent of societies, late Czarist Russia” and the way “of tortured metatarsals and anorexia.” In imagining an ideal repertoire for a summer program, Goderich puts Chekhov’s drama ahead of James Reaney and others such as Rick Salutin and Michel Tremblay, because the evocation of Russian provincial life “happens to describe eastern Ontario with great exactitude.” As for Shaw and his associated staging problems: “Nobody can get through Man and Superman comfortably without peeing twice.”

At one point in the novel, it is said of Matt’s brother Tony, a novelist, that he had broken through to become “the outrageous one ... the flouter of convention.” Hood flouted some conventions of fiction in the earlier novels in this series, and some readers felt the rewards were mainly private fare. Here Hood is dealing with mass entertainment, cultural independence, and the workings and history of theatre in our own time. The range and appeal have broadened considerably.

At the end, there’s rather abrupt news that Matt’s father is going to become Canada’s trade and diplomacy representative in China. Can that be the scene of the next volume in the New Age? Will Hugh Hood wax oriental — or merely political? For answers: stay tuned; watch this space.