Shared Anxiety: The Selected Plays of George F Walker

David E. Kemp is chair of the Drama Department at Queen’s University
and the author of The Pleasures and Treasures of the United Kingdom.

George F. Walker is one of Canada’s most successful anglophone
playwrights. Lively, inventive, and wholly original, Walker can portray
with absolute conviction the insane, out-of-control, and dysfunctional
world in which we live. Walker has an acute eye for the ridiculous and
the absurd, and he writes with a wonderful frankness and élan. This
landmark collection of his plays, spanning two decades (1974-94), is
both timely and welcome.

Included in the collection are Beyond Mozambique, in which Walker
explores the mania of obsession; Zastrozzi: The Master of Discipline, a
metaphysical melodrama; Theatre of the Film Noir; The Art of War, about
a journalist turned sleuth; Criminals in Love, a comic tour de force;
Better Living and Escape from Happiness, which both deal with the social
and domestic interactions of individuals and groups living in
working-class urban settings; and the intellectually challenging Tough.

These plays tell us something of a writer who has won six Chalmers
Awards, four Dora Mavor Moore Awards—and two Governor General’s
Awards, who is a writer widely produced, widely translated, and at the
height of his creative powers. Shared Anxiety is a volume that no one
interested in Canadian theatre can afford to be without.