The Buried Astrolabe: Canadian Dramatic Imagination and Western Tradition

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

Craig Walker is an associate professor of drama at Queen’s University.
He has worked at the Stratford and Shaw Festivals as an actor and is
artistic director of Theatre Kingston. The Buried Astrolabe is the most
important book of Canadian dramatic criticism to be published in the
last 20 years. Drawing on a wide range of writers and thinkers from both
Europe and North America, Walker explains how Canadian drama has
developed from Western European philosophical, literary, and dramatic
traditions. He significantly deepens our understanding of Canadian drama
by focusing on the work of six of Canada’s leading playwrights: James
Reaney, born in the 1920s; Michael Cook and Sharon Pollock, born in the
1930s; Michel Tremblay and George F. Walker (1940s); and Judith Thompson
(1950s). With the playwrights’ respective sensibilities spanning four
decades, Walker is able to tie aesthetic sensibility to changes in
Canadian culture generally over a period and relate both to the
development of Canadian dramaturgy as a whole.

Canadian playwrights have struggled, Walker writes, “[to] establish a
mythopoeic context within which a dramatic imagination could reconfigure
Canadian experience in its own image rather than a conspicuously
borrowed disguise.” What Walker does in this scholarly tour de force
is show that there is, indeed, a national drama that has transcended
aspects of European culture and is essentially unique to our culture.