Establishing Our Boundaries: English-Canadian Theatre Criticism

James Noonan, an adjunct professor of English at Carleton University, is
the author of Biography and Autobiography: Essays on Irish and Canadian
History and Literature.

Establishing Our Boundaries is a critique of English-Canadian theatre
criticism from the 18th through the 20th century by some of the best
theatre historians in Canada. It is also a valuable survey of Canadian
culture and nationalism at crucial points in the nation’s history.

The book is divided into five sections: an introduction by the editor;
a chapter on editor-critics, 1826–1857; two chapters on
reviewer-critics in Toronto and Winnipeg, 1876–1906; nine chapters on
cultural nationalism (the longest section, from the 1890s to the 1980s);
and five chapters on critics in the postnationalist period, which
overlaps with the last two decades of the previous period and continues
through the 1990s.

The 18 chapters are well researched and carefully annotated by the 17
contributors. Prominent theatre critics in each era are analyzed in
detail and with much insight. Anton Wagner’s 56-page introduction is
broad and comprehensive, bringing together the various strands of all
the other essays in an overview of theatre criticism in Canada’s past.


The writers surveyed in the book are surely an impressive group of
theatre critics in English Canada’s history. They wrote for newspapers
and magazines in Toronto, Halifax, Winnipeg, Montreal, Calgary, and
Vancouver, including Saturday Night, Southam News Service, Canadian
Theatre Review, and the Canadian Tribune. Understandably, several wrote
for The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star. Yet one wishes that the
book’s boundaries were broader and that they included critics from
more regions of Canada. Some coverage of critics in, for example,
Ottawa, Edmonton, Saint John, and St. John’s would widen the book’s
scope.

Still, Establishing Our Boundaries is a major achievement by a devoted
editor and the other scholarly contributors. One among the many probing
questions Wagner raises is “[W]ill theatre criticism once more become
mere journalistic reporting for increasingly fragmented audiences?”
Should this be Canada’s sad fate, we have in this book a valuable and
enduring record of how literate and varied this criticism was for 172
years.