Herbert Whittaker. Setting the Stage: Montreal Theatre 1920-1949

Abstract

Herbert Whittaker's memoir of his life and work in the theatre in and around Montreal during the roaring twenties, dirty thirties, and world-warring forties is aptly titled. Although Whittaker is best known as having been a theatre critic with the Globe and Mail from 1949 to 1975, Setting the Stage covers the early, formative years of Whittaker's career as a critic with the Montreal Gazette (1937 to 1949) and as a director, thespian, and pioneer of English theatre in Montreal, while underscoring his work as a set designer. Whittaker's capacious and copiously detailed recollections are also clearly intended to set the stage for younger generations of theatre historians and researchers. Editor Jonathan Rittenhouse's afterward in this volume provides an immediate example of how the wealth of facts, descriptions, anecdotes, and observations that Whittaker supplied both encourages and requires a more distanced, abstracted perspective, as well as some theoretical reflection on the theatrical world view Whittaker inscribes.