In Review: Somewhere Else, The East End Plays, Part 2, Suburban Motel (revised edition), Essays on George F. Walker: Playing with Anxiety

Abstract

Historiographically, 1999 was a big year for George F. Walker: Talonbooks brought out three volumes of collected plays (a total of thirteen more-or-less individual works), and Blizzard published the first full-length book of criticism devoted entirely to Walker and his plays. By the time the new millennium became the most over-staged non-event in history, students and teachers of Canadian drama did not have to look too far to find a playwright with a significant historical past and presence available for inclusion in their courses. This at a time when our political-economic climate does not particularly favour indigenous publishing of Canadian literature, with government funding policies that clearly prefer to put their trust in the cultural benevolence of the huge American publishers. The odds are stacked even further against dramatic literature: as Maria Campbell argues in the introduction to The Book of Jessica, “Who reads plays, anyway?” and certainly plays and criticism tend to have a considerably lower shelf and reader appeal than does literature. Even given the reasonably strong (if not solid) positions that Blizzard and Talon have fought to establish within Canadian (dramatic) publishing, this focus on one playwright is somewhat remarkable. To paraphrase from Walker’s own dialogue, if “there is definitely hardly any justice in the world,” is there any discernible reason why Walker is among the “haves,” rather than the “have-nots,” when it comes to published texts? Do the plays of George F. Walker, indeed, have a “special quality that can be marketed,” or are these four volumes just evidence of Walker’s own good luck?