Performing Canada: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre (review)

Abstract

430Comparative Drama aged fifty-eight, played Regan, Queen Katherine, Portia (Julius Caesar), and replaced PeggyAshcroft as Beatrice.Although her stage career ended in 1970,she did filmworkthereafter.Herlast rolewas die dowager in a Conan Doyle adaption for television in 1992, aired less than a month before herdeath at the age of 101. Forever Juliet is published by Larks Press, a small operation, devoted to works by East Anglian authors or books dealing with the region. Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies qualifies because ofher cottage in Essex,boughtjointly with Marda Vanne in 1934 and her home during retirement until her death in 1992. The Press has the exemplary goal of publishing at affordable prices. At £9.50 this bookisworth its price for the photographs alone,the publicity shots forthe plays in which Gwen starred as well as snapshots with friends and acquaintances . Ranging from Thomas Hardy to Ivor Novello and her many co-stars, the photos suggest the range ofher friendships. My favorite photos are those taken with Nigel Hawthorne at Tagley Cottage. Hawthorne, who seems to have been the moving spirit behind the production of a retrospective on Gwen's career, acted as presenter for the 1988 award-winning Omnibus program aired by the BBC. Martial Rose is tobe thanked forselecting from the Ffangcon-Davies archive so much fascinating material. Forever Juliet is, in a sense, its own "omnibus." Ann Eljenholm Nichols Winona, Minnesota Alan Filewod. Performing Canada: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre.Textual Studiesin Canada.Kamloops,B.C: UniversityCollegeoftheCaribooPrintServices,2002.$12.00 (Canadian). Performing Canada: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre is a series of five extended and disparate essays contextualized by an introduction and conclusion that enact Filewod's critical preoccupations. In his typically iconoclastic style,he challenges the pervasive critical interpretation ofthe"development" of Canadian drama as a seamless narrative accompanying the political and cultural growth ofthe country. Instead ofan historical overview, Filewodjuxtaposes radically different "case studies," affording variant ways of considering the slippery notion of theater as an expression ofwhat he terms the "totalizing ideologies of Canadian society" (16). For Filewod, theater has an inherently political significance: "it transforms experience into a community narrative; Reviews431 and it materially constructs in the audience the community it addresses in its texts" (xvii). In die introduction Filewod boldly proposes his intention to offer"a radical rethinking of the conceptual foundations of Canadian theatre, and, by extension , the Canadian nation which that theatre performs. At the same time, [he] attempts to reconceive the critical norms through which the theatre has been understood" (x). His argument is that "Canadian nationhood is a constantly changing historical performance enacted in an imagined theatre" (x). But on this unstable ground,Filewod erects an elegant,complex,and imaginative critical structure, which resists generalized summary. He scrutinizes theoretical theatrical vocabulary and points to its complicity with the imagined construction of a "national identity."And beginning at the beginning he illustrates the precarious nature of such an enterprise by pointing to the conventionally accepted origins ofCanadian drama in Marc Lescarbot's The Theatre ofNeptune in New France, purportedly performed on the shores of the Bay of Fundy in 1606 by French explorers and"savages"to welcome backto Port Royal the Sieur de Poutrincourt. Filewod questions the accuracy and authenticity of this important historic moment, including the inclusion of aboriginals in the performance , as represented in an iconic illustration by CW. Jefferys in 1942. He also locates the event in a wider theatrical context—that of the court masque, which celebrated and reified authority through elaborate spectacle. For Filewod, the political implications ofthis imperial appropriation are chilling: In this moment of racial impersonation and colonial masquerade, Lescarbot had claimed the new world in a newwayby enlisting the spectating bodies and appropriated voices of its inhabitants in his imagined theatre, and he had established the principle that the colonialism of spectacle is the necessary precondition of imperial invasion. As an intellectual ofthe new humanism, he could not foresee that the colonizing of the cultural imaginary is also a precondition of genocide, (xv) In the following chapters, Filewod examines four formative stages of English Canadian theater: the nineteenth-century"literary" and closet dramas ofCharles Mair and Sarah Anne Curzon...