The Theatre of Form and the Production of Meaning: Contemporary Canadian Dramaturgies

Abstract

The Theatre of Form is a welcome addition to the small library of books devoted to historical and critical analysis of contemporary English-Canadian theatre – books such as Diane Bessai’s Playwrights of Collective Creation, Alan Filewod’s Collective Encounters: Documentary Theatre in English Canada and Robert Wallace’s Producing Marginality: Theatre and Criticism in Canada. This book distills – potently – an argument about theatre that Knowles has been developing for a long time. This argument is about the relation of the arts to history and society, an argument that applies with special force to theatre. It goes roughly like this: the arts do not exist in a transcendent realm apart from society; there is always a complex relation between art and the social formation in which it is produced. Art is indeed not created out of the empyrean but produced out of the raw material of ideology and social practice. Art may reproduce and hence reinforce ideology, enhancing its aura of naturalness and inevitability; it may negotiate a place for a broader range of social realities than is normally permissible; it may render visible “the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and to which it alludes” (Althusser 204); it may subvert ideology from within its own terms; it may allude to counter-ideologies and thus actively produce certain elements of counter-hegemony with practical consequences in the social formation.