The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

niques borrowed from, or inspired by, the
popular culture with which these audiences
were familiar.
As Bessai herself points out in an introductory
section, however, most of the nonnaturalistic
and presentational techniques
employed by the company had been pioneered
earlier in the century by innovators
such as Erwin Piscator, Bertolt Brecht and
Joan Littlewood. What is it, then, that
makes a collectively created play unique? In
what significant way, for example, does
1837: The Farmers' Revolt differ from
Brecht's Artura Ui or Sharon Pollock's
Walsh 7 . Is it the case that "theatrical characterization"
differs from literary characterization?
And just how is the performer who
"writes on his feet" fundamentally different
from the author who writes on the usual
part of his anatomy?
Bessai is conscious of these problems, and
her analysis of several Theatre Passe
Muraille productions is a valiant attempt to
establish critical definitions and criteria for
what she claims is a unique genre. While I
myself do not find all of her arguments
equally compelling, I very much welcome
her detailed accounts of the evolution of
particular plays.
Somewhat less successful, in my opinion,
is her discussion of the playwrights influenced
by involvement in some of these productions.
Rick Salutin, who collaborated
on 183/: The Farmers' Revolt, John Gray,
who composed music for several TPM productions,
and Linda Griffiths, who worked
as an actor with Thompson, have all gone
on to produce successful works alone or in
collaboration. That these writers were
influenced by their contact with Thompson
is undoubtedly true. But to argue that this
somehow sets them apart as "playwrights
of collective creation" seems to me less convincing.
Bessai's suggestion, for example,
that Rick Salutin learned how to use stage
metaphors during his work with TPM, and
that the theatrical presentation of hockey as
history in Les Canadiens is a result seems to
me to oversimplify the creative process.
Similarly, the raconteur style and special
relationship to the audience which John
Gray used in Billy Bishop Goes to War are
not techniques peculiar to collective creation.
The difficulty of creating a "canon" of
these ephemeral works is confronted by
Helen Peters who has prepared an edition
of five of The Plays ofCodco. Peters has had
recourse to the tools of the new bibliography
in an effort to reconstruct works that
were designed for performance rather than
publication. She has produced carefully
line-numbered texts and an extensive apparatus
listing the variants she has found in
the sources consulted (audio cassettes,
videotapes, and written transcriptions).
The result is a rather solemn and reverential
entombment of the improvisational
spirit which one imagines would appeal
enormously to the company's sense of
humour.
It is a paradox of the theatre that the life
of the drama is in performance but its survival
depends on publication. Indeed it was
partly the lack of published Canadian plays
that prompted actors and directors to
resort to the techniques of collective creation
in the early 1970's. When it comes to
preserving the results of that creative
process, however, publication is a clumsy
method. Plays like those of Codco, which
depend heavily on the idiosyncratic pantomime
and regional accent of the original
performers, are very inadequately reproduced
in print. Since this is the only form
in which most of us are likely to know these
works, we are deeply indebted to editors
such as Peters for their painstaking efforts
at preservation. Nevertheless, it is a melancholy
fact that until some more satisfactory
method of recording the non-verbal characteristics
of collectively created productions
is devised (a videotape library
perhaps), much Canadian drama, like The