Sharon Pollock: Essays on her Works ed. by Anne F. Nothof

ESC 28, 2002 Anne F. Nothof, ed. Sharon Pollock: Essays on her Works. To­ ronto: Guernica, 2000. 192. $12.00 paper. If there is one area of English-Canadian cultural studies that deserves more attention than it receives, it is drama. Too often plays are left out of our curricula, neglected by our critics, and marginalized in our academic conferences, both at home and abroad. And, as playwrights themselves will tell you, EnglishCanadian plays still find it difficult to receive main stage pro­ ductions. Different people will offer different reasons for why this is so — plays live only in performance, not in published texts; plays are expensive, and anthologies will only repay their cost when used in drama courses; Canadian plays are depress­ ing or not as good as American or British plays; they are poorly marketed abroad, or not produced on foreign stages, or not translated. It is not the playwrights who are to blame for this state of affairs: for the past fifty years this country has been blessed with a number of seasoned playwrights and steadily emerging talents. Part of the blame lies, I am convinced, with the paucity o f books like the one I am reviewing here. Sharon Pollock: Es­ says on her Works is the first book-length collection of critical essays on one of English Canada’s leading senior playwrights. We need similar collections for other important playwrights, and we need biographies (Hoffman’s biography of Ryga is an exception), as well as the anthologies and theatre history stud­ ies that are already available. This book on Pollock’s work addresses a serious lack, and for this reason alone I am exceedingly happy to have it. Anne Nothof has included eight fine essays, together with her May 1999 interview of Pollock, and she has prepared a biographical sketch and a bibliography. Her brief introduction provides an overview of the Pollock oeuvre and touches several of the estab­ lished critical bases for evaluation of the work: Pollock’s lasting interest in Canadian history, her desire to probe ideologies of race, class, and gender, her fascination with the figure of the artist, and her breadth of experience in the theatre. Nothof con­ cludes her introduction by reminding readers that many years ago, veteran theatre scholar Robert Nunn described Pollock as 316 REVIEWS “Canada’s answer to Ibsen” (10). And the essays she has in­ cluded in this volume confirm the wisdom of Nunn’s remark. Seven of the eight essays are reprints spanning twenty years of critical discussion. Malcolm Page’s “Sharon Pollock: Com­ mitted Playwright” set the stage for much that has been writ­ ten about Pollock’s work since 1979, when this study first ap­ peared. Page examines her earliest work, including the radio plays, and identifies Walsh and The Komagata Maru Incident as important historical plays, and he notes a perceptible shift to feminist issues in plays like Blood Relations. Writing five years later, Robert Nunn returns to the earlier work but focuses most of his attention on Blood Relations. Nunn remarks on a quality that might be overlooked if one limits attention too rigidly to performance, and that quality is the power of Pollock’s writing. He describes the dialogue as rich and spare, and insists that the text of Blood Relations is so close to perfect that it could not be cut in any way. Such praise for the basic writing is rare, but I would argue that the excellence of the writing has come to define Pollock’s work. Her plays not only work in performance; they also read well and reward literary study. Diane Bessai’s “Sharon Pollock’s Women” is a groundbreak­ ing study of Pollock’s emerging feminism and of the women in her plays up to Doc (1984) and Whiskey Six Cadenza (1987). Bessai also provides one of the few sustained examinations to date of the latter play and of Pollock’s portrayal of her charac­ ters’ demands for freedom. No critic writing about Pollock since Bessai can afford to disregard what she has to say about issues that continue to preoccupy the playwright. But a certain prefer­ ence among Pollock’s critics becomes clear...

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