Hoffman, James

English

University of New Brunswick: Centre for Digital Scholarship Journals

BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS260 PP 260-268 • 2017 / 38.2 • TRIC / RTACKAILIN WRIGHT, ed.The God of Gods: A Canadian Play By Carroll Aikins: A Critical Edition. University of Ottawa Press, 2016. 138 pp. JAMES HOFFMANProblematical in contemporary Canadian theatre critique is the considerable archive ofplays written before the mid-twentieth century—particularly those whose subjects seemto be politically intolerable. Why bring back, for example, a hundred-year old “noblesavage” play that might be dismissed as merely inauthentic, even racist, by today’s stan-dards? Certainly such avoidance silences a remarkably fruitful body of early performanceendeavour and consequently limits full and necessary expression of current historical andtheatrical discourse.More than ever now, with the bourgeoning in Canadian drama and criticism, we needto bring forward selected works from the modernist archive, works culturally significantin their day and capable of meaningfully engaging with present theatrical discussion. Asfor intolerance, we might benefit from demonstrating something of what John Fletcher,in his article “Sympathy for the Devil,” has called “critical generosity—avowed sympathywith the causes of one’s subjects” (210).The key is to accompany these early works with balanced historical analysis and inter-rogation that carefully enunciates contextual linkages between past and present. Such aproject, and a very good one it is, is the recent publication of The God of Gods: A CanadianPlay, edited by Kailin Wright. This is a critical edition of a play written by Carroll Aikinsthat premiered at England’s Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1919, was followed by aremount there in 1920, then played at Hart House Theatre in Toronto in 1922 and revivedat London’s Everyman Theatre in 1931. British commentators used words such as “rareartistic delicacy” and “first drama written by a Canadian to be presented in England,” whileCanadian critic Hector Charlesworth called it “a fairly good start for the Canadian drama”when it played in Toronto.The book is a publication of the University of Ottawa Press in its CanadianLiterature Collection, a series of critical editions of nineteenth-to-mid-twentiethcentury literary texts that are out of print or unpublished (also included and relevant:Oscar Ryan’s Eight Men Speak, edited by Alan Filewod, and Bertram Brooker’s The WrongWorld: Selected Stories and Essays, edited by Gregory Betts). All are ventures of EditingModernism in Canada, a collaborative assembly of mainly Canadian researchers whopublish critical editions of modernist Canadian works, a group that Wright acknowl-edges for their editorial assistance. Wright has assembled a robust package of scholarly materials to enhance the re-publi-cation of the play. Along with a general introduction to Aikins outlining his theatricalachievement—he wrote other plays and operated a theatre school in an up-to-date arttheatre building on his fruit farm near Naramata, BC—there are scene-by-scene annota-tions of the set designs, performance variants, as well as character and line explications,TRiC38#2x13.qxp_TRiC'16  2017-11-02  3:57 PM  Page 260plus many useful cultural perspectives. One of these presents evidence that Aikins mayhave based textual details on the Syilx People of the local Okanagan area.Also included are textual notes elucidating the variants of the text—and indeed thetitle of the play as it appeared in the three cities of its four productions. Finally, there is adossier of reviews and photocopied playbills, all amounting to a wealth of primaryevidence, textual and visual, for determining the impact of the play in its early twentieth-century appearances—notably distinguishing the mixed critical reception between theproductions, from its generally appreciated premiere in Birmingham (“Magic at theEmpire”) to sceptical reception in Toronto (“curiously uneven”) and London (“a charade”)—as well as proposing its place in present critical landscapes.  Wright admits that her effort is somewhat of a salvage project as she struggles toaccount for the play’s success, especially given the nagging issues recognized even by manyearly commentators: its uncertain ethnographies, faux language, reductive characteriza-tions, ever changing musical scores, and vague stage settings. The critical strength of thebook is her well-outlined apparatus, a modernist take on the play as a self-reflexiveaesthetic. This is expressed mainly through the “onstage artist-audience figure” of the char-acter Yellow Snake, a “singer” who both participates in the action and also observes it froma privileged vantage point, effectively critiquing the social context while poetically formu-lating a mythic, superior world. As for the mise-en-scène, The God of Gods, in its general lackof specificity, left plenty of room for creativity, in effect allowing elements of theatricalexpressionism in its acting, lighting, and scenery (costuming choices, cyclorama effects,abstracted settings). Wright makes the claim that Aikins utilized the innovative work of1920s Soviet Russian agitprop theatre as well as anticipated the 1930s Canadian multi-media work of Herman Voaden’s symphonic expressionism.Further to the thesis that Aikins was innovative and anticipated modernist forms, theplay dramatizes a particular philosophical motif. Aikins, like many of his contemporariesworking in the arts in the 1920s, was a theosophist1, believing in the high ideals of toleranceand equality, especially pertaining to matters of religion and cultural practice. Thus YellowSnake poetically articulates a utopian place he calls Hidden Water and proposes to takeSuiva, the female protagonist, there as his partner, while simultaneously, and dangerously,revealing the “tribe’s” crass materialism and religious worship of a false idol—thus leadingto the melodramatic deaths of the two lovers.In an extended discussion of primitivism, Wright accounts for the superficiality ofmany of the production elements, both the dramaturgical and the staged, as gesturing“towards the artificiality and theatricality of the audience’s own culture” (xxiv). Thus autopian past critiques a dystopian present. A concluding discussion titled “AdaptingNietzsche” is provocative in suggesting that the play be seen as Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerkmarshalling sundry art forms to represent, finally, the clash between Apollonian andDionysian forces. Yellow Snake could thus be seen as a kind of intuitive, Nietzscheansuperman, an artist-lover-prophet who declares a possible resolution between communityand landscape, humankind and nature, becoming, as such, the true god of gods.Illuminating history, an excellent gloss, provocative thoughts, all very well stated:Wright has indeed made The God of Gods a highly readable, and necessary, “rich subject ofinquiry.”TRIC / RTAC •  38.2 / 2017  •  PP 260-268219261BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUSTRiC38#2x13.qxp_TRiC'16  2017-11-02  3:57 PM  Page 261Notes1  In her Introduction, Wright explains how the Canadian Theosophical Society placed “emphasison ‘Truth’ and ‘tolerance to all’” and demonstrates how The God of Gods “dramatizes these keytheosophical tenets: the play’s central characters perform monologues on tolerance and discov-eries of religious truths—or untruths, as the female protagonist (Suiva) realizes that the commu-nity’s religious idol offers little more than stage tricks” (xxi).Works CitedFletcher, John. “Sympathy for the Devil: Nonprogressive Activism and the Limits of CriticalGenerosity.” Theatre Historiography: Critical Interventions. Ed. Henry Bial and Scott Magelssen.Ann Abor: University of Michigan P, 2010.NICOLE NOLETTEJouer la Traduction: Théâtre et hétérolinguisme au Canadafrancophone University of Ottawa Press, 2015. 296 pp.ALISON BOWIEThere is something playful and ironic about writing a review of a book dedicated to the studyof heterolingualism and translation in a different language from that of the manuscript. Suchis the case with this review of Nicole Nolette’s Jouer la traduction: Théâtre et hétérolinguisme auCanada francophone, which focusses on contemporary theatrical texts in French Canadaoutside of Québec that encounter or create difference, and are written and performed inlinguistic otherness. In particular, Nolette focusses on texts in translation, specifically inves-tigating the notion of la traduction ludique. While Nolette chooses not offer a specific, concisedefinition of this term, she articulates the qualities of play and playfulness that exist withinthe medium of traduction ludique, and, citing Mathieu Guidère’s play theory, parallels the roleof the actor with the role of translator. Specifically looking at translation in theatre, Noletteexplains that, “La traduction ludique telle qu’elle se manifeste dans le théâtre franco-canadienhétérolingue relève de ce plaisir (ou playsir) du jeu, que ce soit celui entre les langues ou celuides possibles de la représentation théâtrale” (19). For Nolette, translative play is more thanwordplay or code mixing; traduction ludique is meta-theatrical, beyond the visual and spokenlanguages of the characters, and layered, offering a different experience to those who under-stand one or the other language, or both. Nolette carefully and thoughtfully engages in dialogue with Derrida and Bhabha, iden-tifying the double codedness of both cultural and linguistic translation. She explains that,“la traduction ludique met stratégiquement en place des espaces d’hybridation et de supplé-mentarité aux frontières poreuses, instables et dynamiques” (23). In her book TraverserMontréal : Une histoire culturelle par la traduction, Sherry Simon, whose work is prominentlyfeatured in Nolette’s study, describes cities as sites of translation that are constantly inBOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS262 PP 260-268 • 2017 / 38.2 • TRIC / RTACTRiC38#2x13.qxp_TRiC'16  2017-11-02  3:57 PM  Page 262

KAILIN WRIGHT, ed. The God of Gods: A Canadian
     Play By Carroll Aikins: A Critical Edition. University of
     Ottawa Press, 2016. 138 pp.

https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/TRIC/article/download/25902/30089

KAILIN WRIGHT, ed. The God of Gods: A Canadian Play By Carroll Aikins: A Critical Edition. University of Ottawa Press, 2016. 138 pp.

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

University of New Brunswick: Centre for Digital Scholarship Journals