Re: Producing Women's Dramatic History. D.A. Hadfield
For women preferring or able to work within this form, their gender could actually be a marketable asset, in the same way that being identified as “Canadian” was valued during the quest for a national theatrical identity. Women like Sharon Pollock and Judith Thompson, for example, became hot theatrical properties in the 1980s because they were able and willing to work within fairly traditional structures. Carol Bolt paraphrases Pollock’s claim that “we were both really lucky because when we started writing, theatres could produce our plays and get both a Canadian and a woman in their season in one shot! . . . That was part of our ‘charm’”2 (Rudakoff and Much 188). Even Thompson herself admits that “[i]t’s probably been easier for me being a woman playwright because many theatres like to say they’re producing women’s plays” (Rudakoff and Much 102).
Judith Thompson has been a firm believer in the efficacy of the margins, as she revealed in a 1990 interview: “Seated on an overstuffed sofa in the Tarragon’s ‘green room,’ the 36-year-old playwright talks animatedly about the importance of remaining outside the mainstream and avoiding complacency. ‘Once an artist loses that hunger—not that I’m in danger of losing it economically,’ she adds ironically—‘the best part of their urge to create . . . that struggle . . . that sense of imbalance, just dissolves” (Rafelman, ellipsis in original). Yet she immediately balances the edginess of the margins with the recognition that “it is wonderful to be able to reach so many people,” an opportunity that working in the centre presents in greater numbers. When Christopher Newton invited Judith Thompson to guest direct a production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler for the Shaw Festival’s 1991 season, it could be seen as an indication that the mainstream might at least be ready for Thompson’s kind of feminism—or that Thompson felt herself ready for the mainstream. Or, that she “wanted to direct because . . . [she] needed the money” equally as much as she “wanted to adapt the play and get inside the body of an Ibsen play” (letter 15 January 1998): the political value of the margins eventually had to bow to the economic advantages of the mainstream.
Judith Thompson has at times been relatively unabashed about the “masculinity” of her playwriting style, and the issues of power it engages. She does not do collective creations; hers is a scripted theatre, and the script is hers: “[Some feminists] think it’s somehow fascistic to set up the word as king and then have the actors serve the word. I don’t see it that way at all” (Tomc 18). She writes plays—rather than fiction or poetry—as a deliberate appropriation of public power. Early in her career, she characterized playwriting as a masculine genre that operates by “penetrating the audience” (Tomc 18), and Thompson enjoys using that type of power to force her audiences into moments of recognition about themselves.3 Thompson’s relationship with the scripted word functions as a double access-point to the very centre of mainstream theatre where the Shaw Festival plays. More than just a signal that she accepts the traditional representational structure that operates in making theatre, her preference for working through texts has allowed her to attain the very publicly visible profile and reputation that would qualify her to work at the Shaw Festival. Because her plays leave behind publishable and reproducible texts, Thompson offers few difficulties for the politics of historiographical representation, which has allowed her to establish a credible reputation as a dramatic author. Thompson has achieved her considerable success in Canadian theatre by “playing a man’s game,” and playing it well. She is currently about as canonical as a contemporary Canadian playwright can be: her name sells out houses, her plays appear in volumes and anthologies, and they are regularly included in university (sometimes even high school) curricula.4 Productions of her new plays usually merit reviews across the country. She has an entry in Who’s Who. In an arena where most of the main players are men, Judith Thompson is a very visible woman. If Thompson could successfully navigate the theatrical mainstream without compromising the fairly moderate feminism inherent in her presence and her production, perhaps it would indicate that the possibility of a nonconfrontational engagement between feminism and traditional theatre had arrived.
Yet, Thompson would no doubt be the first to agree with Zimmerman that the first lesson a feminist playwright must learn is that to write the play is just the beginning. Within the terms of theatrical production, Barbara Godard implicitly reframes the issue of whose authority controls representation and shapes reception when she raises questions about the reasons for and implications of the movement in Quebec theatre that has seen women apparently trade visibility on stage for “success behind the scene” (“Between” 21) as directors. Judith Thompson would be quick to point out that, in English-Canadian theatrical practice at least, it is the director who wields the greatest authority in terms of shaping a representation, more powerful than the writer, and certainly more powerful than the actresses he blocks. For Thompson, this ascendancy of the director has profoundly feminist ramifications: “This development is, of course, a clear reflection of a deeply patriarchal society feeling threatened by all that is female and baring its teeth. The writer, I believe, is a female force. . .. The writer gives birth to the work and the director, like society, shapes the newborn, making it a supposedly coherent, hard-hitting and palatable creature with his stamp on it” (“Why” 106). Even a play written by a woman can be rendered safe for the patriarchy with a male director taking the responsibility and credit for realizing the production.
Thompson did not reach this self-conscious awareness until well into her theatre career. Earlier in her career, she admits that she always sought out male directors for her premieres, in an attempt, she speculates, to locate public “father figures” (“Why” 106), perhaps for herself, certainly for her productions. In her experience, Canadian theatre is predicated on the “hunchbacked colonial mentality” (“Why” 105) that demands an omnipotent patriarch director, “a traditionally male kind of authority figure, a bearded man who knows the play better than any of them, who has the answers to all their questions and who, preferably, speaks with a British accent” (“Why” 105). With her 1990 premiere of Lion in the Streets, Thompson cut out the middle man and appropriated a greater degree of control of her artistic vision by directing that production herself, to great critical and popular acclaim, and to great admiration from Christopher Newton. After attending a performance of that production, Newton invited Thompson to the Shaw Festival to direct Hedda Gabler, one of the great classics of the modern dramatic canon with almost a century of interpretive tradition behind it—a play scripted by a famous man, featuring one of modern drama’s most famous literary women.
The Court House Trials
By its thirtieth anniversary season, the Shaw Festival had already established a reputation as one of the great centres for Canadian theatrical culture. Government funding exceeded $1 million, placing it, along with the Stratford Festival and Canadian Stage Company, among the top three publicly funded theatres. This is theatre at its most “legitimate.” However in 1991, with most of North America in the shadow of economic recession, and box office receipts, which still represented just over 70% of budget, steadily declining, even this most lauded and publicly funded theatre company was in desperate financial straits. Numerous interviews with Newton during the 1989–1992 seasons feature the artistic director’s sense of fiscal responsibility in choosing his programming, but despite his efforts, the deficit continued to accumulate. Programming an Ibsen classic is a strategic move, a relatively safe—although perhaps somewhat “dull”—choice within the Festival’s mandate,5 likely to generate respectable box office sales. Adding direction by Judith Thompson to the equation, hot on the heels of her recent success with Lion, is another well-calculated choice, likely to attract a large audience contingent from the “serious” Toronto theatregoers who would already recognize Thompson’s talent and capabilities—or at least her name—and would lend a more current appeal to the possibly stale Ibsen tradition. The house programme essay by Urjo Kareda, artistic director of Tarragon Theatre—where Thompson was writer-in-residence in 1991—reinforces the link between this production and a particular sector of the Toronto alternate theatre scene.
Targeting this audience is no doubt also related to the specific venue where the production of Hedda Gabler took place. The Court House was the original stage when the Festival began in 1962; since the construction of the grander Festival Theatre