“Dramatic W.O. Mitchell: Five Plays” by W.O. Mitchell

W.O. Mitchell is a novelist of great skill and observational power, well known for Who Has Seen the Wind and Jake and the Kid. In a short introduction to this collection, he claims that as a novelist he wants readers “not only to watch and to listen but to enter envelopes of consciousness as well, giving the illusion of an inner dimension belonging to human nature.” As a dramatist, Mitchell notes, one does something different, because the playwright is in creative collaboration with his audience, actors and directors. While he admits that both novel and drama are illusions, the collaborative nature of the drama increases the number of participants in the illusion. And as Mitchell himself admits, a collection of plays allows him to submit his dramatic work to “the silent, reading audience of the novelist.”

“Each of these plays,” we are informed, “has been a success on stage.” Each reveals Mitchell’s ability to create easily understood characters and a power of surface observation built on an acute awareness of popular prejudice and attitudes. Mitchell certainly creates characters who are “believable” within the confines of the play in which they appear. But in many cases he spoils the effect by insisting that the audience stand up and take note of the exaggerated whimsicality of some characters and the stereotyping of others, such as Daddy Sherry in The Kite and Dr. Anders in Back to Beulah.

Another problem is the excessively narrow environment of the plays: The Black Bonspiel of Wullie MacCrimmon is barely intelligible outside the context of the game of curling. While no doubt thrilling to the participants, curling appears to the uninitiated as the most enervating game ever invented, with the possible exception of cricket.

This brings me to Mitchell’s whimsicality. In The Black Bonspiel, all the characters on Wullie’s team are called Charlie Brown, distinguishable only by adjectives placed before their names. Of course, Malleable Charlie Brown is henpecked by his Mormon wife Annie, the stereotyped, small-town, religious bigot who weeds out whatever she chooses to define as corruption. All these Charlies may well stand for Everyman, but Mitchell does not spend enough time on them and they remain flat and similar, something which Mitchell’s stage directions (and there are a lot of them) cannot alter. Mitchell’s parody of Shakespeare in having Macbeth on Clonke’s team is inept and silly—it is not parody but slapstick. Monty Python could have done it so much better. The other play which may be included here is The Kite, a rather tedious piece about the relationship of a man, of one hundred and seventeen years, with his family. Daddy Sherry, when he isn’t drooling or shocking dogs with catapults, is supposed to establish some sort of rapport with his great-great-great-grandson or make life miserable for the CBC. The kite itself, which sails out of time, would have been a good symbol if Mitchell had made its importance clearer—it is not simply a gift from the youngest generation to the oldest, but a symbol of understanding, love and communication, not to mention freedom from the restrictions of time. The Kite is too long for what it has to say (much of the rambling of Daddy Sherry could have been omitted) and the budding affair between the young widow Helen and the doctor seems mawkishly sentimental and out of place.

The serious plays in Mitchell’s collection are more compact and would make better radio drama than stage plays. However, a play like Back to Beulah has serious limitations, not the least being the subject matter. There has been lately a spate of plays about insane-asylum patients versus nasty doctors: they range from masterpieces like Dunenmatt’s Die Physikir to pale imitations like Bill Horrocks’ St. Peter’s Asylum.

While Mitchell’s play lacks the gratuitous violence of St. Peter’s Asylum, it does not deliver what it promises. The Devil’s Instrument, which is about the deprogramming of a Hutterite boy, attempts to deal somewhat objectively with the situation by endowing Rachel and Ruth with a sense of humour, and John, the blacksmith, with compassion. But Mitchell evidently feels very strongly that Hutterite society is overly repressive and if his depiction is accurate, he is certainly right. But the lack of any really stageable action in this, and in For Those in Peril on the Sea, the last play in the book, where the pivotal figure is bedridden, makes one wonder why these plays were not radio plays. Mitchell does possess a good ear for the rhythm and pattern of all types of speech, as anyone who has read his novels knows, but his overly meticulous directions indicate that he is unsure about physical action, gesture, and placing of the characters on stage. None of this is conducive to the collaboration Mitchell feels is so important.

I am not at all sure that the whimsical character as critic of society really works any more. Daddy Sherry, Wullie MacCrimmon, Pipe-Fitting Charlie Brown and Miss Teetsworth may be “real” characters in the sense that they can be recognized, but Mark Twain has been dead for years now and the brand of humour these characters convey is no less moribund. It does seem somewhat redundant for a Canadian to attempt to create his own version of similar characters. Mitchell’s ear, however, is excellent and works well in the novels, where the audience is silent, collaboration is minimal and where time can be spent creating an environment through description and dialogue. ■

John Butler, who wrote about George Ryga’s plays in Vol. 2, No. 3, regularly reviews Winnipeg theatre for the NeWest Review.