FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 2000. All Rights Reserved

Theatre by Lori Montgomery End Dream the Betty Mitchell Theatre March 8 - 25 There was a time when Sharon Pollock was pigeonholed as a playwright of social conscience. Thanks to early plays like One Tiger to a Hill and The Komagata Maru Incident, she was ravaged by some of the country’s nastiest critics (and a couple of cranky Americans, too) as didactic and moralistic, then given a patronizing pat on the back as her writing matured – often delivered with a backhanded slap at her previous work. But at some almost indefinable point, Pollock ceased to be referred to as the "issues playwright," and simply became one of Canada’s premier writers, winner of the first Governor General’s Award for drama. The change may have gone hand-in-hand with her increasing fascination with ambiguity, although she has lost none of her concern for the powerless and the powerful in society. Her newest play, End Dream, has its first production at Theatre Junction this week, with Pollock as director. She describes a scene that seems to typify her approach to her art: "An actress, the first time she comes in, sees (a bowl of fruit) and she picks up the apple. The apple, which comes up every once in awhile, gets to carry a certain weight, in a way. Now, what is the weight? I think that, like most things in art, the more you try to articulate them and define them, the more they elude you. The more specific you try to make them, the more they lose the interesting resonance of meaning." That doesn’t mean she doesn’t plan to tell a darn good story, too, she says. But she sees the audience’s experience in terms of the big picture – literally. "I don’t think anyone is going to come out saying, ‘What did the apple mean?’ And I don’t think it would be a good thing if they did," she acknowledges. "But all of those little elements that you’re laying in – it’s like a big canvas that you’re painting. And every little element has its place in that composition." From Blood Relations (1980), which offered a speculative take on the life of Lizzie Borden, to Doc (1984), with its autobiographical elements, to Moving Pictures (1999), about Canadian film pioneer Nell Shipman, Pollock has always taken her inspiration from real life, and End Dream is no exception. In this case, it’s the 1924 death of Janet Smith, a Scottish nanny living in Vancouver. The mystery of who was responsible for Smith’s death – a Chinese servant in the household was charged and acquitted – was never resolved, and that ambiguity fascinates Pollock. "What you’re being asked to do is enter into the head of this young woman, and take the trip that she’s taking at the moment of her death," the playwright says. "And as synapses start to misfire, (you see) what she wished had happened or feared would happen.... She’s taken the raw material of her real past, but what she’s made of it may not be what really happened. I suppose the audience is asked, on some level, ‘What do you think happened?’" In terms of structure and image, Pollock sees the play as a departure from her early work, but concedes that it doesn’t represent a radical turning away from the plays that made her reputation. "As always, there are certain things that interest me about power structures, and how people impose power," she says. "And I suppose in some ways, the plight of this Scottish nanny is not so different maybe than, in some respects, the experience of Filipino nannies today, where you’re caught in a household where you’re not treated very well, and you have limited ways of escaping from that." In fact, Pollock sees the trend in her work as simply part of the trend in theatre in general. "It would be very strange, I think, and very sad, if I had worked in the theatre all these years – where we see this move now toward more imagistic theatre – if I had not been affected by that," she points out. "It reflects the changing world in society and culture and technology that I live in."

| Back To This Issue Table of Contents | Back To Main Index |