Ploughmen of the Glacier is an undisguised, sometimes clumsy attempt to say something cosmic about what Ryga's stage directions call "the elemental loneliness of the protagonists." Most of the dialogue is between Lowery, a fly-by-night journalist, and Volcanic, a stereotypically crusty prospector. We can gather that these two are supposed to function as existential icons partly because we are told that their conversation unfolds in a setting which "is possibly surrealistic to suggest a mountainside, up and down which POOR BOY struggles in his eternal, groping quest." Poor Boy himself acts as the folksy Canadian equivalent of a Greek chorus chattering on about Life and Death. At the same time, he doggedly carries a leaky bucket of water up the mountain in order to fill a leaky trough.

In case we miss the significance of this, hard-bitten newspaperman Lowery steps out of character for a moment and draws an awkwardly literary parallel between Poor Boy's activity and the fruitless endeavour of Sisyphus. But there is an important difference between this home-grown Sisyphus and his counterpart as he appears in Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus. The philosopher's mythic model spites the gods by paradoxically rejoicing in his psychological freedom to appreciate the tragic beauty of a grand but pointless struggle. Poor Boy, on the other hand, concludes the drama with trite, simple-minded observations which are hardly worth the price of admission or the time spent watching the play. This might be acceptable if the play stood up as a visually and aurally exciting piece of work—but it does not. (p. 47)

Ploughmen of the Glacier is probably not Ryga's best work if judged for its sublety and theatricality. In any case, the brevity and the paucity of theatrical legerdemain … are not likely to leave an international audience satisfied…. (p. 48)