The plays of James Reaney … have a background of religious and philosophical concern behind them. The survey of philosophy in Reaney's "September Eclogue," in A Suit of Nettles, ends significantly with Heidegger and with games of magic taken from The Golden Bough; and Reaney's plays in general are shot through with a kind of religious-philosophical excitement that tells us there is much going on privately in that area. But he is a solitary exile in an empty land, almost unique in being troubled deeply and seriously with such questions; therefore his plays have a peculiar dislocation and feeling of unreality in the context of Canadian society. (p. 322)

[The] proposition that James Reaney's charming theatre is somehow a distant relation to, first, Bernard Shaw and, second, W. B. Yeats, may sound far-fetched, but I think it can help us to understand what is going on in the plays. In most of these plays of Reaney,… Canada has at last come in for sharp social satire. It was naturally made for it, from the beginning, we suspect, but no playwright would have dared to undertake a full-scale satirical view of Canadian life before World War II. The soul has to be moved to satire by revulsion, and there must be a solid stone somewhere, on which the foot can lean while shaking off the muck. Reaney may be said to possess both these requirements: a major "criticism of life", and a strong intellectual conviction personally achieved. The satirical strain, however, is the lesser part of his purpose—I was going to say "lesser half", but it isn't anything like half—and the other part branches out rather discordantly from the first. This satirical part, however, is dramatically most reliable, and has the most dependable precedents, so that it tends to be theatrically more successful. The first act of several of his plays, as in The Killdeer, The Sun and the Moon, and Three Desks—the part of the play which is closest to social satire—comes off very well. (p. 323)

But the second and third acts of a Reaney play take a radical turn into strange territory…. In short, the play turns to the great romantic tradition, of transcendence, of magic, or religious implication, and here we are in the country of W. B. Yeats, Maurice Maeterlinck, J. M. Barrie and other visionaries of the "eternal return".

The satire itself springs from a very close personal response to provincial life: one has the impression of a very superiorminded young man cast by fate into a pathetic small-town environment and undergoing all the irritations of being forever trapped in a hen-house or a parsonage. (p. 324)

The strange infantilism of Reaney's poetry and plays is somehow related to this sense of the absurdity of life. The unkindest interpretation of this aspect of Reaney is that the painful prison of provincialism pressing on the mind of the gifted poet has produced a kind of "arrested development", in which the language and the fantasy-world of childhood remains the only imaginative and vital reality for him and the one to which he perpetually returns. A more sympathetic literary account would relate this infantile strain to Blake's theory of innocence and the general romantic idyllic myth of childhood.

William Blake was perhaps the first poet in history to offer infantile inanity and childish doggerel as serious poetry, and this to the eternal confusion of literature, since in his work abominable poetry is bound up with the most profound and far-reaching ideas…. The delusion that this sort of thing is high poetry … has led James Reaney to write pages of similar nonsense…. Who knows, some of [the] bathos in Reaney may derive from hymn-book quatrains, the bane of so much English poetry, even as Blake's namby-pamby style derived from the same source…. Also, it is one thing to write for children, as Edward Lear and Lewish Carroll have done—and as Reaney has in his specifically children's books—but quite another to be childish or stylistically insipid in a work written for adults. (pp. 324-25)

After all, one cannot put Reaney down as an idiot boy. The naive childlike style and childlike attitudes which are so recurrent in his plays are an affectation, perhaps with a secret self-indulgence, but nevertheless a conscious design aiming to simplify and to reach an indiscriminate audience. The plays could hardly occur on the stage in Paris or New York, though they might conceivably get there. They could only originate in a country like Canada, a hinterland as far as drama is concerned, where an audience in church basements and high schools must be gently prodded to participate in dramatics. The plays are conceived for a small parochial community—there is an aura of amateur theatre about the whole thing—and the audience, one imagines, is composed of children, nice pleasant provincial ladies, and placid hen-pecked husbands. (p. 326)

The ultimate aim of this simplified kind of play, a collage of children's games (Colours in the Dark), or a fairy tale for adults (Nightblooming Cereus), or a pastime for a sick boy (Listen to the Wind), is anything but trivial and simple. By means of would-be unpretentious play, purporting to gratify the very simplest audience, Reaney intends to achieve the widest possible scope of meaning, interpreting all life from birth to death, all human history, and touching on the major questions of religion and philosophy. His aim, in other words, is epic, and his intentions are those of a major poet, although this is concealed in the trappings of the nursery and of childhood imagination. (p. 327)

Much of the One-man Masque and Colours in the Dark reads like all the gists of Finnegans Wake, Ulysses and The Waste Land rolled into a ball. The vast ambition of this philosophical conception, as it stares through the child's play of the surface, seems at odds with the quirky simplicity of the means adopted.

A little higher on the scale than the nursery or child's play I would place Reaney's regressive attachment to melodrama and the plot-patterns of the Victorian romance. Here at least, we might say, we have a breakthrough—from infancy to adolescence! (pp. 327-28)

I see James Reaney's plays as essentially poetic or lyrical drama. The form of One-man Masque, which amounts to little more than a stage setting for a reading of Reaney poems—as does also a good deal of Colours in the Dark—reveals the strong lyrical bent of this drama. The interpretation of the plays should be directed to the poetic subjectivity of their method, and they should be studied in conjuction with Reaney's poetry,… although the ultimate goal will be a body of ideas, or a "vision", that will be objective and significant for itself. (pp. 329-30)

The plays are a strange and wonderful experience—though often an irritation—and they are a powerful contribution to the possibility of theatre in Canada. Much as I may disagree, having my own way of searching through the creation, I want to stand up to applaud a fine achievement. For my own taste, among the plays, I probably could do without The Killdeer, The Sun and the Moon, the Three Desks, and The Easter Egg—much as there may be interesting things in all of them—and I believe the best of Reaney's theatre, pure Symbolism in the romantic vein of Maeterlinck and Yeats, is to be found in Night-blooming Cereus, One-man Masque, and the moving and impressive later plays, Colours in the Dark and Listen to the Wind. It is here that he suggests vast meanings and haunting other-worldly dimensions through the simplest verbal and theatrical techniques, namely through the symbolic interplay of action and the incantation of poetry. (pp. 333-34)

The difficulty of the plays remains. It is a difficulty which is both intellectual and sociological—hated words!—in that the problem of these plays is to discover, with precision and in detail (not always possible in such a case) what they want to say, and at the same time to reach an audience which is neither prepared for nor capable of any mental exertion. And it all goes back to "vision"—the Greek theoria—in which the divine was revealed in the epiphany of the theatre: except that we today are not quite sure of what we mean by the divine. In the meantime, the play—or "play"—is the thing, if only as a childlike way to keep things going. Reaney's emphasis is definitely on the play. (p. 334)