Criticism: Blood Relations
[In the following excerpt, Saddlemyer briefly makes comparisons between Pollock's Walsh and George Ryga's Indian. Saddlemyer then explores the circumstances that lead up to the murders in Blood Relations, and evaluates cause, effect, and blame.]
Action … Suspense … Immediacy … Persuasion … Conflict … Revelation … Climax … Resolution. These are the qualities of theatre, of story-telling, and, coincidentally, of the lawcourts. It is not surprising, then, that playwrights have been drawn to depict crime and the criminal on trial from the time of the excellent suspense drama Oedipus Rex; and Canadian dramatists are no exception. Take, for example, The Penguin Book of Modern Canadian Drama: seven of the twelve plays have to do with crime, either domestic or political; one (Fortune and Men's Eyes) is actually set in a jail, another (Handcuffs) attempts to exonerate and reclaim the folk criminal, while a third (Riel) includes a courtroom scene.1 Trial scenes are, of course, as old as the theatre—Oedipus, after all, sits in judgment on himself; medieval mystery cycles always include lots of Herod scenes and end with the Last Judgment; at least a quarter of Shakespeare's plays contain judgment scenes, that in The Merchant of Venice being perhaps most familiar; some might say that Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan is one vast trial; J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, whose hero is adulated for a murder he did not commit, caused almost a week's rioting in Dublin when first produced; Galsworthy's Justice actually provoked prison reform in Britain; while Lawrence and Lee's Inherit the Wind not only raised serious questions (still with us in Ontario) about the teaching of evolution but in Henry Drummond, the Clarence Darrow character, as surely provided the model for Perry Mason and even Jessica Fletcher. John Coulter's Riel, first produced in 1950, was so popular that he wrote The Trial of Louis Riel, which is produced every summer in the old Regina court-house (the very building in which Riel was condemned to be hanged as a traitor) with an eager audience of tourists serving as jury. Reverse the procedure, and the lawcourts themselves can be seen as theatres, evidence and situations being replayed before an audience of judge and jury, plays within plays when one includes the public gallery observing both actors and audience breathlessly awaiting the outcome. The cliché ‘courtroom drama’ is in fact theatrically apt.
But even when the court is not visible on stage, drama involves the process of judgment, assigning responsibility for action, distinguishing truth from fiction, sifting the pertinent from the irrelevant, and, before a discriminating audience, re-creating what happened and why. No matter that the facts presented may themselves be a fiction—they are enacted before us as reality, drawn by the author from some inner truth, and as audience we willingly suspend our disbelief (in Coleridge's famous phrase)2 in order to participate in that ritual, ever alert to the confession that will reveal motive and deed.
The two Canadian plays this paper will deal with, George Ryga's Indian and Sharon Pollock's Blood Relations, compound that process by inviting us to sit in judgment on different levels at once, merging past with present, creating a new suspense out of the confessional, using that very ambiguity to force the audience to accept some responsibility in turn for the deeds enacted before them. Indian is a one-act play originally written for television. There are only three characters: farmer Watson, who has hired three Indians to put in fence posts; one of the Indians, who is recovering from a drunken spree held by him and his two cohorts the night before with advance pay cajoled by complaints of hunger; and—after the exasperated Watson has left, threatening to lock up Indian's nephew until the job is completed—an Agent from the Department of Indian Affairs, who learns more than he wants or can handle about the life of his charges when forced by Indian (his only name in the play) to listen to how and why he had to murder his brother. The action of Blood Relations also rests on three characters: Lizzie Borden of the famous axe-murder case, her inquisitive actress friend from Boston who, after repeatedly asking for the ‘truth’ about the murder of the Bordens, is challenged by an impatient Lizzie to re-enact that fateful day ten years earlier, and—in the final few minutes of the play—Lizzie's older sister Emma. The other characters who appear in Blood Relations, Lizzie's Irish friend Doctor Patrick, her father and hated stepmother, her stepmother's grasping brother, and the maid Bridget, although present on stage, are all summoned out of the dark by the two actresses' imaginations.
Thus there is an acknowledged crime at the centre of both plays, but confession reveals more than the admission of guilt; violent action is but the foreplay to an internal trial that involves us not merely as spectators, but as conspirators in fact. This reversal continues throughout each play: imprisonment causes violent action; but that imprisonment is of the spirit, and society is judged guilty of a crime far more heinous in the eyes of the playwright than the violence narrated on stage. In fact neither murder takes place on stage; in Indian we are told of it, in Blood Relations it is assumed. Murder is, in both, presented as a necessary and reasonable act, a release. The murderers themselves feel they have nothing to lose, had no rights to begin with, and attempt to gain them through their crimes; in Miss Lizzie's words, ‘not all life is precious.’3 Both plays tease out an undercurrent of pain and feeling rather than dwell on factual truths; both protagonists mock the institutions which have made them helpless, frustrated, angry, and defiant. The process of judgment is forced to turn in upon itself, to examine the very roots of justice and equality, without ever allowing us to retreat into indifference or evasion. Both plays move from the general to the particular, from what we have always accepted as publicly ‘known,’ to specific individual condemnation. Both plays start, not with the quest for identity, but rather with an earlier search for what is lacking to create an identity in the first place. Both attempt to go beyond the simple ‘whodunit’ of the present to a re-examination of the past in an effort to determine the original crime. And in so doing fact becomes less important than fiction, style and form as persuasive as content.
.....
… In attending to that heartbeat, the Canadian dramatic treatment of the Indian has come to differ from the American, perhaps representing differing attempts to come to terms with history—or, as Ryga would have it, remaking that history into a more manageable mythology.
One brief comparison must suffice: Walsh by Sharon Pollock deals with precisely the same time span and individuals as Indians by American playwright Arthur Kopit.4 Kopit uses as his basic structure the wild west show and within it studies Chief Sitting Bull as victim of Buffalo Bill, the metamorphosis of genuine frontier into Wild West under the Big Top, and then the recreation of the Indian himself in the white man's image. Kopit's Indian is a scapegoat in a battle of which he was unaware; the playwright deals with us and our guilt only, not with the Indian and his place. Interviewed after the first production (which was further transplanted to London and baffled the audience), Kopit stated, ‘I'm not concerned in the play with the terrible plight of the Indian now—they were finished from the moment the first white man arrived. What I want is to show a series of confrontations between the two alien systems.’5
Pollock on the other hand struggles with the plight of the Indian as individual, and through coming to terms with that, attempts to identify the plight of every Canadian seeking roots in a blood-stained soil. She writes from the Canadian side of the border also—her scenes with Sitting Bull take place between the acts, as it were, of the historical events Kopit selects, when Sitting Bull fled to Canada with his people after Custer's death and sat out a long, weary, weakening exile. Where the American political solution was to kill, the Canadian was to starve to death. The process takes longer, allows room for further discussion, above all is quieter. But because the guilt is less obvious, the recognition is all the more pervasive and disturbing. Walsh is the captain in charge of the fort where Sitting Bull seeks help. He is a man of quiet honour; like Buffalo Bill Cody, he becomes a friend and like Cody he was trusted by Sitting Bull. But unlike the Cody of Kopit's play, Walsh is not directly, actively responsible for the Indians' plight. In a prologue and at the end of the play he is shown a broken man, broken not by Cody's personal greed and selfish yet well-meaning goal to create his beloved nation while doing what it wanted, but by an impersonal and equally well-meaning desire to be a good soldier to queen and country while respecting and honoring his Indian friends. Pollock's ending, silent, intense without the brassy assurance of Kopit's vaudeville techniques, reflects a coming to terms with ‘the Indian question’ in our past. The plays represent two points of view, both incomplete, both edged with the knowledge of frustration and incompleteness. Life and history are not as simple as the cowboys and Indians, the good guys and bad guys. Guilt cannot be scrubbed away by admission alone; acknowledgment must be made of the paradox of two different world views, perhaps of two different—but opposing—justices, and the acknowledgment that it must never happen again. Walsh was revived on the occasion of the 1988 Calgary Olympics; a review of first night rests uneasily next to a court judgment rejecting an Indian group's claim that a spirit mask is too privately religious in nature to be on public exhibition and a report concerning the Lubicon land claim.6 Pollock, whose program notes for this revival consisted entirely of historical and contemporary quotations drawing parallels with the conflict in her play, would appreciate the irony.
Ryga moved on to explore other social issues, other heroes of place, the making of mythology itself, and the celebration of ‘the marvellous realization that no matter where we are, we can be better.’ But he never let go of the conviction that ‘Our present definition of history is faulty. We're playing with lies.’7 ‘Until we recognize our past, we cannot change our future,’ agrees Sharon Pollock.8 Like him, she sees the historical situation as a metaphor for the present and began her playwriting career (after a brief span as an actress) by insisting we reexamine our history: ‘to know where we are going, we must know where we have been and what we have come from.’9 Like Ryga also, Pollock believes that ‘theatre should hit people emotionally.’10 And she also winds us in through the age-old process of story-telling.
After a series of plays, including Walsh, indicting us for social crimes and atrocities which she claims Canadian historians have expurgated from our histories, Pollock too turned to an examination of other processes of mythmaking and began to ask questions about other victims of patriarchy. ‘Of course it says something about women today,’ Pollock protested after innumerable male reviewers denied or down-played the feminist message embodied in Blood Relations.11 In many ways the play epitomizes the strengths and originality of theatre about women imprisoned in a man-ordered universe; but at the same time as does Ryga's Indian, it speaks beyond this framework to explore even more far-reaching concerns of time and spirit. ‘All of us are capable of murder given the right situation,’ Pollock continues in the same interview. But did Lizzie Borden … or didn't she? The question remains ambiguous to the very end of the play—it is the Actress who raises the axe; it is the Actress who triumphantly accuses Lizzie. Meanwhile Miss Lizzie stands apart, always watching, content to ‘paint the background’ (572) but never admitting guilt. She was, after all, acquitted.
Pollock deliberately plays with this ambiguity throughout the action, making it the fulcrum on which both action and message turn. In fact, there are games within games performed in time within time, observed by the audience who watches Miss Lizzie observe the actions she has set in motion: psycho-dramatic narrative, but for whose benefit? Lizzie retains her secret to the end; the Actress feels her way fumblingly through Lizzie's story only to be reminded at the end that this is her interpretation only. This is the ritual of theatre itself—watching games being enacted for our single delectation. (An early production of the play, at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto, emphasized the role of audience as participating spectator by having the Actress, as she looks at the hatchet, turning to stare at the audience with Lizzie's last words, ‘I didn't. You did’ [635]. This stage direction is omitted from the second edition of the play.) Pollock's social message is clear: the Lizzie Bordens of this world, hemmed in and caged by Victorian institutions which deny them the right to be personalities, to work, play, and live as individuals, are maimed as surely as Lizzie's birds were, blinded if not decapitated, deprived of dreams and fulfilment. ‘You got no rights,’ her stepmother reminds her (601), and Lizzie in despair cries out after Dr Patrick (himself, as an Irish Catholic, an outsider in Fall River), ‘Do you suppose there's a formula, a magic formula for being “a woman”? I was born … defective.’ She corrects herself, ‘Not defective. Just … born’ (592-3). She accuses her family of the game others want her to play: ‘I'm supposed to be a mirror. I'm supposed to reflect what you want to see’ (597). ‘It's not … fair that I have to’ (602).
But social message alone could lock the play back into 1902, reflecting the ‘dream thesis’ (as Pollock revealingly calls the re-enactment of 1892) when the Bordens were killed. Today's audience could easily escape, as Pollock accuses the male reviewers of doing, by smugly echoing Ryga's Agent: ‘It has nothing to do with me … I wasn't there.’ And so she winds us further in, first through the game with Miss Lizzie's Actress/Lover, ‘painting the background.’ Next, through the Actress' game, calling up four imaginary people who in turn evoke a fifth. What is real? What is unreal? Even the relationship between Miss Lizzie and the Actress is ambiguous: during the first production in Edmonton in 1980, Miss Lizzie suggests the game of pretend in order to keep the Actress' interest in her, which she loses once the game is played through and the question is answered. The second production at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa introduced a different interpretation which Pollock found more interesting, with Miss Lizzie angrily suggesting the game because she is fed up of being questioned. Like Ryga's Indian she challenges the Actress (and the audience): ‘Now you know what is like to be me.’
The Actress/Miss Lizzie relationship, itself a duality, is duplicated by the relationship between Lizzie and her sister Emma, the third ‘real’ character on stage. ‘You remind me of my sister,’ Lizzie comments to her lover in the opening scene (570); by the final scene, we see that Lizzie has treated the Actress as her puppet in the same way she accuses Emma of behaving towards her: ‘My head your hand, yes, your hand working my mouth, me saying all the things you felt like saying, me doing all the things you felt like doing, me spewing forth, me hitting out …’ (634-5). Emma too is implicated in the murders; she too ‘did’ it. The net of responsibility is cast further still, more dangerously close to us, in the words of the Defence (called forth by Lizzie and the Actress): ‘If this gentlewoman is capable of such an act … look to your daughters … your wife’ (593). If we are convinced by the drama played out before us, then we too are capable of such an act. (Interestingly, Ann Jones in her fine study Women Who Kill convincingly argues that the social hypocrisy which led Lizzie to murder was in turn responsible for the further moral hypocrisy that led to her acquittal.)12
But still we the audience could deny responsibility. Taking another person's life cannot be equated with Mr Borden's drowning puppies that are ‘different’ on the farm; within civilized society, people don't calmly do such things. But Lizzie's calm reasonableness is the underlying force of argument in the play. Only really herself in the present time of 1902 with her Lover, to whom she can tell ‘the most personal things, … thoughts, … dreams, … but never that’ (569), the 1892 Lizzie in the recreated scenes with Dr Patrick almost gives herself away, flexing her brains and tongue, indulging in her wit and fancy, pretending it is possible to have some freedom to soar. Full trust, full flight prove to be illusory, but just as the Actress teases Lizzie into painting the background with more details of the foreground, so Dr Patrick encourages her to believe in herself as a valued person. Only then is she led to push him to the edge of confession: ‘Which would you save?’ she challenges him in another ‘game,’ daring him to choose between two patients where only one could be saved, one ‘a bad person,’ the other ‘trying to be good’ (624). ‘Not all life is precious, is it?’ (626). Dr Patrick can only paint in the background, but Miss Lizzie, like the Actress, is given enough details to take the next step in the drama. Her life is precious. Unlike her mother, the doctor assures her, she cannot die. ‘I want to die, but something inside won't let me.’ And so she must will to live. ‘I can do anything’ (614). In order to save her own life (answering her own challenge to Dr Patrick), she must kill.
Miss Lizzie's reasoning threads through the play, tying the scenes together in both time periods, pulling the past into our present time as the games delicately balance on either side of the equation ‘We have to do something’ / ‘There's nothing we can do’ (612). The intensity of Lizzie's thought processes is reflected in the wide-eyed staring that pervades the play from the opening scene when the Actress comments, ‘You know … you do this thing … you stare at me … You look directly at my eyes. I think … you think … that if I'm lying … it will come up, like lemons on a slot machine’ (567). The Actress then observes Miss Lizzie as she leads her into the scene and the part she must play; Miss Lizzie in turn observes the action that unfolds before her. She stares at each character in turn; she dreams that the mask she wears on the carousel (society's larger cage?) hides her own eyelessness; she comments, ‘when a person dies, retained on her eye is the image of the last thing she saw. Isn't that interesting?’ (627). Perhaps by the second edition of the play Pollock had realized that it was no longer necessary at the curtain for the Actress to look at the audience. The process of observing, of ‘seeing’ and therefore comprehending, of equating ‘eye-lessness’ with ‘I-lessness’ (no first person at all), had already taken place.
In addition to its visual aspects, Blood Relations is also a complex work on a literary level, beginning, of course, with the title. For the act of relating is to narrate; however, in order to prevent history (the once-told story) from restricting and falsifying in turn, Miss Lizzie refuses to commit herself to the telling. Instead, she instructs the Actress in the art of re-creation, leaving open the multiple possibilities of more than one truth. But relating in the passive sense is also to be committed to family relationships—and others. Miss Lizzie and the Actress are bound together by the closest of female friendships as lesbian lovers; they discuss the almost symbiotic nature of their relationship in the first scene, when Lizzie admits that ‘sometimes you think like me … do you feel that?’ and the Actress replies, ‘Sometimes’ (571). Sister Emma is not only Lizzie's puppeteer, as Lizzie accuses, but in turn her puppet, for the question of Lizzie's guilt binds them irrevocably together as much as the property they inherited. In the play within the play, all relationships are unfulfilled or uncommitted: Andrew Borden cannot choose between his daughter's demands and his wife's wishes, and fails both; his brother-in-law Harry is alternately triumphantly in power or sneaking out the back to chop wood (the axe also weaves its way through the play); Emma fails Lizzie by running away; Dr Patrick refuses to commit himself either to Lizzie or her philosophical challenge; servant Bridget, whom the real Lizzie re-enacts as the Actress realizes her lover's role, is in more ways than one a creature of Lizzie's imagination. It is not until ten years after the murders, with the retrial before us echoing the earlier Defence, that Lizzie can relive—and thus complete—her own past. With the Actress' weekend visits from Boston, Lizzie also finally exorcises the need she so often played out in her game with Dr Patrick, of ‘running away to Boston’ (588). She may not, after all, have retrieved the farm, that childhood dream, already signed over to her mother's brother, but she is in control of her space at last.
Blood Relations is a disturbing play; like Indian, it is meant to be. Through it, the audience is forced to comprehend what it must be to want to kill: spectators through that comprehension become ‘blood relations’; the play yet another ‘blood sport.’ The passage the Actress is rehearsing at the opening of the play is from act 3 of The Winter's Tale in which Hermione, unjustly accused wife, explains her dilemma to her inflexible, judgmental husband. Like Lizzie Borden, Hermione is damned if she protests her innocence (the Actress would ‘be disappointed’), and damned if she confesses falsely (the Actress would ‘be horrified’ [572]). Shakespeare's lines continue, ‘You, my lord, best know— / who least will seem to do so’ and conclude,
which is more
Than history can pattern, though devised
And played to take spectators.
(3.2.32-7)
In the children's song which serves as yet another framework to the play (and in many other light-hearted refrains such as that in the Broadway musical New Faces of 1952: ‘You can't chop your poppa up in Massachusetts / Then get dressed up and go for a walk’),13 history has indeed patterned. In the play Pollock has created, Lizzie Borden's story is once again devised ‘to take spectators.’ The question has been translated: ‘did she or didn't she?’ has become ‘would you or wouldn't you?’ And, like George Ryga, Sharon Pollock asks which is the greatest crime: imprisonment of the soul, or life at any price?
‘Part of the reason a person writes is to try to see some design, to create order out of chaos, to try to understand things about myself as well as the world around me,’ explains Pollock in words that George Ryga might easily have echoed.14 For both playwrights, theatre is more than a place of entertainment—although it must first of all be that; it is also a place for understanding, and through comprehension, an instrument for change. But ‘obviously real change only occurs when the broad base is altered. The collection of individuals in a society is that base. They must change if anything meaningful is to happen.’15 Only then can justice be the same for all.
Notes
-
The Penguin Book of Modern Canadian Drama ed Richard Plant (Toronto: Penguin 1984) includes John Coulter's Riel (1950), George Ryga's Indian (1962), John Herbert's Fortune and Men's Eyes (1963), William Fruet's Wedding in White (1970), David E. Freeman's Creeps (1971), David French's Of the Fields, Lately (1973), James Reaney's Handcuffs (1975), Sharon Pollock's Blood Relations (1980), Margaret Hollingsworth's Ever Loving (1980), Allan Stratton's Rexy! (1981), Gwen Pharis Ringwood's Garage Sale (1981), George F. Walker's The Art of War (1982). All quotations from Indian and Blood Relations are from this edition.
-
Samuel Taylor Coleridge Biographia Literaria ch 14
-
Sharon Pollock Blood Relations, The Penguin Book of Modern Canadian Drama 626
-
Sharon Pollock Walsh (Vancouver: Talonbooks 1974) 2nd printing; Arthur Kopit Indians (New York: Hill and Wang 1969)
-
Arthur Kopit quoted in an interview with Irving Wardle Times Saturday Review 29 June 1968
-
Stephen Godfrey ‘Debate Soars Above Earthbound Historical Drama’ The Globe and Mail 29 January 1988, D11
-
Ryga quoted by David Watson Canadian Drama 168
-
Sharon Pollock quoted by Bob Allen ‘Play Reveals Shame of Komagata Maru’ Vancouver Province 16 January 1976, 31
-
Sharon Pollock, program note to first production of The Komagata Maru Incident
-
Sharon Pollock, note to the The Komagata Maru Incident (Toronto: Playwright's Co-op 1978) [v]
-
‘Sharon Pollock’ in Robert Wallace and Cynthia Zimmerman The Work: Conversations with English-Canadian Playwrights (Toronto: Coach House Press 1982) 123
-
Ann Jones Women Who Kill (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1980) 209-37
-
‘Lizzie Borden’ words and music by Michael Brown
-
Sharon Pollock quoted by Margo Dunn in Makara (August 1977) 4
-
Sharon Pollock quoted by Bob Allen ‘Play Reveals Shame of Komagata Maru’ 35
Ann Saddlemyer received her PHD from the University of London in 1961 and has acted in numerous plays. Her many publications on Irish and Canadian drama include The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge, which received the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Award for criticism, and Early Stages: Essays on the Theatre in Ontario, 1800-1914. She is preparing the authorized biography of Georgie (Mrs William Butler) Yeats and, for Oxford University Press, the World's Classics edition of the works of J.M. Synge.
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.