[In the following excerpt, Sidnell outlines flaws in the Avon Theatre's production of Pollock's One Tiger to a Hill and the weaknesses intrinsic to the play itself.]

The third Canadian play was Sharon Pollock's One Tiger to a Hill, presented at the Avon Theatre. It might have fared better on the Third Stage, since the Avon proved too big and formal for Pollock's impassioned dramatization of her argument against cruelty, lies and cover-up in the prison system. It was an odd choice to make from Pollock's plays, since it appears to be flawed by talkiness, laborious demonstrations of the inhumanity of inhumane actions and the inclusion of superfluous characters for the sake of debate—to be inferior to her later work. The elaborate setting did not help the play, though the bars, the wire giving onto open wings, the galleries, stairs, and so on were highly expressive, in themselves, of institutionalized ennui and violence. Part of the difficulty was that John Wood, the director, and John Ferguson, the designer, were unable to make enough of Pollock's framing device.

What is enacted in the play is the incident recounted by one of the participating prison officials, which convinced him of the appalling cruelty of the system he had helped to operate. Putting members of the audience on the stage should have established this narrative context, but the solidity and overwhelming power of the prison environment largely annulled the distance between the telling and the showing. As theatre becomes more visual, it becomes (when a verbal text is being played) more prone to tedious and counter-productive repetitions and redundancies in the relation between words and things.

In One Tiger to a Hill the words, which are worked very hard and emotively, would probably have been more effective in a less descriptive environment, in a scenic context not so immediately derived from them. As it was, the actors often had the difficult task of reiterating meanings and feelings that had already been forcefully declared. The real interest of the acting was often found in the silences, with their evocations, through movement and gesture in the given setting, of viciousness, anger and despair—the kind of impression that might be made by documentary images, and that was not strengthened by Pollock's earnest speeches and the moral conclusiveness of her plot. In the performed work, the visual text was stronger than the verbal one.