Craig S. Walker, Queen's U
Modernist Literature on the Post-Modernist Stage

One of the most innovative and exciting theatrical performances in Toronto in 2003 was certainly Bluemouth Inc.'s trilogy, Something About a River. Ironically, this startlingly original production drew much of its inspiration from a literary work that is now more than eighty years old, and has become so well-known that it is even regarded by many readers as somewhat hackneyed: T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland. So, however timeworn the commonplaces of modernist literature may appear on the page to sophisticated readers, some of these seem to be finding fresh life on the post-modernist Canadian stage. Implicitly, then, notwithstanding all the manifest freedom of communication between poets, novelists and playwrights during the modernist age (v. Eliot himself), the theatrical version of the literary poetics did not play itself out at the same time. This paper will examine the question of the extent to which the absorption (or translation) of certain techniques drawn from modernist literary poetics may have created a sort of pressure toward various post-modernist theatrical devices, particularly in the conceptualization of theatrical space and time. While the field of study is potentially limitless, the discussion here will focus in the first place on a handful of Canadian dramatic adaptations of works of modernist literature (including Something About a River) as a means of testing more general observations.