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This volume comprises a reprinting and gloss of the original text
of the 1933 Communist play Eight Men Speak. The play was banned by
the Toronto police after its first performance, banned by the
Winnipeg police shortly thereafter and subsequently banned by the
Canadian Post Office. The play can be considered as one stage-the
published text-of a meta-text that culminated in 1934 at Maple Leaf
Gardens when the (then illegal) Communist Party of Canada
celebrated the release of its leader, Tim Buck, from prison. Eight
Men Speak had been written and staged on behalf of the campaign to
free Buck by the Canadian Labour Defence League, the public
advocacy group of the CPC. In its theatrical techniques,
incorporating avant-garde expressionist staging, mass chant,
agitprop and modernist dramaturgy, Eight Men Speak exemplified the
vanguardist aesthetics of the Communist left in the years before
the Popular Front. It is the first instance of the collective
theatrical techniques that would become widespread in subsequent
decades and formative in the development of modern Canadian drama.
These include a decentred narrative, collaborative authorship and a
refusal of dramaturgical linearity in favour of theatricalist
demonstration. As such it is one of the most significant Canadian
plays of the first half of the century, and, on the evidence of the
surviving photograph of the mise-en-scene, one of the earliest
examples of modernist staging in Canada.
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