In his preface to the original publication of  Eight Men Speak, Ed Cecil-Smith asked “why are the Canadian authorities afraid of this play?” The answer then was obvious: it was a visible incarnation of an invisible and banned party, played at a public rally where the hero, Tim Buck, could only be present in the body of an actor-avatar. (It was, if I may digress, a bit of an embarrassment for the party officials that the actor chosen to incarnate  Buck spoke with a pronounced Yiddish accent). The Communist Party had recently been hijacked by the Stalinist faction led by Buck (and prominent in his cadre of young radical supporters was his publicist and biographer Oscar Ryan, initiator and co-author of Eight Men Speak.) In 1934, only 17 years after the revolution in the USSR, communism promised hope in the misery of the Great Depression. R.B. Bennett was so paranoid about Tim Buck’s affable cult of personality that he would personally phone the managers of venues where Buck was scheduled to speak to express his prime ministerial displeasure.

But that was in another century. Why, we might ask, are Canadian authorities still afraid of this play? While researching  its archival traces this summer I felt, for the first time in my scholarly life, the chill of government suppression. It really is a chill. It’s that wash of adrenalin in the back of the neck that you get when you narrowly avoid a car accident.

There are very  few documentary records of Eight Men Speak other than memories, the text itself and newspaper coverage, most of which was generated by the controversy over the banning of performances in Toronto and Winnipeg. We know from press sources that the Toronto Police Board of Commissioners asked the province to ban the play in January 1934, and sent a detective to take notes at the performance. These notes formed the basis of a report sent to Ottawa. No trace of that report can be found in government records. Nor can we find the detective’s notes. We could however examine the Police Commission minutes. After all, these are public documents. Aren’t they? Most of those minutes are available in the Toronto Archives — except, mysteriously, those that cover 1933-34. Those are still held by the Toronto Police. It took four months and threats of Freedom of Information filing for the police to grant access to the minutes, which prove that the police had decided to have the play banned well in advance of its production. (Why then did they not prevent that production? The logical answer is that they needed to see it once to know how subversive it might be. And maybe to see who turns out to watch it…)

The archival document that concerns me most however is one held by Library and Archives Canada. It is a fond of correspondence between the Post Office and the Soliciter General, determining whether the play could be banned from the post (as it was).  The fond had been restricted in 1934, and as no-one had asked to see it since, I had to request an access review. As they are required to do, LAC sent it to the Ministry of Justice for review. Some months later I received a document of 12 pages. Every word, except for letterhead, dates and signatures, had been redacted. As in, erased. We’re now waiting to hear the results of an appeal to the Information and Privacy Commissioner. I’ve been told not to hold my breath.

I know this isn’t about Eight Men Speak at all; according to a friend who works as a lawyer in the federal government, the  refusal and redaction of documents is the government-directed default response to any document request. If they can withhold it, they will.

Government censorhip of archival documents, battalions of armed police on the streets, arbitrary arrest of protesters: the world we live and work in today is one that the creators of Eight Men Speak fought to prevent. Why are the Canadian authorities afraid of this play? Maybe because it won’t go away.

This is my  first foray into the EMiC blogworld.  I’m a little at sea on the social networking technology, but I’m a theatre person, and theatre was one of the first instruments of social networking. It is still the only one that is polyphonic, somatic, tactile and hormonally interactive. That means theatre operates on every level of human communication. For me, a blog is still a one-dimensional substitute for  a performance and an after-show pint at a cheery pub.

It is now 77 years and two weeks after the last known performance moment of Eight Men Speak, the text — or the textual remains — of which I am preparing in a critical edition for EMIC. By performance moment, I mean that we only know that after the play was banned (following its single full staging on December 4, 1933), sequences of it were staged at a protest rally in Toronto in January 1934.. At that rally, Rev. A.E. Smith, the leader of the Canadian Labour Defence League (one of the legal organs through which the outlawed Communist Party acted) accused Prime Minister Bennett of ordering the ban. He then addressed the facts behind the play, which had been staged as an indictment of the federal government’s arrest of eight communists — including Tim Buck– under Section 98 of the Criminal Code, the red-busting law that gave the government wide power to arrest anyone for “unlawful association.”  (Today we’re more civilized; we call it a ‘security certificate.”) The CLDL had staged the play as part of its national campaign to have the law repealed and the men freed. While in prison, Buck had been the subject of what seemed to have been an assassination attempt when guards fired rifle bullets into his cell during a prison riot. Smith told the crowd that Bennett had ordered Tim Buck shot, and was the next morning himself arrested for sedition. That led to the one of the most important and volatile political trials in Canadian history. In March 1934 Smith was acquitted and 500,000 Canadians signed CLDL petitions to repeal the law. Tim Buck was released later that year.

It sounds like a victory for democracy and civil rights, but as I immerse myself in the world of the play I find that its histories still resonate. The play was produced by the Workers Theatre of the Progressive Arts Club, who had developed their skill in agitprop in short agitational performances in public places. One of their favoured venues was Queen’s Park, were they were frequently beaten and run out by the Toronto Police “red squad”.  (As Clifford Odets has a communist recruiter say to an unemployed actor when she hands him a copy of the Communist Manifesto in Waiting for Lefty, “Read while you run…” ) In 1933, the Toronto Police allocated a handful of men to the job of suppressing free speech at Queen’s Park. In 2011, they put more than 10,000 on the streets for the G20 for the same purpose. Amongst the many hundreds who were arrested, brutalized and encaged without food, water or toilet facilities were young activists who had gone to Queen’s park to perform street theatre.

Eight men are still speaking, but they remain silenced by federal and police authorities. In my next post, I’ll describe how, almost 80 years after the fact, the federal government is still fighting to prevent the release of archival documents about the banning of the play.