SHARON POLLOCK’S EARLY HISTORY PLAYS - WALSH

SHARON POLLOCK’S EARLY HISTORY PLAYS - WALSH

The paper focuses on one of Sharon Pollock’s early history plays Walsh (1973). By way of close analysis of the play, the author of the paper shows the way Pollock reenacts the past historical event into the present context by merging fact and fiction, by multiple point of view, by fictionalizing the main character, by the active role of the audience, by the use of metadramatic devices. By short comparisons to another historical play of Pollock’s The Komagata Maru Incident (1976), the author proves that Walsh is more a docudrama than “a theatrical impression” of an historical event. The author shows that Walsh belongs to historiographic metafiction and could not be analyzed in a feminist way as Richard Paul Knowles would suggest. The author concludes that Pollock’s special technique of telling the story, of structuring the play and her multiple point of view create a new unique story about the Sioux’s stay in Canada glorifying the life in the prairies in the 1870s and 1880s, the Canadian frontier myth, the myth of the Mounties, etc.