The Icelandic Canadian - 01.04.1988, Page 16

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THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
SPRING, 1988
love this little island. We love it for its
beauty, its ice, its fire, and, yes, we love it
for its harshness too. It is not a place for
weaklings, it is a place for men. It is a place
for men with heart.”
For all his brave talk of liberty and of
men with heart, Magnus did not allow
liberty to his wife and three children, and
his children must have often thought that
he had a stone where his heart should be.
Nemesis was bound to catch up with
such a man. It caught up with Magnus, in
full measure. His wife died, worn out with
overwork and drudgery. An electric dish
washer and an electric washing machine
would have added years to her life. His
elder daughter married the American and
left Iceland for the United States. His son,
a wayward youth, preferred fast cars to
poetry and the old traditions. And his
younger daughter, the apple of his eye,
whom he was grooming as the crown and
flower of Icelandic womanhood, became
pregnant — by an American. He was left
with a bitter cup of gall to drain to the lees.
Poetry and chess, his favorite pastime, still
remained for him, but they were ashes in
his mouth, when he had no one to share
them with. As an old Icelandic saying runs:
“A man alone is only half a man, but a
man with others is more than himself.”
I have never seen The Icelander per-
formed, but, from reading it, I can vouch
that it is a powerful, thought-provoking
play. It was first staged by the Morden
Little Theatre. Paul had been the moving
spirit in organizing this theatrical group
and was its director from 1963 to 1975,
during which time he directed and pro-
duced twenty-one full length plays (three
from his own pen) and numerous skits and
one act plays. In May, 1971, The Icelander
was produced by the Manitoba Theatre
Centre, in Winnipeg. In the same year it
was performed at the annual Icelandic
Festival. In 1974, under Paul’s direction, it
was performed by a group of players from
Morden, at the Canadian Multicultural
Festival in Ottawa. In a review of the per-
formance the Ottawa Citizen said: “The
cast performs with integrity, though with
varying degrees of skill ... the play is
well-constructed and it speaks from the
heart.” It might have added “and to the
heart.”
Paul has written fifteen full length plays,
among them, one called The Resurrection
of Crazy Horse. The scene of this play is a
remote valley in British Columbia. The
chief character is an Indian, who, with all
the odds stacked against him, qualifies as a
lawyer. The villain is a social system which
leaves much to be desired, as represented
by a mean, grasping, land-hungry white
man. The play offers no sugar-coated de-
piction of Canadian society — a society
that is about a light year away from true
civilization. It is a society in which the
cards are stacked in favor of the crafty and
mean-spirited, one which has turned a
deaf ear to the message of Beethoven’s
Ninth Symphony — all men are brothers.
In his dictionary, Dr. Johnson defines
an essay as “a loose sally of the mind, an
irregular indigested piece, not a regular
and orderly composition.” In simpler
words, an essay is a leisurely and discursive
reflection on men and manners. Paul Si-
gurdson is quite a good hand at the familiar
essay. At a few removes, his essays have
the genuine Elia flavor. In some of them,
notably “Be Serious — It’s Golf’ and “The
Art Show,” he is in a playful mood. On
golf, he offers this counsel: “There is only
one way to approach the game of golf. You
must take it seriously. Don’t appear at the
first tee like a misplaced Haight-Ashbury
hippie, togged in blue jeans, running shoes
and a black ten gallon hat, brim up and
askew on your head. Don’t resurrect your
old uncle Jockerby’s ash-shafted clubs,
and don’t be seen with any of those freshly
enamelled balls you buy from the little
link-rats at the entrance gate.” In short, Be