bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Book Reviews
Authors: Falk Signi , Meserve Walter , Weales Gerals , Pronko Leonard , Davis Jed , Barnes Robert , Hill Claude , Woodward James , Lesage Laurent , Page Malcom , Armstrong William , Trousson Raymond , Trowbridge Clinton
Published: April 2013

Brom Weber, Sherwood Anderson, reviewed by Signi Falk

Gerald Weales, Tennessee Williams, reviewed by Signi Falk

Robert Hogan, Arthur Miller, reviewed by Signi Falk

James M. Salem, A Guide To Critical Reviews Part I American From O'Neill To Albee, reviewed by Walter J. Meserve

Garff B. Wilson, A History Of American Acting, reviewed by Gerald Weales

Pierre Melese, Beckett, reviewed by Leonard Pronko

Isabel B. Burger, Creative Play Acting: Learning Through Drama(2nd Ed.), reviewed by Jed H. Davis

Willis Knapp Jones, Behind Spanish American Footlights, reviewed by Robert J. Barnes

Richard H. Allen, An Annotated Arthur Schnitzler Bibliography, reviewed by Claude Hill

Irwin Weil, Gorky. His Literary Development And Influence On Soviet Intellectual Life, reviewed by James B. Woodward

John Gaywood Linn, The Theater In The Fiction Of Marcel Proust, reviewed by Laurent Lesage

John Kershaw, The Present Stage. New Directions In The Theatre Today, reviewed by Malcom Page

Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy, reviewed by William A. Armstrong

Aureliu Weiss, Le Monde Theatral De Michel De Ghelderode, reviewed by Raymond Trousson

Leonard Moss, Arthur Miller, reviewed by Cilnton W. Trowbridge

Edward Murray, Arthur Miller, Dramatist, reviewed by Cilnton W. Trowbridge
The Two Published Versions Of Sean O'Casey's Within The Gates
Authors: Todd
Published: April 2013

THE ALTERATIONS MADE IN Sean O'Casey's early plays in the course of their production at Dublin's Abbey Theatre are fairly well known. But the changes made in certain later plays have received less attention, though these are recorded in two different published versions, and though we can be more certain with the later plays that they were made not merely to suit the taste of a particular audience or management but because O'Casey himself saw them as improvements. Some of them are indicated, rather vaguely, in the collected edition. On the dust cover of the second volume, published in 1949, which contains The Silver Tassie, Within the Gates and The Star Turns Red, Macmillan's note that 'certain important revisions to facilitate stage production have been made for this edition; and both Within the Gates and The Silver Tassie are described on their title pages as stage versions. But no further information is given on the substance of these revisions, and in the third volume of the collected edition, published in 1951, there is nothing at all to suggest that it makes any changes from earlier editions of its plays. Each of the plays in these volumes appeared as a book before it was seen in the theatre, and each had at least one stage production between its first publication and its appearance in the collected edition.
Yeats's The Hour Glass
Authors: Parker
Published: April 2013

IN THE OPENING YEARS OF THIS CENTURY, Yeats was consolidating the work of his first period of playwriting activity. On Baile's Strand (1903), The King's Threshold (1904) and Deirdre (1907) were the first works of his dramatic maturity. These plays share a unity of conception and tone which contrasts with the diversity and uncertainty of the other plays of this first major period. In the search for a dramatic conception and technique, he tried out many and various modes, ranging from the symbolist dreaminess of The Shadowy Waters to the broad peasant humour of The Pot of Broth. The Hour Glass was a by-product of this search, and it has received scant attention because of its very obvious defects.

The central Haw in its dramatic scheme is a failure to make its spiritual world, which is set up our our admiration against a material world, convincing or even tangible. The agon fails to engage our attention. And yet the play has more to offer than is commonly supposed, and its revised versions are particularly valuable for the evidence which they afford of Yeats's developing dramaturgy during the Abbey period.
The Mythic Pattern In Lorca's Blood Wedding
Authors: Zimbardo
Published: April 2013

LORCA'S Blood Wedding ENJOYS A CURIOUSLY PARADOXICAL FAME. ,Critics are unanimous in praising it, both as an expression of Lorca's best mode, his "Andalusian vision" and as one of the finest products of that twentieth century movement in drama which tries to find new roots in the elemental soil. Yet the praise itself is damning, for we have been led to think of Lorca's plays as "peasant drama," so Spanish in their symbolism as to be incomprehensible beyond the locale which inspired them. For example, in the judgment of Angel del Rio, Blood Wedding "may very well miss becoming a world classic because of its local color and the fact that its action seems limited and appears to lack real spiritual content ... a great deal of its atmosphere can be communicated only to a Spanish-speaking public steeped in Spanish artistic traditions." This perception of the play not only confines it to the Spanish speaking world, but suggests that its atmosphere is its crucial ingredient. Elemental emotion, or atmosphere, is thought to constitute the very meaning of Blood Wedding. "Sensuality, hatred, love and tragic destiny bringing with it a bloody and violent death are the central themes of this play." Moreover, the confusion of the atmosphere with theme, unfortunately suggesting melodrama, extends even to close critical interpretation. Campbell, for example, in discussing the lullaby of Act I asserts in one breath that it is evocative and meaningless: "though it means little enough, yet [it] suggests ... terror and tragedy," or again, "In spite of its lack of meaning, this 'nonsense rhyme' creates the same ominous atmosphere as the nonsense of Edgar in Lear." Our response to Blood Wedding is generally to praise its elemental power and then refuse to take it seriously.
Tragic Effect In The Hairy Ape
Authors: Clark Marden
Published: April 2013

The Hairy Ape HAS BEEN WIDELY PRAISED and widely reprinted. Most reviewers and critics have agreed that it has unusual power and unusual ability to project its sense of tragedy. But critics have disagreed on where that sense of tragedy comes from and, in consequence, on basic matters of interpretation. Early critics saw its power in its brutal naturalism, for a long time hardly noticing the expressionistic techniques—and disregarding O'Neill's explicit instructions that the treatment of the scenes "should by no means be naturalistic." More recently commentators have recognized some of the complex ways in which this comparatively direct and simple play works. I like much of Doris V. Falk's analysis in psychoanalytic and existential terms. She seems especially germane when she suggests that Yank in his "belonging" "has abdicated his manhood, has ceased to be an 'existent' and becomes a passive, vegetative being at the mercy of forces outside himself and beyond his control." However we interpret "belonging," we miss O'Neill's play if we interpret it as good. Yet as late as 1947 Joseph Wood Krutch, perhaps the most sensitive and appreciative of O'Neill's critics, was able to describe Yank as "a man who, however brutalized, remains a man until he loses his sense of 'belonging,' and thereby inevitably becomes an animal." The truth, I am convinced, is almost diametrically opposite this. I would describe Yank as a man who, by glorying in his merely belonging, contributes to his own brutalization, who remains a brute until he gets jarred out of that sense of belonging and then inevitably moves toward becoming a man, in the process inevitably destroying himself.
Oscar Wilde And His First Comedy
Authors: Mikhail
Published: April 2013

IT IS NOT EASY, IT SEEMS, to find out how Oscar Wilde was launched on his brief career as a comic playwright. Wilde himself said that he wrote plays "to please myself." William Rothenstein supports this view by saying that in writing plays Wilde was "making legitimate use of the artifice which was, in fact, natural to him." P. P. Howe also finds that "it is easy to see that a writer ... the best of whose work had always the quality of good conversation, would turn to the theater to hear, as it were, his own voice." G. ]. Renier asserts that Lady Windermere's Fan was brought forth by Wilde "out of the abundance of his fancy and his verbal facility." George Rowell holds that "Wilde wanted a medium for his epigrams, and lazily chose the model most readily to hand [the problem play]." Lynton Hudson, on the other hand, maintains that Wilde "turned to the theatre because he needed money.” Archibald Henderson also agrees with Hudson and adds that it dawned upon Wilde that Tom Robertson, H. G. Byron, Sheridan and W. S. Gilbert were living factors in the English drama. "While little scope was allowed the creator of the higher forms of dramatic art," he says, "in the field of burlesque and farcical comedy the artist was allowed very great freedom in England. It was under the pressure of such convictions that Wilde sought a hazard of new fortunes." Arthur Ransome, however, thinks that "the spectacular effects of the theatre ... drew Wilde to the writing of plays." Boris Brasol believes that "the fiasco of his dramaturgic experiments" prompted Wilde to write his social comedies.9 According to Arthur Symons, "About the year 1891 the idea came to him that the abounding wit, which he had kept till then chiefly for the entertainment of his friends, would be turned quite naturally into a new kind of play."
Frank Wedekind And Bertolt Brecht: Notes On A Relationship
Authors: Gittleman Sol
Published: April 2013

ONE OF THE MOST DIRECT AND SIGNIFICANT literary affinities in the modern theater has been that between Frank Wedekind, a truly major (and generally unheralded) innovator in the development of contemporary European drama, and Bertolt Brecht, the disciple whom he most clearly and markedly influenced. Even a cursory examination of their lives, theories, and techniques demonstrates to what considerable extent Brecht accepted Wedekind both as his personal and ideological mentor. Significantly, this was no academic literary influence such as Ibsen-Miller or Strindberg-O'Neill; with Wedekind-Brecht there was a deeply tangible, personal and physical impact which bordered on hero-worship on the part of the young Brecht during his student days in Munich in 1918. At that time Wedekind was generally recognized as "the greatest literary theatre figure in Munich" and was a dominant personality in every aspect of intellectual life throughout Germany. Above all Wedekind was a figure of great controversy, the darling of the Bohemians, the unchallenged leader of the avant-garde.
Reconciliation Of Movement And Form In Diana And Tuda
Authors: Feng Carole
Published: April 2013

IN HIS BOOK, The Age of Pirandello, Landor MacClintock describes Pirandello's theory of "movement versus form" as a varying expression for what was called "by the Church 'body and soul,' by Rousseau 'nature and civilization,' by Freud 'id, ego, and superego’.” "Movement versus form," then, becomes an expression of the eternal dichotomy or polytomy of man as a social animal. This idea is manifested in Pirandello's work, M acClintock feels, as the "contrast between the fluidity of 'life' and the fixity which men attempt to impose upon it in art and in social conduct." Pirandello's play Diana and Tuda, then, becomes an expression of this fundamental idea" that 'life' and 'form' are antithetical and antipathetical." This interpretation of the play is essentially in agreement with the one expounded earlier by Domenico Vittorini in his book, The Drama of Luigi Pirandello, as Vittorini's chapter dealing with Diana and Tuda is entitled "Life Rebels Against the Fixity of Art." Both these interpretations, I think, do not take fully into consideration the idea of life and form expressed by Pirandello himself in his "Preface to Six Characters in Search of an Author."
A Reading Of Ionesco's The Killer
Authors: Purdy Strother
Published: April 2013

.IN 1963 IONESCO GAVE A SERIES OF ANSWERS to the question, "Why does a writer write?" One of them was, "[I write] because I wish to understand the world; because I would place, at least for myself, a little order in that immense chaos." Strange words to the ears of those who have come to believe that Ionesco shows us the chaos of the world by putting chaos onstage, who would agree, for instance, with the Dictionnaire de litterature contemporaine, which states that the theater of Ionesco is "the most perfect antithesis one could imagine to the theater of Sartre, where the thought always precedes the theatrical expression," and concludes, "Each play of Ionesco defies critical explication . . . to apply it . . . is to risk making oneself into one of Ionesco's own comic characters." This is quite false; Ionesco is not practising Dada, even in The Bald Soprano; his plays are just as well constructed to transmit ideas as Sartre's, but in a more sophisticated way. The way varies—in Rhinoceros it is very close to allegory; in The Killer, a much more complex work, it is a group of symbolic correspondences. Several of these have been identified in critical articles, generally within a comparative study of several plays, but there has not yet been an attempt to bring them all together and show that they make sense, or "order," together. With mild defiance of Ionesco's remarks about critics, I should like to make such an attempt.
Hamm, Cloy, And Dramatic Method In Endgame
Authors: Easthope Antony
Published: April 2013

ONE WAY IN WHICH A PLAY HOLDS THE ATTENTION of an audience for the duration of its performance is by presenting an action which may be formulated as a question: Who killed Laius? How will Hamlet revenge his father? Endgame has a plot at least to the extent that it holds its audience with an uncertainty, one which is continuously reiterated from the stage: Will Clov leave Hamm? At the end, when the final tableau shows Clov standing there, with umbrella, raincoat, and bag, unable to stay and unable to go, the question remains unresolved. Nevertheless, any discussion of Endgame, including one which proposes to consider the play's dramatic method, should begin with this question, or rather with the relationship between Hamm and Clov from which it arises. And since Clov is for the most part a passive victim, a pawn dominated by Hamm's active mastery, it is with Hamm that we should start.
Book Reviews
Authors: Nethercot Arthur , Falk Signi , Wellwarth George , Aung Maung , Mikhail
Published: April 2013

John O'Donovan, Shaw And The Charlatan Genius/ A Memoir By John O'Donovan With Eighteen Illustrations, reviewed by Arthur H. Nethercot

Donald Haberman, The Plays Of Thornton Wilder, reviewed by Signi Falk

Max Spalter, Brecht's Tradition, reviewed by George E. Wellwarth

James R. Brandon, Theatre In Southeast Asia, reviewed by Maung Htin Aung

Epifanio San Juan, The Art Of Oscar Wilde, reviewed by E. H. Mikhail
Dramatic Form: The Example Of Godot
Authors: Trousdale Marion
Published: April 2013

IN THE THEATER'S CANNIBALISTIC HABITOF making its own image part of the matter of a play there are certain interesting implications regarding the mechanics of form. Robert Nelson has argued that the play-within- a-play reveals the dramatist's controlling conception of the theater, and it is possible it seems to see in an inner form a personal gestalt that the outer form need not reveal. But formally there is something more involved. For if an art form can use the fact and nature of its own being for part of its statement, what is implied is that in the form itself there exists potential statement. This seems self-evident. But the implication is that theater, like painting, can divest itself of its outer form. For if the theater can make of its mimetic aspect a vehicle, in Wimsatt's sense, then theoretically at least it can make of it the dominant vehicle. What we normally think of as the mechanics of a play can become not only the dominant but the essential mode of statement. It is this I feel that accounts both for the importance and the uniqueness of Waiting for Godot.
Nigerian Drama In English
Authors: Ferguson John
Published: April 2013

NIGERIA HAS HIGH INDIGENOUS TRADITIONS OF dramatic dance and masquerade associated with religious festivals; the parallels with what is known of the origins of Greek drama are close enough to warrant a full-scale investigation, though it seems that for the most part the festivals have remained at the level of dramatic dancing and have not worked through to a full dance-drama. None the less there is reenactment of moments of myth, and a high level of mimetic expression, and it has become clear that more sophisticated drama will wisely and rightly incorporate these elements.
Tennessee Williams' Persistent Battle Of Angels
Authors: Quirino Leonard
Published: April 2013

WHEN TENNESSEE WILLIAMS PUBLISHED THE TEXT of Orpheus Descending which, in its first incarnation on Broadway in 1957 had lasted only sixty-eight performances, he included in the same volume the play on which it was based, Battle of Angels, which had opened in Boston in 1940 and had never reached Broadway at all. Read together, the two plays reveal a highly respectable reason for their commercial and aesthetic failure: the author's frantic ambition to make each of them a compendium of almost everything he believed about life and its artistic reflection in drama. In each of the plays, Williams attempted to amalgamate tragedy (both Greek and domestic), melodrama (both metaphysical and psychological), morality play (both frankly allegorical and subtly symbolic), ritualistic drama (with overt and covert mythic referents) and romantic mood play (both visually and verbally poetic). Each of the plays thematically attempts to depict sexual repression as the basis of religious sublimation and social hypocrisy, to portray the inability of love and sex to counteract God-given aloneness, and to sketch a portrait of the life and fate of the artist as a pariah-scapegoat in quest of meaning in a waste land. Above all, each of the plays attempts to celebrate existence as a continuous battle of the forces of light against those of darkness in which the former, though cruelly defeated (often by mutiny within their own ranks) are never totally destroyed though they appear never destined to win.
The Chain And The Circle A Structural Comparison Of If Waiting For Godot And Endgame
Authors: Schoell Konrad
Published: April 2013

BECKETT'S FIRST TWO PLAYS REPRESENT two different principles of construction, on which his dramatic oeuvre is based. On the one hand are his one-act plays, Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape, Come and Go as well as the radio plays All That Fall, Embers, Words and Music and Cascando; the TV play Eh Joe, Film and the pantomime Act without Words I. On the other hand, there are the two-act plays, Waiting for Godot, Happy Days, Play, and also the pantomime in two parts Act without Words II. None of Beckett's published plays comprises more than two acts. Waiting for Godot is his longest and his only full-length play. His theater writing grows continuously shorter: the performance of his last theater play Come and Go hardly takes five minutes. There is little relation between the number of acts of a play and the duration of its performance. Endgame in one act is longer than the two plays in two acts, Happy Days and Play.
Edward Albee's Tiny Alice: A Note Of Re-Examination
Authors: Davidson Richard Allan
Published: April 2013

EDWARD ALBEE'S Tiny Alice SUSTAINS neither the acute artistic control nor the consummate theatrical dialogue of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf or the Zoo Story~ but it attempts to be more metaphysically provocative than either. And in the 1964-1965 New York production the attempt was successful. (However, the compensating talents of a John Gielgud, an Irene Worth, a William Hutt were, in Tiny Alice, more necessary to support the somewhat shaky substratum and camouflage the plethora of superficial quips-that so often pass for deeply probing comments on being—than, say, an Arthur Hill and an Uta Hagen were essential to the success of Virginia Woolf.) In this drama perhaps more profundity is attempted than in any of Mr. Albee's other plays; less is actually realized—at least on the printed page. Mr. Albee's success rests on his superior reinforcement of the verbal with the visual.
Time, Fantasy, And Reality In Night Of The Iguana
Authors: Leon Ferdinand
Published: April 2013

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS TELLS US HE CALLED The Glass Menagerie, his first major success, a "memory play" because it derived from memories of his youth in St. Louis. In The Night of the Iguana, his latest memory play, the source of recollection belongs to his characters. Time metes out to each a portion of pain: a vivid sense of the fantastic and a unique vision of reality. The play opened at the Royale Theatre in New York on December 28, 1961. Several weeks later, Williams won his third New York Critics Circle Award.
Ugo Betti's Troubled Waters
Authors: Salmon Eric
Published: April 2013

DIRECTING, RECENTLY, THE FIRST PRODUCTION IN English of Ugo Betti's "Troubled Waters" (Aqua Turbate) set me wondering about Betti's ultimate standing as a playwright. That he was possessed of a fine and sensitive mind is not by now in question and that he was a natural-born writer is also, surely, beyond doubt; but whether the cast of his writing fell naturally into the dramatic mold is much more a moot point, and worth debating, I think. His plays are dangerously overloaded with mere ideas, which seem often to exist independently of the play's central experience or even of the essential nature Of the characters themselves: not that the ideas are precisely irrelevant, but that they usurp by outside comment the theater's ultimate purpose of a re-creation of the reality of experience. They tend to superimpose opinionated and intellectual solutions on particular problems, rather than allowing the plays to reveal, by the sudden juxtaposition of unrealised and previously unperceived relationships of things, the truth of being humanly alive.
Brecht: An AristotelianMalgre Lui
Authors: Dickson Keith
Published: April 2013

BRECHT WOULD APPEAR AT FIRST SIGHT to make a much better Platonist than an Aristotelian. Plato, with his deep-rooted distrust of the emotions as a permanent threat to the hegemony of reason, banished all but hard-headed didactic poets from his Utopia, whereas Aristotle commends the cathartic emotionalism of tragedy. Brecht, equally suspicious of the emotions, obstinately affecting the dress and mannerisms of an unsentimental, tough-minded proletarian boor, repeatedly stressed the rationalistic element of his theatre and the utilitarian value of literature in general as a didactic stimulus towards sociopolitical (i.e. Marxist) thinking. Moreover, from 1931 onwards, Brecht consistently describes his 'epic' dramaturgy as 'nicht-aristotelisch.' In view of the invariably polemical nature of the context 'non-Aristotelian' is scarcely a strong enough rendering of his term, and 'anti-Aristotelian' would be nearer the mark. Yet Aristotle cast a longer shadow than Brecht and most of his critics would care to admit.
Theory And Practice In Artaud And Carballido
Authors: Peden Margaret
Published: April 2013

EMILIO CARBALLIDO IS GENERALLY CONCEDED to be the best of the contemporary playwrights in Mexico. He is certainly among the most prolific, and he is the most productive in regard to imaginative, sound theatrical pieces. Also, his work is recognized and appreciated. Scarcely a year has passed in the last fifteen in which Carballido has not been awarded an academic or critical prize for his work.

In addition to his productivity, Carballido stands alone in another aspect, in his variety and diversity. Mexican theater has generally been a staid, traditional theater. The large body of works since its emergence in the late twenties and thirties has been realistic-examinations of the emerging middle class, popular reviews of the music hall variety, and a militantly self-conscious social theater. There are striking exceptions of course, especially recently. Carlos Solorzano, for instance, has been experimenting with a theater that uses dance and music to create a poetic reality, and Elena Garro's theater is almost completely theater of fantasy. Nevertheless, the total picture remains traditional and realistic.
The Birth Of Dion Boucicault
Authors: Johnson Albert
Published: April 2013

SINCE THE DEATH IN 1890 OF THE Irish-American playwright Dion Boucicault and especially since his entry in The Dictionary of National Biography, there have existed two versions of his birth date: 26 December 1820 or 20 December 1822. During the last half of his life Boucicault himself claimed that he was eighteen when London Assurance was produced on 4 March 1841, and in an article for The North American Review he stated that he was born on 26 December 1822. An unofficial substantiation of this date as well as of his legitimacy has rested upon The Career of Dion Boucicault, a pamphlet or booklet by Charles Lamb Kenney, Boucicault's schoolfellow and life-long friend. Kenney's affirmation cannot be accepted, however, because he did not write the booklet. Boucicault wrote it and Kenney signed his name, according to Louise Thorndyke, Boudcault's third wife.
The Lost Past In Death Of A Salesman
Authors: Bates Barclay
Published: April 2013

Death of a Salesman HAS BEEN CORRECTLY CHARACTERIZED as a play about the triumph of substance over image. Willy Loman is destroyed because he fails to see that men buy appearances only in their leisure. But Death of a Salesman is also about the triumph of the present over the past. Public Willy is the modern gladhanded salesman, but private Willy is four anachronisms: he is the archetypal cherisher of the pastoral world, the pre-industrial-revolution artisan, the ham-handed outlaw frontiersman, and the dutiful patriarchal male intent upon transmitting complex legacies from his forbears to his progeny. Hence one may argue that in a sense it is Willy's civilization, which cannot encourage or even tolerate these anachronisms, that truly destroys him.
Mr. Pinter's Belinda
Authors: Hinchliffe Arnold
Published: April 2013

THE BASIC QUESTION, PROBABLY, is where has Pinter been going since The Caretaker? From The Roam to The Caretaker, with one or two exceptions, his work seems all of a piece. It concerns people living pretty much alone and if or when they have made the crucial adjustment to society there will be time for them to think of other things. Pinter himself has always insisted that he deliberately chooses a brief but climactic moment in their lives, and that there is no reason to suppose that they do not have girl friends or political beliefs, but the impression remains of shabby people in shabby rooms threatened by enigmatic interior or exterior forces. In one of the "Comedies of Menace" the initial crude physical violence of The Room was gradually refined without in any way lessening the intensity, and with this refinement the comedy became more uncertain. Laughter at the later plays was often relief from what they were implying. Television liberated Pinter from his shabby room, or at least coincided with a movement out. His characters were younger, more elegant and articulate, and their apartments more spacious and tasteful. The battle for domination now centered obviously on sex. Characters are now "in society" and concerned with this particular, personal, relationship. Illusions and lies, always a part of the Pinter strategy (it has never been easy to tell where fact ends and fiction or fancy begins) are now used as an instrument for achieving or maintaining a relationship of a sexual kind with another person. But the expectations aroused by comedies like The Collection and The Lover were baffled by Tea Party and confounded by The Homecoming.
Self-Revelation In An Ideal Husband
Authors: Mikhail
Published: April 2013

DESPITE ITS APPARENT OBJECTIVITY, An Ideal Husband is self-revelatory. In a letter to his friend Reginald Turner, written in 1899, Wilde said:

I read a great deal, and correct the proofs of An Ideal Husband, shortly to appear. It reads rather well, and some of its passages seem prophetic of tragedy to come.

A sense of damnation, a foreboding of tragic failure, is to be found in the writings of Oscar Wilde long before it is sounded in An Ideal Husband. It is the theme of the sonnet Helas! as it is of The Picture of Dorian Gray. The motive of the outcast is conspicuous in Wilde's two previous comedies, Lady Windermere's Fan and A Woman of No Importance, where both Mrs. Erlynne and Mrs. Arbuthnot describe in moving words the lot of an outcast; but it reaches an ominous significance in An Ideal Husband, written shortly before Wilde's own fall. One cannot avoid the impression that An Ideal Husband is an oblique expression of Wilde's inner torment, using Sir Robert Chiltern as a mask. Wilde has described in Chiltern's person his own fear of an imminent scandal. Charles Ricketts remembers Wilde saying of the play when he insisted on Ricketts being present at the first night: "It was written for ridiculous puppets to play, and the critics will say, 'Ah, here is Oscar unlike himself!,—though in reality I became engrossed in writing it, and it contains a great deal of the real Oscar." Mrs. Cheveley, while threatening Sir Robert, actually presages with amazing accuracy one prominent feature of Wilde's downfall, when she says
The Cocktail Party And The Illusion Of Autonomy
Authors: Oberg Arthur
Published: April 2013

T. S. ELIOT'S CONCERN WITH ESTABLISHING a defining language in his verse plays extended to the end of his career. Although Eliot wondered after writing The Cocktail Party "whether there is any poetry in the play at all," The Cocktail Party and the plays that followed reveal a continuing interest in the nuances of language, if not in the highly imaged, poetic language of the earlier plays and poetry. The verse, while becoming less dense, placed a greater reliance upon the movement of the verse line than ever before. What The Cocktail Party lost in textured poetry it gained in modulation and inflection. Eliot reaches for the right or "valid" word, the turn of thought or phrase reflected in an increasingly stylized verse. Words give the impression of being self-creating, spoken by characters in search of a more precise speech.
Book Reviews
Authors: Cohen Ruby , Flanagan John , Miller Jordan
Published: April 2013

Eric Bentley, The Theatre Of Commitment, reviewed by Ruby Cohn

Jane De Hart Mathews, The Federal Theatre, 1935-1939, reviewed by John T. Flanagan

Frederick. J. Hunter, A Guide To The Theatre And Drama Collections At The University Of Texas, reviewed by Jordan Y. Miller
Synge's Prose Writings: A First View Of The Whole
Authors: Price Alan
Published: April 2013

THE PUBLICATION RECENTLY OF THE Oxford University Press definitive edition of ]. M. Synge: Collected Works, Volume II, Prose enables the non-dramatic writings of Synge to be seen as a whole for the first time. The sight is impressive and should further increase his standing which has been steadily going up since the publication of the official biography by David H. Greene and Edward M. Stephens ln 1959.
Sainthood For Millionaires: Major Barbara
Authors: Watson Barbara
Published: April 2013

THE MAJOR DIFFICULTY OF Major Barbara lies in its simple and necessary irony, which is only the irony of life itself. Shaw, in his preface to the play, gives copious "First Aid to Critics," but the confusion remains, partly because, as he himself points out, if you tell the truth nobody will believe you, and partly because this preface deals with ideas rather than with dramatic method. That method is, as Cheserton calls it, "the grave, solemn and sacred joke for which the play itself was written,"1 an irony designed to show that we may not accept the least of capitalism's benefits without accepting the last of its depredations: also that the damage it does and the audacity of its excuses beggar invective and so thoroughly satirize themselves that no response is left but irony, a weapon Shaw wields as superbly as Swift.
O'Casey And Yeats And The Druid
Authors: Group David
Published: April 2013

SEAN O'CASEY SHOULD HAVE BEEN RIPE FOR REVENGE after W. B. Yeats rejected The Silver Tassie in 1928. His first three plays had rescued the declining Abbey Theatre from artistic and financial disaster, and his new Expressionistic play had been written in precisely the experimental spirit which Yeats had described in founding an Irish Theatre dedicated to "that freedom to experiment which is not found in theatres in England, and without which no new movement in art or literature can succeed." But Yeats and his fellow directors said no-the final decision was Yeats's, the worst blunder in the history of the Abbey Theatre-and the bewildered, outraged O'Casey, his career as a dramatist disrupted and endangered, was cut off from his theater and his country. Nevertheless, in the years following the rejection, O'Casey, a man who seldom forgave an injustice, defended and celebrated the genius of Yeats, though he was understandably slow in forgetting Yeats's role in the rejection. And this refusal to seek revenge tells us something about the genius of O'Casey.
Trials In The Soundscape: The Radio Plays Of Samuel Beckett
Authors: Cleveland Louise
Published: April 2013

DESPITE THEIR FREQUENCY AND AMPLITUDE, studies of Samuel Beckett seldom break the silence surrounding his radio plays. The thematic power of these plays is unquestioned, but their technical virtuosity goes largely unrecognized. Beckett's own concern with sound and listener is evident throughout his work, from his early theoretical essay Proust (1931) to his return to the radio medium in Cascando (1963), yet the importance of the radio plays as experiments in sound has not yet been explored.! The place to begin is with the soundscape itself, which Beckett expands as a theater of perceptual struggles analagous to those in his stage plays or novels.
Samuel Beckett's Film
Authors: Hampton Charles
Published: April 2013

IF THE BECKETT CHARACTER IS TO AVOID the realization of his nothingness, he must keep himself between two opposite extremes. If he chooses to use persons as reflecting others to maintain himself in the impression of existence he runs the risk of realizing his own nothingness by glimpsing his reflection in their eyes On the other hand, in isolating himself to avoid this danger he finds that his re .. fleeting others gradually diminish until he is again reflected by nothing. Beckett's first film, entitled Film,is the portrayal of a character who has realized the danger of reflection in the eyes of others and so avoids all eyes, animal and divine, as well as human. But in his frenzy to isolate himself from these, he inadvertently abolishes all reflecting others and so sees himself for what he is.
Whatever Happened to Arnold Wesker?: His Recent Plays
Authors: Page Malcolm
Published: April 2013

BETWEEN 1958 AND 1960 ARNOLD WESKER HAD FOUR PLAYS staged in London, which made him one of the two or three best known of the young dramatists who emerged in Britain in the late fifties. These plays were the 'Trilogy' made up of Chicken Soup with Barley (1958), Roots (1959, seen off-Broadway in 1961), and I'm Talking about Jerusalem (1960), together with The Kitchen (1959, filmed 1961, off-Broadway 1966). John Russell Taylor wrote in 1962 that "Wesker has acquired a greater reputation on the strength of a still relatively small body of work than any other dramatist of his generation. . . . The eventual performance of all three Wesker Trilogy plays in sequence at the Royal Court in 1960 found the critics almost without exception ready to bring out their most unequivocally enthusiastic adjectives, and hail the work as an unparalleled achievement."! A. R. Jones praised the trilogy in Critical Quarterly: "Wesker has rewritten the myth of our time and rewritten it from the point of view of those who suffered and, somehow, survived the crises and disillusionments of the last twenty-five years. It is ... a profoundly moving embodiment in imaginative terms of his generation's experience of the history of our time .... To say that he is promising would be insulting; the trilogy represents a real achievement." A. Alvarez said of The Kitchen, "This seems to me, without any qualifications at all, the best play of the decade," and after three of the plays had been performed Alan Pryce-Jones claimed that Wesker was "the playwright among his contemporaries whose future gives the strongest promise of glory."
Pinter's A Slight Ache As Ritual
Authors: Burkman Katherine
Published: April 2013

THE DRAMA OF HAROLD PINTER EVOLVES in an atmosphere of mystery. While the surface of life is realistically detailed, the patterns that lie below the surface are as obscure as the motives of the characters, the pause, as prominent and suggestive as the dialogue. "The more acute the experience the less articulate its expression," is the author's own defense of his technique, a technique that he uses to heighten the sense of mystery and of menace in A Slight Ache.

Still, the audience experiencing Pinter's "comedy of menace" is not simply thrust into the world of a nameless terror and left there. Although Pinter is unwilling to explain the mysteries in his dramas and is impatient with critics who seek to pin down his meanings, a close examination of his plays reveals their careful structure and precise use of symbol. At the same time that his art reflects the mysterious universe as he perceives it, it also attempts to approach the mystery that it reflects.
Bernard Shaw and Psychoanalysis
Authors: Nethercot Arthur
Published: April 2013

IT IS NO UNUSUAL SOCIAL OR psychological phenomenon to find the members of each new age, especially its artists, preening themselves on their Newness, though sometimes they are self-critical enough to allow a note of irony to intrude into their claims. Thus Ber~ nard Shaw, in his preface to the Independent Theatre edition of Widowers! Houses in 1893, began by quoting from his quondam collaborator, William Archer's, review of the play in The lVorld~ which alluded mockingly to "the New Drama, the New Criticism, the New Humour, and all the other glories of our renovated world."l Yet, although in the preface to St. Joan (1924) Shaw admitted "that the fashion in which we think changes like the fashion of our clothes, and that it is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period," both he and Archer made the attempt, even if in most ways Shaw went far beyond his fellow-critic in his iconoclasm and open-mindedness to new ideas.
Deirdre: The “Mingling Of Contraries" In Plot And Symbolism
Authors: Slatterly Margaret
Published: April 2013

IN HIS ESSAY "Poetry and Tradition," William Butler Yeats discusses the artist's use of contrasting elements and offers a theoretical statement which may be applied to his own poetic drama Deirdre: "The nobleness of the arts is in the mingling of contraries, the extremity of sorrow, the extremity of joy, the perfection of personality, the perfection of the surrender, overflowing turbulent energy, and marmorean stillness." The pattern of tragic action in Deirdre illustrates this principle as the drama develops from the fear of treachery, through the realization of this evil, to the final triumph of love over fear in death. Thus, the play shows a "mingling . . . of the perfection of personality [and] the perfection of its surrender," as Deirdre's death becomes her victory and the final testament of her love for Naisi.
J. M. Synge's Deirdre Of The Sorrows: Beauty Only
Authors: Fackler Herbert
Published: April 2013

JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE'S Deirdre of the Sorrows is his one work of literary derivation. It alone is drawn from the "epic cycles which the Irish literary movement had proposed as the central reservoir for Irish drama." The story of Deirdre had been told dramatically more than once before: besides Yeats's Deirdre in 1906, George Russell's Deirdre had been produced in 1901. When there was some concern among Synge's friends that he might be accused of copying from Yeats and Russell, Synge replied, "Oh no-there isn't any danger of that. People are entitled to use those old stories any way they like. My treatment of the story of Deirdre wouldn't be like either of theirs." Synge was as good as his word. His play, unlike those of his predecessors, deals with Deirdre in a new way. In Synge's play there is a reciprocal sympathy between characters and nature, a surprising reversal of the treatment of death, and a heightened sense of the tragic essence of the old legend that is very nearly Greek in spirit.
Brecht's Galileo: Its Development From Ideational Into Ideological Theater
Authors: Sorensen Otto
Published: April 2013

OF ALL OF BRECHT'S WORKS, perhaps his Leben des Galilei has caused greatest consternation among critics, and for several reasons. Gunter Rohrmoser finds it can be classified neither as tragedy, history, parable, nor as a didactic play. Walter Weideli calls it "the most finished example" of epic theater,2 which it clearly is not, if Brecht's own remarks on it are taken into consideration. In a diary entry of February 25, 1939, three months after completion of the work, the author noted:

The Life of Galileo is technically a great step backward, like Senora Carrar's Rifles. All too opportunistic. The play would have to be completely re-written in order to attain this 'breeze, which comes from new shores,' this rosy dawn of science. Everything more direct, without the interieurs, the 'atmosphere: the empathy ....

And still, even though Brecht worked and reworked the play, he appears never to have been satisfied with it.
Educating the Prohets
Authors: Mitchie James
Published: April 2013

IT IS A PITY THAT SO MUCH twentieth century religious drama lacks the humanizing element of humour. A notable exception is James Bridie. Like the mediaeval dramatists, he did not make the mistake of confusing seriousness with solemnity. In dramatizing the Old Testament story of Jonah, for example, he captured very well the spirit of so many of the Mystery plays, the combination of the sincerely religious with the broadly comic. Of course he did not have to invent the humour; it was there to begin with in the Bible narrative; but he deepened and extended it. Humour, varying from the boisterous to the oblique, from the gently mocking to the astringently ironic, is the powerful solvent of spiritual complacency, ignorant and illiberal narrow-mindedness, and obdurate egoism. It is a humour that stems ultimately from compassion. This, too, was a quality which Bridie shared with the Old Testament author. The affinities between the two writers are unmistakeable, both in attitude and in treatment of their theme. Both obviously hated smug exclusiveness and intolerance; both disliked men whose religion separated them from other people; and both esteemed humility. The author of the book of Jonah clearly implied that the Israelites should realize, with deeper humility, the great honour bestowed on them as the bearer of the message that God is love. Bridie no less clearly indicates that a proper sense of modesty will help a prophet not to confuse his inspired message with his own quite ordinary, fallible self. Being artists, however, both avoid heavy didacticism in conveying their meaning. Thus, instead of arguing about exclusiveness in religion, the Biblical author wrote a tale about it, spun out of his lively inventive mind a story of marvellous events to capture his readers' attention. In adapting this story for the modern theatre Bridie maintained its narrative momentum but broadened its scope and, without overt moralising, brought out its relevance today for all who seek to build walls about their religion.
Book Reviews
Authors: Brie Germaine , Walker Augusta , Gershman Herbert , Day Cyrus , Lesage Laurent , Wilmeth Don , Frazer Winifred , Richmond Farley , Nethercot Arthur , Hartman Murray
Published: April 2013

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Le Theatre Moderne Depuis La Deuxieme Guerre Mondiale, Vol. II, reviewed by Germaine Brie

Arnold Hinchliffe, Harold Pinter, reviewed by Augusta Walker

Henri Behar, Etude Sur Le Theatre Dada Et Surrealiste, reviewed by Herbert S. Gershman

Winifred Dusenbury Frazer, Love As Death In The Iceman Cometh, reviewed by Cyrus Day

John Batchelor, Existence And Imagination, The Theatre Of Henry De Montherlant, reviewed by Laurent Lesage

Maris LeyPiscator, The Piscator Experiment: The Political Theatre, reviewed by Don B. Wilmeth

Paul T. Nolan ed., Provincial Drama In America, I870-I9i6-A Casebook Of Primary Materials, reviewed by Winifred L. Frazer

ina Singha And Reginald Massey, Indian Dances: Their History And Growth, reviewed by Farley Richmond

Bernard Shaw, You Never Can Tell, reviewed by Arthur H. Nethercot

John Russell, American Theatre, reviewed by Murray Hartman
Dialectic And Time In The Condemned Of Altona
Authors: Tembeck Robert
Published: April 2013

THE STRUCTURE OF The Condemned of Altona by Jean-Paul Sartre may be defined spatially by the "downstairs," the Gerlach living room and Werner's office, and the "upstairs" where Frantz has sequestered himself. Temporally, there is on the one hand the tight, rigid time set by the German clock whose gongs begin the action of the play, and on the other an inner time regulated by subjective will and imagination rather than by clocks and watches. A first reading of the play might lead one to associate clock time with the downstairs and inner time with the upstairs and think of the two realms as having nothing in common. One might then be tempted to think of the action of the playas an oscillation between the two poles of the upstairs and the downstairs gradually mounting in tension as the play shifts, quite regular ly, from one pole to the other between acts. The demarcation between the downstairs and the upstairs, however, is not clear-cut. The upstairs is partially linked to the downstairs through the door Leni uses. The downstairs is linked to the upstairs through the three "enormous" photographs of Frantz. There is also an intermingling of the two time schemes. The two flashbacks that take place in the living room make use of an inner time scale. And when in Act IV Johanna leaves her watch with Frantz, he marks time just as precisely as his father while waiting for her return. These preliminary observations indicate that Sartre has patterned this play along dialectical rather than polar lines of action.
The Influence Of The Kabuki Theater On The Films Of Eisenstein
Authors: Levine Norma
Published: April 2013

To EVEN THE MOST CASUAL OBSERVER a Kabuki performance appears extremely stylized. This is so for several reasons. The "aragoto" style of acting (literally "rough business"), is muscular, vigorous, and highly exaggerated. And of course, all women's roles are played by skilled male impersonators so that, while their interpretation of female mannerisms is studiously exact, it is firmly objective. For variety, the Kabuki actor will imitate the rigid movements of the puppets from the classical Puppet theater, in contrast to which his former acting style appears almost naturalistic. But the very heart of stylization is the pose or "mie," a tense, self-contained attitude, as attention-getting and climactic as the aria.
Duerrenmatt's Mass Play
Authors: Pfefferkorn Eli
Published: April 2013

IN EVERY SENSE OF THE WORD, Friedrich Duerrenmatt's The Visit is a mass play. That is to say it is a play about the behavior of the dehumanized masses of the twentieth century as well as a play about the realities underlying the symbolism of the Christian Mass. The Visit studies the behavior of a community as it drifts from unconscious conniving at murder to a conscious participation in a sacrificial killing. In the process of this transformation, from the unconscious to the conscious, the individual is obliterated and becomes absorbed into a mass of people speaking and acting like an automaton. The automaton is fed by a promise of a million pound check. The effacement of the individual is foreshadowed by the "characters" of the play who, with the exception of two, are identified only as numbers, nicknames, professions or community functionaries.