bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
An Investigation of Stoppard's "Hound" and "Foot"
Authors: Crossley Brian
Published: April 2013

IT IS the parodic and satirically self-referential quality of Tom Stoppard's plays that sets him apart from the Juvenalian playwrights of the fifties. Whereas Osborne uses anger as a means of attack upon the world, Stoppard remains the theatrical critic and aims his derision at the mores of drama, and especially at the age-old detective figure of Sophocles' Oedipus. Turning the tradition against itself is the main thrust of his aesthetic attack. Using the modern preoccupation with absurdity and Angst, he strikes home at such figures as T.S. Eliot and his "overwhelming question," which is not to be asked, which one dare not ask, for perhaps there is no answer or only such an answer as it would be better not to know. Stoppard makes game of these notions by the old theatrical trick of inverting them. Throughout his plays the serious forms of the dramatized detective story are reduced to cartoon-like scenes which humorously strip away the conventions on which they are founded. Even the highly visual comic effects appear to mock both blind justice and the Oedipus myth.
Book Reviews
Authors: O'Connor Patricia , Page Malcolm , Imhof Rüdiger , Wolter Jürgen
Published: April 2013

Martha T. Halsey, Antonio Buero Vallejo, reviewed by Patricia O'Connor

Terry W. Browne, Playwrights' Theatre: The English Stage Company At The Royal Court, reviewed by Malcolm Page

Peter Ansorge, Disrupting The Spectacle: Five Years Of Experimental and Fringe Theatre In Britain, reviewed by Malcolm Page

Ronald Hayman, The First Thrust: The Chichester Festival Theatre, reviewed by Malcolm Page

Rudolf Halbritter, Konzeptionsformen Des Modernen Angloamerikanischen Kurzdramas, reviewed by Rüdiger Imhof

Herbert Grabes, ed., Das Amerikanische Drama Der Gegenwart, reviewed by Jürgen Wolter
Dualism and Paradox in the "Puritan" Plays of David Storey
Authors: Stinson John
Published: April 2013

IN HIS CAREER as a dramatist David Storey has by now piled success upon success' but has received relatively little attention from the academic critics. This response, though, is perhaps to be expected. Despite the general infatuation of the daily and weekly reviewers with most of his plays, many critics have shunted him off the track reserved for their really serious attention and been content to regard him as an exponent of cinema verite on the stage, a conscientious naturalist, Of, at best, a skillful documentarian with a certain talent for capturing a mood, a feeling, an atmosphere, and overlaying it with what is merely a semblance of dramatic form. Advocates, on the other hand, are prone to see him as a Yorkshire Chekhov subtly investing materials thought promising only for naturalism with a kind of unforced poetry found as bittersweet experience in the real life of any halfway sensitive soul. Others have suggested Pinter for comparison, seeing in Storey's minimalist techniques and in his silences, not nameless menace, but a kind of saving grace unsuspectingly found abounding in the dreary world of everyday, especially when men come together in work or play. They are prone to see The Contractor, Home, and The Changing Room as muted but beautiful hymns to life.
Modern Drama Studies: An Annual Bibliography
Authors: Carpenter Charles
Published: April 2013

THE PRESENT ANNUAL BIBLIOGRAPHY follows the basic principles and limitations described in the first installment of March 1974. The main objective is to record current scholarship, criticism, and commentary that may prove valuable to students of modern dramatic literature. The bibliography embraces all the expected areas and topics of modern world drama. including playwrights who lived past 1900 (plus Buchner and Becque) and influential men and women of the theatre other than performers. This year's list covers 1976 and further 1975 items, plus a sprinkling of missed 1974 items. The MLA International Bibliography for 1974 supplements the previous list even more, especially with regard to articles in non-literary periodicals and material in non-Roman alphabets. The MLA volumes for 1975 should come out in late summer or early fall.
Comedy and Paradox in Pirandello's Plays (An Hegelian Perspective)
Authors: Paolucci Anne
Published: April 2013

THE TEMPTATION WILL always be strong, for those of us analyzing any aspect of Pirandellian comedy, to begin with an examination-or at least a brief assessment -of the playwright's well-known little book L'Umorismo, On Humor.' I have not wholly resisted that temptation, but I have tried to on two grounds. First, Pirandello's exposition in that book has been carefully examined and evaluated by such experts as Professor Dante della Terza, whose incisive essay "On Pirandello's Humorism" has proved invaluable to most of us interested in the subject, and Professor Antonio Illiano, whose translation of L 'Umorismo (with Daniel Testa) supplies indispensable notes as well as a fine introduction.
Pirandello and Theosophy
Authors: Illiano Antonio
Published: April 2013

AS A "WISDOM-RELIGION" with marked mystical concerns, theosophy has been rooted from time immemorial in the history of mankind, and its original religious beliefs and practices. As a speculative system with both religious and philosophical implications, however, theosophy can be traced back to Plato, and to such early mystical movements and esoteric doctrines as Orphism and pre-Christian gnosticism.
Book Reviews
Authors: Athanason Arthur Nicholas , Morris John
Published: April 2013

Cameron Northouse and Thomas P. Walsh, John Osborne: A Reference Guide, reviewed by Arthur Nicholas Athanason

Ronald Hayman, Tom Stoppard, reviewed by John Morris
"God-Hunting": The Chaos of Worship in Peter Shaffer's Equus and Royal Hunt of the Sun
Authors: Lounsberry Barbara
Published: April 2013

EQUUS and The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Peter Shaffer's masterpieces to date, are mutually revealing. In fact, the historically removed and more elaborate Royal Hunt can help the reader penetrate the starker Equus, as well as the confusion which its modern psychoanalytic metaphor has unfortunately occasioned. For Equus is only peripherally related to the pitfalls of modern psychiatry, just as Royal Hunt is concerned only incidentally with the rape and massacre of the Incan civilization by the Spanish conquistadores. Despite these compelling settings, each play is really an exploration of man's search for gods, what he does when he seems to find them, and how they ultimately elude him.
The Defeat of Naturalism in Arnold Wesker's Roots
Authors: Costello Tom
Published: April 2013

BY ANY COMMON DEFINITION of the term, Arnold Wesker's Roots is bound to be considered for a place as a representative play of modem English naturalism: the focus in the text on working-class culture, the Norfolk dialect, characters presented as determined by environment and habit, the sense of the play having been written as an expose for a particular moment and point in historic time, and last, but not least, the dullness, monotony and literal tone of so much of the dialogue. As naturalism, Roots provides good evidence to support the definition. The trouble is that such evidence is so obvious and imposing that too many productions of the work succumb to it without question. Consequently the public is presented with an experience which fails to reveal the force of the non-naturalistic, even poetic dimensions of Wesker's drama.
Oscar Wilde and the Bunburys
Authors: Green William
Published: April 2013

ONE OF THE MOST MEMORABLE non-appearing characters in drama (and in literature in general) is Bunbury, the imaginary invalid of The Importance of Being Earnest. Non-appearing though he may be, Bunbury was very real and important to Oscar Wilde.
EARLIER ENDGAMES
Authors: Cohn Ruby
Published: April 2013

BECKETT SINKS DEEP WITHIN HIMSELF to write. In his own words: "The only fertile research is excavatory, immersive, a contraction of the spirit, a descent." Such descent differs from the free associative flights of the Surrealists who value every sally. Beckett not only has abandoned hundreds of pages, however, but also painstakingly revises before he publishes. Different works require different re-view, from the minor modifications of Godot (a few passages dropped and a few phrases sharpened) to the major changes of Endgame. Richard Admussen has traced the various versions of Play, as Breon Mitchell has done for Come and Go. John Fletcher and I have commented on the distillation of what we believed to be the first draft of Endgame. However, that draft has an antecedent to which Beckett himself called attention in a letter to his friend, France's eminent Anglicist Jean Jacques Mayoux: "La redaction definitive de Fin de partie est de 56. Mais j'avais aborde ce travail bien avant, peut-etre en 54. Une pre miere, puis une deuxieme version en deux actes avait precede celIe en un acte que vous connaissez." The "deuxierne version en deux actes" is now in the Ohio State University library, whereas the "premiere" version is in the Beckett collection of Reading University, England, and a handwritten version of a brief continuation is in the Trinity College Library of the University of Dublin. We thus have an unparallelled opportunity to follow three stages of Beckett's favorite among his plays.
The Absurd Professor in the Theater of the Absurd
Authors: Fischler Alexander
Published: April 2013

SINCE INCONGRUITY CHARACTERIZES THE PROFESSOR whenever he appears on a conventional Western stage, one wonders what happens to this traditionally absurd figure when he enters the theater of the absurd with Ionesco and Adamov. One anticipates an answer based on the algebraic model of two "negatives" combining to yield a "positive." But this proves to be absurd mathematical reasoning worthy of Ionesco's professor, that is, mostly, though not entirely, false. Negative and positive poles are particularly hard to determine in this case. The professor resists congruity even when he is featured in a sentimental or happy ending. His incongruity is congenital and absolute; he is at odds not only with his surroundings, but with his own self; he is a two-sided figure, combining, for instance, the character of victim with that of executioner, or concealing an intensely active nature under a contemplative mask; his absurdity is a function of his ambiguity; being a simulacrum, all words and pose, he is ideally suited to any theater and can make the most contrived action around him on stage pass for real life. The theater of the absurd could not make the absurd professor seem logical any more than it could make him blend harmoniously with his surroundings. However, by accentuating and accelerating the disjointedness of character, setting and situation, the displacement, as Simone Benmussa would call it, the theater of the absurd turned the professor into a central figure for the representation of man's condition in the modern world, in a way neither Mr. Chips nor his cousins, Moliere's Docteurs, could have represented it.
Interview with Jean Audureau
Authors: Knapp Bettina
Published: April 2013

JEAN AUDUREAU, born on July 2, 1931, in the West of France, has been living in Montpamasse in Paris since 1957. His first play, In Memphis There is a Man with Prodigious Strength, was staged at the Marais Festival in Paris (June, 1966) by the well-known director Antoine Bourseiller. His second, The Young Man (1974), was performed at the Theatre des Amandiers at Nanterre and was directed by P. Debauche. Avant-garde critics acclaimed both works. The Maul opened at the Theatre Oblique in Paris in 1978 and was directed by Henri Ronse.
THE "DAIMONS" OF HEARTBREAK HOUSE
Authors: Nathan Rhoda
Published: April 2013

WHEN OEDIPUS THE KING, blinded by his own hand, gropes his way onto the stage in Sophocles' play, the chorus asks him, "What daimon drove you on?" When King Agamemnon, in Homer's Iliad, seizes Achilles' mistress to compensate for the loss of his own captive girl, he blames an irresistible temptation generated by the dairnons who have befuddled his understanding. To the Greek mind, suspension of rational behavior was never acknowledged as intrinsic to human nature, but always attributed to impulses which might overwhelm the most thoughtful man in times of stress when the daimons chose to exercise their supernatural power. These daimons were not merely poetic or epic conventions. They were realistic reflections of the fears and convictions of a rational people who named them and blamed them for leading them from virtue. Daimonic force, as distinct from the divine, was dangerous, punitive, and irresistible, and, as Medea's nurse observed, only inconsequential people were untouched by its destructive energy. Euripides, the most rational of the tragedians, appeared to have devised his characters to be particularly superstitious. Phaedra, in the Hippolytus, also laid the blame for her infatuation on the daimons. Thus, it would seem that the predicament in which one found oneself had less to do with one's character than with a force which today we might call psychic intervention. Even the most heroic men who prided themselves on their autonomy could be driven from their course by invisible or cunningly disguised daimons who came to them unbidden.
Language as Life: Christopher Fry's Early Plays
Authors: Gillespie Diane Filby
Published: April 2013

POETRY IN THE THEATRE. Christopher Fry says, is a response to the twentieth-century need for a new realism. In saying so, he follows in the wake of W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, and T. S. Eliot, and is joined by other English-speaking dramatists like Archibald MacLeish. Maxwell Anderson. Robert Frost. W. H. Auden, and Christopher Isherwood. However diverse and uneven their achievements are in practice, these men are remarkably consistent in theory: the realistic or naturalistic theatre dominated by imitators of Ibsen's social-problem plays, they insist, must be amplified or replaced. Instead of mundane. trivial human lives lived in powerlessness and despair, they emphasize deeper emotion and sensitivity in man, or they insist that man and his efforts are potentially noble however much his modern environment seems to degrade him. Poetry, they insist, communicates these complexities more successfully than prose. Fry's own emphasis is on the spiritual dimension in the human experience and the poetic language that can say "heaven and earth in one word."
Peter Shaffer's Recurrent Character Type
Authors: Dean Joan
Published: April 2013

PETER SHAFFER'S The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964) and Equus (1973) were both produced by the National Theatre Company; they enjoyed even greater critical and commercial acclaim than his earlier successes. The Battle of Shrivings, however, received almost unanimous scorn from the London critics when it was produced at the Lyric Theatre in February 1970. While The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Equus were hailed for their spectacular dramaturgy, The Battle of Shrivings was seen as a retreat to the comfortable ease of the well-made plot and the domestic setting which worked effectively in Five Finger Exercise (1958) and Black Comedy (1967). Shaffer has since returned to the play, rewriting it as Shrivings (1974). In its present form, Shrivings demonstrates more significant affinities with The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Equus than with his earlier works. These three plays, his most recent full-length dramas, form an impressive triad in which Shaffer recurrently employs certain themes, techniques of characterization, and motifs. They are best considered complementary pieces, shedding and reflecting light upon one another. All three portray a middle-aged man in a crisis of faith: Pizarro and Martin Ruiz in The Royal Hunt oj the Sun, Martin Dysart in Equus, and Mark Askelon in Shrivings all experience profound dissatisfaction with their cultures and their very existences. For each of them, contact with a primitive and vital culture exacerbates this crisis of faith and fuels their need for belief. Though Shaffer's dramatic techniques vary widely among these plays, his most important themes and character types appear with considerable regularity. The failure of modern society to provide a constructive vehicle for man's religious impulses and need for ritualistic worship, the decrepitude of Western religion, and the resultant fragmentation of personality form an important thematic nexus among Shaffer's recent works.
Albee's Seascape: An Adult Fairy Tale
Authors: Gabbard Lucina
Published: April 2013

EDWARD ALBEE'S SEASCAPE is obviously not a realistic play. When the two great lizards slide onto the stage, behaving like ordinary married human beings and speaking perfect English, realism is immediately dispelled. Encounters between human beings and talking animals are the stuff of fairy tales. Bruno Bettelheim, in The Uses of Enchantment, describes a fairy tale as a work of art which teaches about inner problems' through the language of symbols' and, therefore, communicates various depths of meaning to various levels of the personality at various times.' This is the method of Seascape.
Book Reviews
Authors: Saddlemyer Ann , Tracy Gordon , Vowles Richard , Vowles Richard
Published: April 2013

Edward A. Kopper, Jr., LADY ISABELLA PERSSE GREGORY, reviewed by ANN SADDLEMYER

Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, THE MODERN IRISH DRAMA II : LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS 1902-1904, reviewed by ANN SADDLEMYER

Helfried W. Seliger, DAS AMERIKABILD BERTOLT BRECHTS, reviewed by GORDON TRACY

Egil Tornqvist, SVENSKA DRAMASTRUKTURER, reviewed by RICHARD B. VOWLES

Frederick J. Marker, KJELD ABELL, reviewed by RICHARD B. VOWLES
In Defense of Pastor Manders
Authors: Leland Charles
Published: April 2013

PASTOR MANDERS HAS NEVER ENJOYED a good press. His reputation is that of a child of superstition and darkness, an enemy of light and truth, defender of established but decaying or dead values, ugly, oily, domineering. In the words of one recent critic, he is "a petty tyrant who embodies the power of the Church, State, and public opinion . . . an ironically domesticated Napoleon, a drawing-room and committeeroom dictator." Even his use of language is insincere and hypocritical: "a kind of liturgical chant ... like the rhetoric of Brand in a flabby and debased form." On the stage he is often portrayed as sniggering, unctuous, and epicene. Aspersions have been cast on his virility in a well-known essay by a professor of psychiatry who pronounces clinically: "We may reasonably have doubts about his potence."
Ibsen the Poet
Authors: Northam John
Published: April 2013

IT MAY SEEM to you surprising that so much of the general discussion of Ibsen's work in the English language is preoccupied, directly or indirectly, with the distinction between poetry and prose. Your language reflects a unity of concept that English has long lost. We distinguish sharply between poet and prose writer, letting concern with form, in my opinion, destroy that much more significant unity enshrined in your word "dikter"-a word which, it seems to me, defines not by form but by creativeness of spirit. Thus we agonise over Ibsen the poet as against Ibsen the prose writer, try to locate the place, the reasons, the effects of a dislocation in his work where he ceased to be the one and became the other. I want, in this talk, to discuss Ibsen in your terms, as dikter, rather than in ours; as a man through the whole of whose work, poems, poetic dramas, prose dramas, runs a single unifying, creative intelligence. I shall not pretend that I have anything new to say to such an audience as this; but at a celebration, and this is an occasion of celebration, it may not come amiss to recall, with admiration and gratitude, the familiar attributes of the dikter we are gathered to honour.
Long Day's Journey Into Night: From Early Notes to Finished Play
Authors: Barlow Judith
Published: April 2013

IN HIS DEDICATION of Long Day's Journey Into Night to his wife Carlotta, Eugene O'Neill states that he wrote the play "with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones." One of the most fascinating aspects of O'Neill's composition of Journey is that this pity, understanding and forgiveness are largely absent from his early notes and drafts. In the published Journey, the Tyrones are often selfish, bitter and even vicious as they take out their misery on their closest kin, but their basic decency and their deep concern for one another are clear. In early versions, by contrast, the Tyrones' cruelty and anger are so predominant that it is difficult for an audience to sympathize or empathize with the characters. Through revisions O'Neill modified his initially very harsh portrait of the haunted Tyrones. Studying O'Neill's development of these figures forces us to recognize the extent to which the published Journey, for all its bleakness, presents a picture of complex individuals caught in a web of love and need as well as resentment. Further, we learn that the act of composition apparently was, for O'Neill, a lesson in compassion.
Toward a Third Stream Theatre: Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Plays
Authors: Skau Michael
Published: April 2013

ONE OF THE EARLY PRACTITIONERS of the "new theatre" was Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose two volumes, Unfair Arguments with Existence and Routines, explore the dimensions and strategies of dramatic innovation. The influence of Bertolt Brecht, Jean Genet, Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett, and Eugene lonesco can be easily detected in many of his productions as he experiments with the forms and structures of drama. Ferlinghetti uses the expressive power of noise and silence, the disintegration of language, the integrity of production autonomy, and the involvement of the audience to disturb the conventional ambiance of the theatre, replacing the traditional with what he calls "Third Stream Theatre." Eschewing the professionalism and virtuosity of his acknowledged influences, Ferlinghetti provides effective and significant contributions to experimental theatre.
Sam Shepard's Angel City: A Movie for the Stage
Authors: Rosen Carol
Published: April 2013

SAM SHEPARD IS a playwright of zap-pop-pow action, and he is a playwright of comic-book verbs: his plays flash, zoom, and screech across the stage. Primary colors ooze through neon tubing, jazz and rock music shoot through a sound system, and characters hurl words like weapons, wounding each other with Shepard's heightened version of American English, a language of riffs, culled from slang, jargon, punk talk, dime novels, and B-movies. Shepard floods his stage with such language, a codified language of energy sounding through space; and he peoples his stage with the lone heroes of American myths. Gangsters, rock stars, cowboys, and science-fiction images cohabit on his stage; rub-outs, hits, showdowns, and take-offs collide in his plots.
Time and Harold Pinter's Possible Realities: Art as Life, and Vice Versa
Authors: Kreps Barbara
Published: April 2013

IF WE COMPARE PLAYS such as Silence, Landscape, Monologue, and Old Times with plays such as The Room, The Birthday Party, A Slight Ache, or The Dumb Waiter, one thing that seems immediately clear is that Harold Pinter has undergone considerable evolution in his career as a playwright. And yet, when we look at the few official statements Pinter has released over the years about the vision that lies behind these plays, what seems to be equally clear is that he has, from the beginning, been concerned with elaborating a single idea. On March 8, 1960, the program brochure for The Room and The Dumb Waiter contained a printed sheet of paper in which, among other things, Pinter said: "The desire for verification is understandable but cannot always be satisfied. There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. The thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false. The assumption that to verify what has happened and what is happening presents few problems I take to be inaccurate." In an address to drama students at Bristol in 1962, Pinter incorporated this statement into his speech and expanded it:
The Anger in Equus
Authors: Witham Barry
Published: April 2013

PETER SHAFFER'S EQUUS is neither great theatre nor bad psychology, but it has elements of both. It is an exhilarating play: a remarkable blend of delayed exposition and theatrical effect, of melodrama and circus, which has inspired huge ticket sales and adoring critical reviews. And it is that increasingly rare serious drama which capitalizes on lurid events while maintaining a devotion to "ideas." Yet, in spite of its wide popular acclaim, Equus is difficult to sort out even when all the clues have been discovered. Why does Alan make his slightly sadomasochistic leap from Jesus to horses? What specifically does the scene in the porno theatre have to do with Alan's confrontation with Jill and the horses? Is the climactic nude scene an organic part of the play's structure or simply a gratuitous bow to contemporary fashion?
Serge Rezvani and France's Theatre Ouvert -Clash between Dramatist and Producer
Authors: Donnachie
Published: April 2013

THE RECENT OPENING of the new Beaubourg/ Pompidou Culture Centre in Paris (January 31 , 1977) and the lengthy absence from the French stage of Serge Rezvani (in the world of the theatre, famous, above all, for his Capitaine Schelle, Capitaine Eçço) appear at first glance totally unconnected. Even the mention of Theatre Ouvert does not seem to provide an adequate common denominator, until one remembers that Lucien Altoun's enterprise was chosen to be the initial performer at France's National Culture Centre and that it was under his aegis that Rezvani agreed to appear before the Parisian public (a special festival, incorporating his songs, his latest paintings and two new plays, was held February 5-15, 1976, at the Marais Culture Centre). Theatre Ouvert and Rezvani are both important phenomena in their own rights, and a quick look at each is warranted before a longer look at their head-on collision during this festival.
Singing in the Wilderness: The Dark Vision of Eugene O'Neill's Only Mature Comedy
Authors: Van Laan Thomas
Published: April 2013

THE CONSENSUS ABOUT Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! characterizes the playas nostalgic, light-hearted, sunny, wholly approving of the life and people it depicts, and-in the words of Joseph Wood Krutch "quite unlike anything else O'Neill ever wrote." O'Neill himself described the play, shortly after he wrote it, as "out of my previous line," and he probably encouraged the usual view by calling it "a comedy of recollection" and "a dream walking," by offering a remarkably non-committal note for the Wilderness Edition of his plays in which he seems to praise "the spirit of the American large smalltown at the turn of the century," and by claiming that the play was not autobiographical but "a sort of wishing out loud. That's the way I would have liked my boyhood to have been." Since the appearance of Long Day's Journey Into Night, the consensus has included a realization that Ah, Wilderness! dramatizes some of the same material from which O'Neill would eventually create profound tragedy; this realization has generally altered not the response to Ah, Wilderness! but merely the terminology in which this response is phrased, for it is now customary to describe the play as the other side of the coin, the "bright counterpart to the dramatist's final self-assessment."
The Silver Tassie: The Post-World-War-I Legacy
Authors: Rollins Roland , Rabby Llewellyn
Published: April 2013

IN THE FINAL MONTHS and in the yearS following World War 1, that extended nightmare that shattered an established hierarchical social order that had provided stability and spiritual serenity for centuries of European men, a new mood of bewilderment, despair, and cynical alienation tormented millions of disenchanted people in the western world. And as is so often the case, it was the artists, especially the playwrights, who first gave voice to this new cry of hopelessness, frustration, and fear. Beginning with the plays of the German Expressionists, 1912-1916, a new generation of post-war playwrights exerted themselves to assess the full impact of the old order upon those who were left behind to contemplate the ruins and to lament the loss of friends and cherished values. Repeatedly these playwrights recoiled in anger and anguish from the new lines of force in an historical process that was separating man from ancient patterns of life that had been passed on from father to son, that was regimenting man almost out of existence, and that was driving God from His heaven.
Modem Drama Studies: An Annual Bibliography
Authors: Carpenter Charles
Published: April 2013

THE PRESENT ANNUAL BIBLIOGRAPHY follows the basic principles and limitations described in the first installment of March 1974. The main objective is to record current scholarship, criticism, and commentary that may prove valuable to students of modem dramatic literature. The bibliography embraces all the expected areas and topics of modern world drama, including playwrights who lived past 1900 (plus Büchner and Becque) and influential men and women of the theatre other than performers. This year's list covers 1978 and further 1977 items, plus a number of missed 1976 items. It also includes a few 1975 articles published in the new journal Canadian Drama/ L 'Art Dramatique, which is indexed from its inception. Four other especially relevant journals are selectively indexed for the first time: Dialog (Warsaw), Siovenske Divadlo, Rivista Italiana di Drammaturgia (1976-) and the Journal oj Beckell Studies (1976-).
The Ideologies of Le Printemps 71: Adamov's "Metamorphosis" Reconsidered
Authors: Fischer Gerhard
Published: April 2013

ARTHUR ADAMOV'S CAREER as a dramatist is generally interpreted as the development of an existentialist avant-garde author to a politically committed, left-wing writer with clear Marxist preferences. His early plays, from La Parodie to Taus contre Taus, all written between 1947 and 1953, belong to the first dramatic expressions of what later came to be called Theatre of the Absurd; in fact, Adamov was one of the pioneers of this new theatrical form together with, but independent of, Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco. The next two works, Ping Pong (1955) and Paolo Paoli (1957), which established Adamov's international reputation, already constitute a turning point in his career, a first break away from the absurd theatre to a more concretely political, social and historical drama. Le Printemps 71 (1960) is usually considered the work that marks the completion of the playwright's "conversion" to Marxism: a play with an evident leftist political tendency, treating an historical topic which is of central importance to Marxist theories of the state and the revolution, i.e., the Paris Commune of 1871.
The Emblematic Structure and Setting of David Storey's Plays
Authors: Quigley Austin
Published: April 2013

AS DAVID STOREY'S PLAYS AITRACT increasing critical attention, a disturbing note of concern can be heard in the midst of the otherwise general acclaim. This concern is voiced most clearly in Spurling's puzzled review of Storey's Life Class, which was first produced at London's determinedly experimental Royal Court Theatre:
Historical Homonyms: A New Way of Naming in Tom Stoppard's Jumpers
Authors: Davidson Mary
Published: April 2013

MOST OF US HAVE MIXED FEELINGS about acrobats. We are impressed by their skill but dismayed by their movements, whether these are splits, cartwheels, backbends, or pyramids. In contrast to the more expressive movements of dancers, theirs seem mechanical and inhuman. As we watch acrobats, questions arise. Are these artists mocking us? Is it some monstrous pun which makes the head appear between the legs? Is the performance related to any human experience? Do we feel astonishment, or boredom, or a rapid osciUation between the two? And finally, is what the acrobats are doing worth the trouble that they take? Philosophers produce the same efTects. And astronauts. And politicians.
Modern Hieratic Ideas about Theatre: Maurice Maeterlinck and Antonin Artaud
Authors: Konrad Linn
Published: April 2013

THE ABOVE DESCRIPTION OF MAETERLINCK'S THOUGHT is by Antonin Artaud, who wrote an introduction to the publication of Maeterlinck's book of poetry Douze Chansons (by Stock) in 1923. The metaphor is significant. In 1902, Maeterlinck published a collection of essays entitled Le Temple enseveli, a title which refers to the author's predominant philosophical concern, namely the soul and its invisible realm. By employing this image to characterize Maeterlinck's thought, Artaud conjoins his predecessor's poetic, dramatic and discursive forms, and points to the creative process of a thought that has as its origin, center and goal, the unknown forces of life and death. The fact that Artaud wrote a penetrating and appreciative text on Maeterlinck in which he states that, "... Maeterlinck utilise certains procedes de pensee dont on ne remarque pas assez l'aclualite" (Artaud's emphasis, O.c. 213), poses first of all a challenge to modern criticism of Maeterlinck's work which has not been met. Secondly, this text with its specific hieratic metaphor invites a comparison between the ideas on theatre of the two playwrights-theoreticians, which, given Artaud's controversial, but seminal place within modern theatre, ought to reveal Maeterlinck's role as a precursor to an important trend in twentieth century drama. Since I see the image as descriptive of both authors' dramatic intention, I propose in this article to establish such a connection by taking my point of departure in the metaphorical temple.
The Unhappy Mean in Simon Gray's Otherwise Engaged
Authors: Nelson Byron
Published: April 2013

OTHERWISE ENGAGED SPEAKS to a particularly middle-aged fear: the fear that in protecting oneself from the shocks of life, the spirit will ultimately wither, and that what had been adopted as an insulating device will eventually corrupt and kill the soul.
Terence Rattigan's Variations on a Theme
Authors: Foulkes Richard
Published: April 2013

IN THE PREFACE TO THE SECOND VOLUME of his Collected Plays, Terence Rattigan recalls an early attempt at play-writing as a fourteenyear-old in a junior form at Harrow. The playlet was in French, and for it he was awarded two marks out of ten and the comment: "French execrable: theatre sense first class." The youthful Rattigan's flair for dramatic effect is clear from the scenario which he recalled in later life: "I ... plunged straight into the climactic scene of some plainly very turgid tragedy. The Comte de Boulogne, driven mad by his wife's passion for a handsome young gendarme, rushes in to the Comtesse's boudoir where she sits at her dressing-table having her hair done by three maids (in those days I was less economical in my use of small parts than I have since become)..."
Workers' Theatre: Forms and Techniques
Authors: Phillipson George
Published: April 2013

SIX AMATEUR ACTORS ARE GROUPED SYMMETRICALLY on a bare platfonn. Two are kneeling, two standing, one half lying, one crouched slightly behind his companions. Their only properties are six broomsticks which they have arranged in such a way as to suggest prison bars. At the climax of their perfonnance, they all chant:
Unity of Theme, Image, and Diction in The Silver Tassie
Authors: Pasachoff Naomi
Published: April 2013

When, in 1928, Yeats rejected O'Casey's manuscript of The Silver Tassie for use by the Abbey Theatre, among his unfavorable comments on the play were the following: "There is no dominating character, no dominating action, neither psychological unity nor unity of action ...", and "there should be no room in a play for anything that does not belong to it . ..." While the succeeding years have discredited much of Yeats's argument, I shall use the two criticisms I have quoted as my point of departure, for contrary to Yeats, unity and lack of irrelevancy are the most striking features of The Silver Tassie. Despite the fact that the play is part realistic and part expressionistic, its scenes and actions are interrelated. Even those scenes seemingly present for their comic relief alone sound echoes of earlier scenes. On the verbal and imagistic levels, the idiom of the play, though varied, is never haphazard. Image groups and speech patterns can be traced which bridge the gap between the realistic and the expressionistic. Recurrent themes fuse the two dramatic styles. The most important recurring theme is a concern with various aspects of and interrelationships among religion , violence, love and prayer. The most striking group of recurring images refers to the animal world. I shall discuss each of these, and then turn briefly to a consideration of other recurring themes and images, as well as to recurring patterns of speech.
Modern Drama Studies: An Annual Bibliography
Authors: Carpenter Charles
Published: April 2013

The present annual bibliography follows the basic principles and limitations described in the first installment of March 1974. The main objective is to record current scholarship, criticism, and commentary that may prove valuable to students of modem dramatic literature. The bibliography embraces all the expected areas and topics of modern world drama, including playwrights who lived past 1900 (plus Buchner and Becque) and influential men and women of the theatre other than performers. This year's list covers 1979 and further 1978 and 1977 items.
Book Reviews
Authors: Cohn Ruby , Ben-Zvi Linda , Adler Thomas , Styan
Published: April 2013

Arnold F. Hincliffe, THE ABSURD, reviewed by Ruby Cohn

Arthur Pollard, SATIRE, reviewed by Ruby Cohn

D.C. Muecke, IRONY, reviewed by Ruby Cohn

Moelwyn Merchant, COMEDY, reviewed by Ruby Cohn

John D. Jump, BURLESQUE, reviewed by Ruby Cohn

Philip Thomson, THE GROTESQUE, reviewed by Ruby Cohn

Jessica Milner Davis, FARCE, reviewed by Ruby Cohn

David L. Hirst, COMEDY OF MANNERS, reviewed by Ruby Cohn

LAWRENCE GRAVER AND RAYMOND FEDERMAN, EDS. , Samuel Beckell: The Critical Heritage, reviewed by Linda Ben-Zvi

FOSTER HIRSCH, A Portrait ofthe Artist: The Plays ofTennessee Williams, reviewed by Thomas P. Adler

JUNE SCHLUETER, Metafictional Characters in Modern Drama, reviewed by J.L. Styan
"The Formless Hunch": An Interview with Peter Brook
Authors: Labeille Daniel
Published: April 2013

Peter Brook was in Stratford-upen-Avon in August, 1978, to direct Antony and Cleopatra for the Royal Shakespeare Company. As I was in England doing research on both Brook's and Strehler's productions of King Lear, I took advantage of this coincidence to interview Brook about the Lear rehearsal process. This interview became an extensive digression into some of Brook's present ideas on directing.
Pinter's Betrayal and the Comedy of Manners
Authors: Diamond Elin
Published: April 2013

From the Restoration comedies of manners through drawing room comedy of the twentieth century, marriage is the joke whose punch line is adultery. In the dance d deux, a trois, even a quarre. marriage represents society's rules and property arrangements, to which even the most ardent lovers become bound and from which adultery is the symbolic release, the expression of free will. I say symbolic because, while mocking marriage, Restoration manners comedy gave no satisfying answers about the conduct of long-term adultery.
Pinter's Progress
Authors: King Noel
Published: April 2013

Austin Quigley concluded his recent study The Pinter Problem with this observation: "it is by no means uncommon to find in responses to his recent work the same elements of uncertainty that characterized the early criticism. The time is long overdue for Pinter criticism to move beyond the problems that have dominated the field since the first appearance of Pinter's work on the London stage." Quigley's solution in part is to apply some aspects of current work in linguistics to a reading of the plays, whereas Lucina Gabbard in her recent analysis The Dream Structure of Pinter's Plays: A Psychoanalytic Approach applies aspects of Freud's theories to a reading of the plays. In this article, I shall suggest that a further way of reading Pinter resides simply in noticing the extent to which he has worked in the various media (theatre, film , television, prose, poetry) in various capacities (writer, actor, director) and in this context trying to see the stage plays as only one part of an overall body of work.
Theatre Space: A Historical Overview of the Theatre Movement in Ghana
Authors: Lokko Sophia
Published: April 2013

Long before the arrival of European culture in the fifteenth century, Ghana enjoyed a rich culture of pageantry in which gold ornaments and iron played prominent parts. The cults of iron and gold were the foundations on which societies were organised; the gold cult, handed over from mother to daughter, embodied the arts of drama, music and dance, which mothers sought to pass on as richly as they could.
Book Reviews
Authors: Gale Steven , Schlueter June
Published: April 2013

RONALD HAYMAN, British Theatre since 1955: A Reassessment, reviewed by Steven H. Gale

OLEG KERENSKY, The New British Drama: Fourteen Playwrights since Osborne and Pinter, reviewed by Steven H. Gale

RONALD HAYMAN, Theatre and Anti-Theatre: New Movements since Beckett, reviewed by June Schlueter
Politics and Poetry: Peter Handke's They Are Dying Out
Authors: Schlueter June
Published: April 2013

In 1974, a year after its publication, They Are Dying Out was produced at Zurich's Theatre am Neumarkt and Berlin's Schaubuhne am Halleschen Ufer. The Schaubuhne, like Frankfurt's Theater am Turm, favored politically involved plays with a leftist orientation, and three years earlier it had shown considerable hesitation with respect to The Ride Across Lake Constance. There was no such hesitation with They Are Dying Out, however, which Horst Zankl (who directed both the Zurich and the Berlin productions) undertook without reservation, apparently feeling its anti-capitalistic message was clear. When the Yale Repertory Theatre produced They Are Dying Out in 1979, the play was billed as a "biting, wry comment on the cult of mass marketing and its creators," with translator Michael Roloff and director Carl Weber "Americanizing" the production to reflect the special embarrassments of our home-grown consumerism.
Peter Handke and the End of the "Modern"
Authors: Hays Michael
Published: April 2013

In order fully to understand Peter Handke's contribution to modern European drama, one needs not only to locate his work in relation to that of other contemporary playwrights (this has been done often enough), but also to come to grips with the fact that Handke is a serious literary critic and theoretician whose dramaturgy springs more from his desire to expose the ideological substance of drama and criticism than it does from a desire to author works which follow in the tradition of the "modern". Therefore, prior to dealing with his plays, I would like to place Handke in the historical-critical context out of which his art and criticism have arisen. By exploring this context and his work, I wish to show that Handke stands at the crossroads between the modem and the as yet undefined realm of "post-modern" culture.
"The Greatest Uncertainty": The Perils of Performance in Thomas Bernhard's Der Ignorant und der Wahnsinnige
Authors: Gross, Jr. Robert
Published: April 2013

Thomas Bernhard's recognition of the omnipresence of death has provided the background for all of his dramatic works to appear thus far. For Bernhard, death is not a single, unique event that occurs at the conclusion of each life, but a current of negation that runs throughout the whole of human existence, manifesting itself in sickness, exhaustion and decay. The Writer in Die Jagdgesellschaft presents the Bernhardian vision of death in its most unadorned form:
"Reject it, in order to possess it": On Heiner Muller and Bertolt Brecht
Authors: Girshausen Theo
Published: April 2013

None of those writers who began writing in the German Democratic Republic (GDR; the Federal Republic of Germany is here similarly abbreviated to FRG), or who found a literary home there, was more clearly regarded as a pupil of Brecht than the playwright Heiner Milller - not even Peter Hacks, whose first plays return unabashedly to forms of the "epic theatre," and about whom the story long circulated that he had immigrated to the GDR in the early 1950'S at Brecht's personal invitation. Hacks began to speak of the "new classicism" of the theatre in the "developed socialism" of his society, and in his plays of the 1960'S based on classical models he replaced the critical parable about the misunderstandings in this world with large-scale and above all aesthetically "rounded" designs for the future human society. It was at this pOint that people realised that Hacks was going his own way - a way that led away from Brecht. The interaction was quite different with Milller. His first plays about the establishment of socialism in the developing GDR, about the hard, difficult, contradictory work involved, have little in common with the "typical" techniques of "epic theatre." There is no trace of parabolic forms, "Verfremdungseffekte," techniques of authorial comment as Brecht developed them (and as they are characteristic of Hacks's early works) in Milller's The Wage Slaver (Der Lohndrucker; 1957), Correction (Korrektur; 1956/58), Report from Klettwitz (Klettwitzer Bericht; 1958), or The Bui/ding Site (Der Bau; 1964). Nonetheless, until the 1970'S, there was no question that this writer was a successor to Brecht. This categorization -in contrast to that of Hacks - outlasted Milller's adaptations of the classics (like Philoctetes [Philoktet; 1964], Prometheus [1968) , or Oedipus the Tyrant [Odipus Tyrann; 1966)), and even his version of Macbeth (1971) , which treated the old text much more drastically and radically than Brecht had ever done in his adaptations of the classics.
The Drama of the German Democratic Republic since Brecht: An Outline
Authors: Fischborn Gottfried
Published: April 2013

When Bertolt Brecht came home in 1948 to what was at that time the Soviet occupied zone of Germany (later to become the German Democratic Republic [GDR]), he had in his suitcase his latest dramatic works: a very free adaptation of Sophocles' Antigone and the historical drama The Days of the Commune (Die Tage der Commune). In his "thorough rationalisation" ("Durchrationalisierung"), as he put it, of the classical myth, he raised the question about that resistance against a fascist, dictatorial regime which - like the conspiracy of July 20th, 1944 - arose out of the ruling circles themselves, even though it was too late, too dilettantish, too inconsistent. The tragic history of the Paris communards in 1871, on the other hand, with its internal entanglements and its external threats, seemed to Brecht to be suitable as both an analogy to the situation and an admonition to the progressive powers in eastern Gennany: while political power was still being attained, new forms of contradictions arose to be solved.
The Youth Plays of GRIPS
Authors: Fischer Gerhard
Published: April 2013

If The Guinness Book of Records were to solicit suggestions for an entry "Most Successful German Theatre of the Seventies," I would neither hesitate to nominate the GRIPS-Theatre for Children of West Berlin, nor limit this superlative to children's theatres -I would include "adult" theatres as well. Success, of course, is a difficult category to establish; and it is also rather flippant to compare the achievements of "serious" theatres to those of theatres playing primarily for children and young people. There, however, are a number of good reasons to substantiate my claim. The most impressive fact about GRIPS is perhaps its productiveness. Since its foundation in 1969, GRIPS has created twenty-three original plays, all of them written and produced in a collective working process. Besides plays and performances, GRIPS also produces books and didactic booklets with follow-up material. Eight of the plays as well as two collections of GRIPS songs are now available as long-playing records; thirteen productions have been televised in Berlin and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) as well as in other countries.