bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Strindberg and Lagerkvist
Authors: Scobbie Irene
Published: April 2013

HERE ONE OF THE BEST-KNOWN living Swedish dramatists, Pär Lagerkvist, comments on his compatriot, August Strindberg, and gives some indication both of the scope and significance of Strindberg's dramatic production and of the influence Strindberg has exerted over the younger playwright.

Strindberg himself would no doubt have approved of Lagerkvist's words, for at one stage in his career he considered himself Sweden's first naturalistic playwright, while after the Inferno crisis he attempted to create something new in drama. In 1888 he despatched the manuscript of Fröken Julie to Bonniers with a covering letter in which he proclaimed his playas "the first naturalistic tragedy in the history of Swedish drama," and certainly it embodies the main characteristics associated with naturalism. The plot is based on a true story which Strindberg develops into a 'case history' in the true Zola manner. He applies Taine's doctrine of the three main factors which govern human destiny: la race, le milieu and le moment. For Strindberg, la race implies, in the case of Miss Julie, the aristocracy, le milieu is the Swedish estate where the action takes place, and le moment embraces the points he mentions in his preface, mainly the unreal atmosphere of a Swedish midsummer eve, Julie'S physical condition, the fact that her engagement had just been broken off, and the additional fact that her father happened to be away from home.
Feathers Finely Aflutter
Authors: Ayling Ronald
Published: April 2013

ONE OF THE MOST STRIKING FEATURES of the quarrel between the Abbey Theatre directors and Sean O'Casey over The Silver Tassie in 1928 was the reaction of the directors to O'Casey's behaviour. They were surprised, even upset when the playwright, far from meekly accepting (as they expected) their adverse opinions on his play, turned round on each of them from Yeats to Lennox Robinson and rent their criticisms into pieces in a series of public attacks unmatched for ferocity and sheer pugnacious brilliance. Today it is difficult to understand how Yeats and, in particular, Lady Gregory could have so completely misunderstood the essential nature of O'Casey's character. Not that they needs must have accepted the play, but that their rejection should really have been more tactfully-and honestly conducted. Yeats was, I feel sure, only trying to help a still struggling writer when he suggested that the playwright should "excuse" the Abbey's rejection by saying that he (O'Casey) had withdrawn the play for "revision." Instead, O'Casey scorned excuses and explanations, told the public that the Abbey had refused his play because it was considered a bad play whereas he, the author, still thought it a fine one. From then on, the battle lines were drawn.
Conrad's Stage Victory
Authors: Ryf Robert
Published: April 2013

THE STORY OF Conrad's involvement with the theater is a long and curious one, and to him, for the most part, a painful one. His attitudes toward the drama were so ambivalent as to suggest a deep-seated emotional conflict, one which apparently persisted throughout most of his writing career. Both fascinated and repelled by the idea of writing for the stage, on one occasion he declared flatly to Stephen Crane that he had no dramatic gift, and then immediately added that he greatly desired to write a play, that it was, in fact, his "dark and secret ambition." Inexplicably hostile to actors and their profession, he referred to them as "a lot of wrong-headed lunatics pretending to be sane.” As he came to know a few of them later, he revised his opinion somewhat, but felt free to blame the cast for the partial failure of his first dramatic effort.
Strindberg And The English Theatre
Authors: Morgan Margery
Published: April 2013

THOUGH THE STORY OF THE INTRODUCTION of Ibsen to England is familiar from many tellings and re-tellings, the struggle to make room in the English theatre for his Swedish rival is nowhere conveniently recorded. It would be misleading to claim too much for the present account, which has arisen out of a holiday indulgence: the organizing of a commemorative Strindberg Exhibition. It is offered as the rough map of a preliminary reconnaissance, a basis for later supplementation and correction.
Susan Glaspell And The Provincetown
Authors: Waterman Arthur
Published: April 2013

WHEN SUSAN GLASPELL MARRIED George Cram Cook in 1913 and moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, for a summer honeymoon, she was making the most important move in her life. Not only was she entering marriage, but she was moving from the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth, from the culture of the Midwest to that of the East, and moving artistically from being a conventional novelist to becoming an experimental playwright. Born and educated in Iowa, she had written two novels and numerous short stories in the local color tradition, which were designed for the Midwestern feminine audience and patterned to suit that public's taste for escapist fiction.
Myth and the American Dream: O'Neill to Albee
Authors: Miller Jordan
Published: April 2013

INTERVIEWED IN 1946 upon his return to New York after several years in California, Eugene O'Neill remarked that America was the greatest success and the most dismal failure as a country that the world had known. Quoting scripture, he asked, "What profit it a man to gain the whole world if he loseth his own soul?" During his last active years, before illness incapacitated him, O'Neill worked steadily at a cycle of some eleven plays based upon this view of his country's split personality. Collectively entitled A Tale Of Possessors Self-Dispossessed, the series was to reveal the nation's progressive failure and loss of soul as reflected in the history of a single American family from colonial days to the present. The possessors of America's magnificent resources were thus to be shown as their own enemies, losing spiritual identity and noble purpose in the self-dispossession of their potential greatness.
Beckett's Endgame: An Anti-Myth of Creation
Authors: Lyons Charles
Published: April 2013

WHEN SOLON, according to Plutarch, criticized Thespis on the basis of the potential danger to ethics inherent in the act of impersonation in drama, he assumed that the spectator would be unable to distinguish between reality and its imitation. While the percentage of spectators who have fulfilled Solon's prophesy has remained small, the balance of reality and illusion in the theater has been in question since the first actor assumed a character not his own in whatever form that impersonation was accomplished.
Existential “Character-Ideas" In Camus' The Misunderstanding
Authors: Behrens Ralph
Published: April 2013

EACH OF THE FIVE CHARACTERS IN Albert Camus' The Misunderstanding serves, I believe, as an embodiment of some aspect of Camus' thought. Though these characters do not personify abstractions in any clear-cut and well defined manner, as might be the case in allegory, yet the reader can arrive at some fairly decisive conclusions as to the existentialist symbolism involved. The characters seem not to be designed as living individuals so much as vehicles to express the ideas of the author; one might, indeed, call them existential "Character- Ideas.
Purgatory and The Family Reunion: In Pursuit Of Prosodic Description
Authors: Lightfoot Marjorie
Published: April 2013

T. S. ELIOT'S PROSODY IN The Family Reunion and his other verse dramas in modern setting has been compared with that of Yeats's Purgatory, to which Eliot recognizes a debt. Pursuit of the comparison may help to establish the nature of the line Mr. Eliot has sought to develop for his contemporary verse drama since Sweeney Agonistes, his first effort in the twenties. He has expressed a desire for a flexible, transparent verse form which could move from the prosaic to the poetic at moments of intense emotion, refining modern idiom and conversational speech rhythms into art. The rhythm of Yeats's Purgatory has, on the one hand, been called by Louis MacNeice an awkward attempt, "in the absence of formal limits," to escape from traditional metrics and gain a "tougher and starker kind of verse." On the other hand, Ronald Gaskell has demonstrated that the play combines effectively a versatile and precise diction, tight syntax, the illusion of conversation between characters who "transcend the personal," and measured accentual verse of 4-stress lines which provides the formal limits of the metric. It will be seen that Eliot's verse in The Family Reunion is also describable as 4-stress.
The Sustained Metaphor In The Only Jealousy of Emer
Authors: Scanlon Aloyse
Published: April 2013

YEATS'S BORROWINGS from the structure and spirit of the ancient Japanese Noh drama are recognized and regularly subjected to comment and analysis. His indebtedness to Noh's stark structure, its economy of scenery, its minimum of actors, and its underscoring of intense emotions by a few musical instruments for the development of a unique, indirect, and symbolic form of drama, exemplified in his Four Plays for Dancers, has not been overlooked. Yeats's proscription of all unnecessary acting; his use of mask, song, and dance; his delving into the life of the soul, and the images of his verse form are all Noh influences that have been duly weighed and evaluated.

Relatively little attention, however, has been given to the poet's perception of language values in the Noh and his appropriation of specific devices such as the sustained metaphor. Yet, Yeats is particularly indebted to Noh for the dominant image which gives unity to his drama.
Cold Passion: A Study OfThe Herne's Egg
Authors: Moore John
Published: April 2013

IN HIS EARLIER PLAYS Yeats was intent on building up illusion, on fortifying the matter of myth against the hostile intrusions of the unbeliever. The Romantic virtues he presented could be regarded ironically only by the enemy, and all the irony within the plays was expended on the characters lacking faith in the supremacy of the imagination and unwilling to commit themselves to some image of desirable perfection. In the later plays he is both surer of his ability to create illusion with authority and more indifferent to the need to do so. Consequently he dares to be ironic about myth and finally (in The Death of Cuchulain) about himself. The Green Helmet (1910) is the last play in which the hero receives unqualified approval. The later plays do not, I think, ever repudiate either myth or romance, but they gain by being read with a sense of humor. They are at once more lyrically intense and more intellectually playful. Yeats trusts his power of incantation more but has less hope that his ideas will be found persuasive.
Yeats's Changing Metaphors For The Otherworld
Authors: Vendler Helen
Published: April 2013

YEATS'S FATHER ONCE TOLD HIM that poetry concerns itself with the creation of Paradises, and it is certain that the Otherworlds invented or adapted by a poet, whether demonic, purgatorial, or paradisal, are one index to the bias of his imagination. Yeats's multiple Otherworlds, critiques of "this world" both personal and social, are found throughout his prose and poetry, although I confine myself here only to the plays: even those alone, however, are enough to indicate the range of the Yeatsian Otherworld, alternately somber and gay, languorous and active, visionary and bitter. And Yeats's metaphors for the Otherworld provide for some reflections, as I read them, on changes in Yeats's view of the function of art. The Otherworlds Yeats created he also, for the most part, inherited: there appear fitfully throughout his works almost all the notions of Paradise, Fairy Land, the Elysian Fields, and so on, that are common stock in folk tale, myth, and religion, and even the more eccentric Swedenborgian Otherworld is given houseroom. But as in all drawings from ample mythologies, the selection is determined by the characteristic impulse of the poet, and Yeats's Fairyland is neither Spenser's nor Shelley's, but his own, just as his Purgatory, whatever it owes to Dante or Swedenborg, is a mixture uniquely compounded.
Yeats and Lady Gregory: A Unique Dramatic Collaboration
Authors: Murphy Daniel
Published: April 2013

IN 1954 OLIVER ST. JOHN GOGARTY published as fact certain rumors that had apparently circulated in Dublin for fifty years. He wrote that Yeats had finally admitted to him that he had written Lady Gregory's plays, in particular The Rising of the Moon […]

Gogarty is not known for his veracity, and he undoubtedly invented the conversation he attributes to Yeats. Yeats did not write Lady Gregory's plays, but he did help her whenever he could. Of The Rising of the Moon, Lady Gregory, in an unpublished letter to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, wrote (July 26, 1903): "I have also been writing a little play 'The Rising of the Moon' in which Yeats helped me, as I helped him in 'Cathleen' and 'Pot of Broth’.” What occurred, then, was a collaboration between Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats in some early plays.

Yeats, in a Preface to his Collected Plays, noted that he had explained his indebtedness to Lady Gregory in Plays and Plays and Controversies and then added: "If I could have persuaded her, she would have signed The Unicorn from the Stars, her share in it is so great. She had generally some part wherever there is dialect, and often where there is not."
Profiles of a Poet
Authors: Fallon Gabriel
Published: April 2013

THE YEAR NINETEEN HUNDRED AND TWENTY-ONE was not the best of times for the Abbey Theatre. Its finances were at their lowest ebb. Ireland's war of independence was rising to a peak-point; the notorious Black-and-Tans were loose upon the land; the streets of Joyce's Dublin were pocked with daily and nightly ambushes; a British curfew declared that citizens must be within their dwellings by 8:00 p.m. When a 9:00 p.m. curfew closed all the other theatres, the Abbey had remained defiantly open, but the additional hour was just one hour too much. Shaw, Yeats, and Lady Gregory, taking advantage of this temporary closure, gave lectures in London to help to keep the Abbey's doors open and to payoff its debt to the bank. Most of the Theatre's leading players had gone off to the U.S. on a tour of Lennox Robinson's The Whiteheaded Boy leaving behind a handful of part-time players—of whom I was a junior member—a promising School of Acting and a seasoned actor from the main company who remained behind to direct the School. A gift of £ 500 from Lady Ardilaun, added to the takings from the London lectures, gave the Theatre a new lease of life and, as soon as the British lifted their curfew to a more reasonable hour from the Theatre's point of view, Lady Gregory left the Black-and-Tan terror of Coole Park, Galway, for the Black-and-Tan terror of Abbey Street, Dublin, and ordered rehearsals to commence
The Shaping Force in Yeats's Plays
Authors: Unterecker John
Published: April 2013

My TWO-PRONGED THESIS IS THIS: that William Butler Yeats was one of the most conscious craftsmen the theater has ever known, and that he may well, in the long run, be one of its most successful artists.

In making these claims I am, I realize, taking positions both unpopular and extreme. With the exception of the adaptations of Sophocles, Yeats's plays have never, so far as I know, achieved longruns anywhere. And though such die-hards as Eric Bentley have praised Purgatory to the skies, most professional drama critics have neatly solved the problem of dealing with Yeats's plays either by ignoring them or by tucking them into the catch-all never-never-land of "experimental drama." Even among the admirers of Yeats's poetry, the plays seem to create a good deal of discomfort. F. A. C. Wilson, for instance, who deals with them extensively, seems happiest when he is able to extract from them allegorical messages. And Helen Vendler, who explicates them brilliantly—more brilliantly, to my mind, than any other critic—dismisses them flatly as plays written for a coterie theater, remarking of The Death of Cuchulain that "the play is no more compelling, dramatically speaking, than the other late plays, which is to say almost not at all." Purgatory, for her, is "thin and unsatisfying" largely because it ends, she feels, "on a tone of frustration and incomprehension." Only a handful of Yeats scholars—most conspicuously among them John Moore, David Clark, and Peter Ure—have made any serious attempt to see how the plays function both as drama and as poetry, how the poetry in a very literal way complements the drama, enriching and strengthening it, and how the drama in turn complements the poetry, providing a structure of essential action-the articulated bone, if you will, which is driven by Yeats's muscular verse.

And yet, finally, it is this combination which makes Yeats's plays the powerful dramas that they are: a verse which at its best functions so inconspicuously as in production to be unnoticeable, integrates and supports a very carefully planned dramatic structure.
Book Reviews
Authors: Mercer Vivian , Boulton James , Welland Dennis
Published: April 2013

David R. Clark, W. B. Yeats And The Theatre Of Desolate Reality, reviewed by Vivian Mercier

by John Russell Taylor, Anger And After: A Guide To The New British Drama, reviewed by James T. Boulton

John Russell Taylor, The Angry Theatre: New British Drama, reviewed by Dennis Welland
German Theater Between The Wars
Authors: Ritchie
Published: April 2013

"THE FIRST WORLD WAR ended by leaving France morally, artistically. and intellectually in a supreme position on the continent of Europe, and her prestige was at its highest," writes Enid Starkie in her discussion of the influence of France on English Literature. It is then easy for her to go on from here to show the impact of French culture on the great names of the age. Her observations are certainly true, but from our point of view the interesting aspect is how markedly the graph of her influences declines as she moves from poetry. through fiction, to drama. On the drama she has practically nothing to say. English drama, she reminds us, was going through a sterile phase between the wars when nothing interesting was produced (except by Shaw and O'Casey) until the arrival of Eliot, Auden, and Isherwood in the 30's, and "in the meantime, those who wished to enjoy the true and noble pleasures of the theatre made the journey to Paris, where the most advanced and stimulating theatre in Europe was flourishing and playing to full houses."
Paul Vincent Carroll Since The White Steed
Authors: Pallette Drew
Published: April 2013

It will surprise some Americans to learn that Paul Vincent Carroll is still active in the theater. Older playgoers remember with nostalgia Hardwicke's performance as the intellectually-proud canon in Shadow and Substance, and the stir caused by this play and The White Steed when they won the New York Drama Critics Circle award in 1938 and 1939. But while Shadow and Substance appears from time to time-with justification-in new anthologies and in the classroom, many Americans think of Carroll in terms of the thirties. Very little has been written about him in this country since then. Unless they have kept a sharp eye on theatrical events, they are probably not aware that Carroll has continued very active indeed over the past twenty-five years. Since his success with The White Steed he has written at least seven full-length plays, four of which have received major Broadway productions.
From Naturalism To The Dream Play: A Study Of The Evolution Of Strindberg's Unique Theatrical Form
Authors: Benston Alice
Published: April 2013

IF WE TRACE THE EVOLUTION of Strindberg's theatrical form, we have a perfect model of the contemporary dramatist's rejection of realism and return to stylized theater. His career offers a typical pattern: naturalism, symbolic naturalism, and, finally, the completely artificial structure of the poetic dream play. His work mirrors the kind of modern sensibility that has been the main impetus of theatrical experiments in our century. His genius in expressing this modern sensibility influenced such people as Kafka and Pirandello and continues to influence anyone involved with contemporary drama.

To observe the transformations that Strindberg made in the prevailing dramaturgical form, we have to understand the way he used naturalism. Since almost all of his voluminous works are in some way autobiographical, it is also necessary to start with some kind of assessment of Strindberg's egocentricity and his mania for self-revelation. It is this aspect of personality which prevented him from viewing naturalism in the strictly objective, scientific terms in which it was conceived.
Arthur Adamov And Invaded Man
Authors: Sherrell Richard
Published: April 2013

ARTHUR ADAMOV'S CRITICS are in general agreement that his early plays (those included in Theatre, Vols. 1 and 2) are in many ways the direct result of his effort at what Leonard C. Pronko calls "an exorcism of private terrors:” In his self-revelatory work, L'Aveu, a portion of which is translated into English, Adamov admits that by expressing his neurosis he exorcises himself. As a result of L'Aveu the dimensions and motifs of Adamov's "disease" are well known and we see these contents gaining expression in his plays. Martin Esslin in his book, The Theatre of the Abs'u.rd,• has given a lengthy review of L'Aveu together with helpful insights as to some of the relationships between Adamov's neurosis and his activity as a playwright. I do not propose to recapitulate this review. Rather, I want to point up what are for me some interesting expressions of Adamov's neurosis and insight which I find in his second play, L'Invasion.
The Plays Of D. H. Lawrence: Addenda
Authors: Mahnken Harry
Published: April 2013

IN THE February, 1960, issue of Modern Drama (Vol. II, NO.4), a short article appeared in which were discussed the ideas found in the several plays written at intervals during the literary career of D. H. Lawrence.

In that article there is a mistake about the date• of composition of one of the plays. Further, the author omitted a play which would have added weight to his final conclusion: that the plays show "how a great artist hammered out his thought on several anvils, reshaping and redefining it to fit the specific form—novel, tale, play—to produce the work of art."
The Image Of Youth In The Contemporary Theater
Authors: Thompson Marjorie
Published: April 2013

IN THE THEATRE OF THE LAST SEVEN YEARS the juvenile lead has indeed come into his own, and with much more to do than merely look handsome and follow the course of true love with varying degrees of smoothness. The younger dramatists' chief concern is young people and, in particular, their predicament in the world today.
Book Reviews
Authors: Albrecht  , Six Sally , Siegel Ben , Ivask George
Published: April 2013

G. Wilson Knight, Henrik Ibsen, reviewed by Irving Deer

Erich Schmidt, Das Moderne Englische Drama, reviewed by Claude Hill

Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt, reviewed by John H. Kelson

Georg Büchner, Complete Plays And Prose, reviewed by Michael Scherer

Theodore J. Shank, A Digest of 500 Plays: Plot Outlines and Production Notes, reviewed by Walter J. Meserve

Elmer Rice, Minority Report, reviewed by Michael J. Mendelsohn

Charles Leonard, Michael Chekhov's To The Director And Playwright, reviewed by Robert Shedd
John Whiting And The Theme Of Self-Destruction
Authors: Hurrell John
Published: April 2013

ON JUNE 16, 1963, the British dramatist John Whiting died in a London hospital of cancer at the age of forty-five. The event aroused little interest in the British press beyond a fairly bland obituary in The Times and a sad, personal one by a former Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts colleague, Walter Lucas, in the British Drama League publication Drama. In this country, The New York Times reported his death in a merely routine manner. This lack of concern at his death, and what it might mean for the English-speaking drama, is hardly to be wondered at considering how little attention his work had received from critics in either country. Until the production of The Devils by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre in 1961, reviewers had been unanimous in damning his plays; Harold Hobson's review of Saint's Day in The Sunday Times [London] for September 9, 1951, was matched for its hysterical savagery only by Ivor Brown's comments in The Observer. Until The Devils, none of his four plays enjoyed a long run. Yet Saint's Day received a £700 award in the Festival of Britain Drama Contest, and when it was attacked, Tyrone Guthrie and Peter Brook sprang to its defense in the correspondence columns of The Times. In fact, among British theater people Whiting has been something of a legend as a writer with a tremendous talent for providing theatrical impact —although the chief argument brought against him by the reviewers was his coldness, his literary obscurity, his failure to establish communication with audiences, and his excessive addiction to complex symbolism. In this country, he has remained almost entirely unknown: The Devils has been the only one of his plays to receive a major production (at the Arena Theatre in Washington, D. C., late in 1963), and the only critical study of his work that I have been able to track down is Jacqueline Hoefer's "Pinter and Whiting: Two Attitudes Towards the Alienated Artist" (Modern Drama, February, 1962).
The Psychoanalyzing Of Eugene O'Neill: Postscript
Authors: Nethercot Arthur
Published: April 2013

WHEN I PUBLISHED MY ARTICLE, "The Psychoanalyzing of Eugene O'Neill," in Modern Drama (December 1960 and February 1961), I attempted to trace the development of the psychoanalytical element in his plays, not only from the evidence within the plays themselves and according to the recognition and discussion of this element by the critics, but also from O'Neill's own comments on his knowledge of the subject and on its influence over his writing. But at that time Arthur and Barbara Gelb's prodigious biography, O'Neill, with its vast storehouse of materials from articles, documents, letters, conversations, and interviews bearing on the many aspects of O'Neill's life, thought, and writings had not been published. Scattered through this volume, often without any particular emphasis on their significance, are a considerable number of facts corroborating and extending my speculations on the origins and evidences of O'Neill's interest in psychoanalysis and his assimilations of it into his work. This despite the fact that he had persisted in maintaining for many years that he knew nothing about it, and that, even if he did know something about it, he could have written his plays simply from his observation and knowledge of human beings and their motives and behavior.
Dürrenmatt's Die Ehe Des Herrn Mississippi: The Revision Of A Play
Authors: Phelps Leland
Published: April 2013

EVEN A CURSORY READING OF Diirrenmatt's plays reveals that he is by no means a traditional dramatist. His first published work, Es steht geschrieben (1946), is not divided into acts; time and place change, but no pauses or intermissions are indicated. The scenes flow uninterruptedly one into another from the beginning of the play to the end. The same technique was used in Der Blinde (1947): the entire drama is one unit which flows from scene to scene without a pause, changes in time and place notwithstanding. In the play, Die Ehe des Herrn Mississippi (1950, 1957), the action is divided into two parts, the first of which is much longer than the second. Here again the element of time is treated unconventionally. The play begins with the end; the character who is to be shot at the end of the play is actually executed as the curtain rises. He then gets up and proceeds to speak directly to the audience, giving the background necessary for the action to follow. In Romulus der Grosse (1948, 19.56), Ein Engel kommt nach Babylon (1953), and Der Besuch der alten Dame (1955) Diirrenmatt makes use of the normal act structure, but within the individual acts of these three plays, normal time and space relationships are disregarded, scenes sometimes change without benefit of a curtain, flats are raised and lowered, and props changed before the eyes of the audience—techniques reminiscent of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of our Teeth and Brecht's epic theater. No attempt is made to create and maintain an illusion of reality.
In Defense Of Yeats As A Dramatist
Authors: Mercier Vivian
Published: April 2013

Thus spake W. B. Yeats after some forty-five years of seeing his plays produced and often directing them himself. Perhaps the last phrases quoted are all the answer some critics of his plays deserve. Certainly he has no need of any defense from me or from a lady who wrote "I would like to redeem both A Vision and the [later] plays…” It was the same lady who remarked that "In spite of its appeal, The Player Queen, like most of Yeats's plays, is not really stageworthy." Granted such a redeemer, Yeats hardly needs a betrayer. What he does need are directors who are intelligent and humble enough to read all that he has written about the kind of production he wanted for a particular play or type of play and then to carry out these instructions as faithfully as possible.
The Sea Gull And The Wild Duck: Birds Of A Feather?
Authors: Slater Dorothy
Published: April 2013

THAT CHEKHOV WAS CONSCIOUSLY AND PURPOSELY CONCERNED WITH literary and dramatic theory in The Sea Gull is undisputed; in this first mature handling of a new dramatic form which he earlier tried to express in The Wood Demon, he had, as Professor Balukhaty has pointed out, the twofold purpose of stating his aesthetic principles and supporting them by the example of the play itself. It is Chekhoy's "example" of symbolism that I shall consider in this paper. In a play designed to exemplify a new kind of drama and to offer a comment on existing forms of drama, it is legitimate, indeed essential, to ask what functions so obvious a symbol as the sea gull is meant to have. Because The Sea Gull is a play, not a prose statement of Chekhoy's dramatic theory, we would expect its dominant symbol to have one or more of the usual functions of a symbol; and indeed the sea gull is no exception for it tells us something about Nina and Trepleff, and it helps to ,carry one of the major themes of the play. In this paper, however, I am concerned only with that facet of the play which is Chekhov's comment on dramatic theory; hence I am concerned only with what role, if any, the sea gull plays as a part of that comment. Is Chekhov joining the ranks of the symbolists, or is the sea gull, bearing marked resemblances to Ibsen's wild duck, created, in part at least, to criticize symbolist drama?
Beyond Realism: The Plays Of Harold Pinter
Authors: Bernhard F.
Published: April 2013

HAROLD PINTER, whose slice of British life would seem to be cut as thick as John Osborne's or Arnold Wesker's, is surprisingly enough among the least realistic of modern English dramatists. Pinter shares with his social realist contemporaries commitments to what seem totally realistic situations, characters, and language. His dramatic situations are commonplace: a tramp discusses with two brothers the possibility of his becoming caretaker for their ramshackle flat; a young man loses his composure at his birthday party because of the presence of two men he does not know; a couple speculate about a matchseller outside their bungalow and finally invite him inside. The characters are as commonplace as the situations: unheroic people from the urban middle and lower classes. And the dialogue is a meticulously accurate transcription of ordinary speech. Of such grain have the realists of the Osborne school concocted a yeasty bread of social protest. But beneath the realistic prose of Pinter's plays lurks the spirit of a poet, transmuting the same drab material into something more like poetry than anything else for which we have a name.
Roots: A Reassessment
Authors: Latham Jacqueline
Published: April 2013

Roots is the central play of Arnold Wesker's trilogy; although on the stage it has been the most successful of the three, it has met with little favour from the critics. Laurence Kitchin, in his Mid-Century Drama (1960) and in an article in Experimental Drama (1963), has given it the praise I think it deserves, and John Mander in The Writer and Commitment (1961) has analyzed its central theme, communication, with insight. Otherwise the view which prevails is expressed by J. L. Styan in The Dark Comedy (1962): the play presents "a raw, real and therefore [sic] largely unsympathetic family of simple country people" whom we are meant to despise; at the same time critics seem to be agreed that Ronnie is an unattractive and unsympathetic character and that both the Bryant family and Ronnie fail Beatie in the end. The Bryants, though, should not merely be dismissed as a more successful attempt at a typical country family than Shaftesbury Avenue or even Sloane Square usually gives us. Such acceptance leads to the judgment that Roots is a "one-act play blown up to three acts" as John RusseU Taylor says in Anger and After (1962). On the contrary, I believe that a case can be made for the prominence given to the Bryant family, and that Wesker's handling of language, though less exciting than Pinter's, is more resourceful than has been admitted.
What Garrick Gaieties? A Note On Reference And Source Material
Authors: Weals Gerald
Published: April 2013

ALL OF US WHO TEACH DRAMA have a tendency to invoke the splendor of particular productions, even those we have never seen; a mythical aura hangs over, say, Ethel Barrymore in Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines or Laurette Taylor in The Glass Menagerie. I have heard myself say, "Now, if you had seen A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway ... ," forgetting for the moment that I had not only seen Jessica Tandy and Marlon Brando as Blanche and Stan, but Uta Hagen and Anthony Quinn in the same roles, and that they were two different plays. What with cast changes,• script changes, theater changes, and the varying quality of performances from night to night, the historical re-creation of any production is almost impossible. The best that we can hope for, I suppose, is a little fact and a lot of fancy.
Book Reviews
Authors: Rose Marilyn , Greene David , Pronko Leonard , Oliver William , Rowe Kenneth , Price Jonathan
Published: April 2013

Haskell M. Block, Mallarme And The Symbolist Drama, reviewed by Marilyn Gaddis Rose

C. G. L. Du Cann, The Loves Of George Bernard Shaw, reviewed by David H. Greene

Jean Jacquot, Les Théatres D'asie, reviewed by Leonard C. Pronko

Jean Jacquot and Denis Bablet, Le Lieu Theatral Dans La. Societe Moderne, reviewed by Leonard C. PRONKO

Manuel Duran, Lorca, A Collection Of Critical Essays, reviewed by William I. Oliver

John Gassner and Ralph G. Allen ed.,Theatre And Drama In The Making, reviewed by Kenneth Rowe

Douglas and Kari Hunt,Pantomime: The Silent Theater, reviewed by Jonathan R. Price
The Becket Plays: Eliot, Fry, And Anouilh
Authors: Roy Emil
Published: April 2013

WITHIN THE LAST THREE DECADES' the martyrdom of Thomas Becket has furnished dramatic material for notable plays of T. S. Eliott Christopher Fry, and Jean Anouilh. Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and all of Fry's work including Curtmantle (19,61) stem directly from Eliot's determination to have a poetic drama. Although Anouilh's play Becket2 or the Honor of God (1961) owes little or nothing to Eliot or a theory of poetic drama, all three writers have dissociated themselves from modern realism. As Francis Fergusson has said in another context, they use the stage, the characters, and the story to demonstrate an idea which they take to be the undiscussible truth. Eliot takes dramatic root in classical Greek and medieval morality plays, the Elizabethans and metaphysicals. Fry is distinctly Shavian, and Anouilh has singled out a performance of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author for its seminal impact on his work. Just as significant is the fact that although both Murder and Curtmantle are the culminations of a long and publicly debated process of theory and experimentation, they are apparently both dead-ends. Eliot never again used either a martyrdom or such a dazzling array of verse so prominently. Fry's play-which appeared after a "crisis of confidence" lasting nine years-may have ended his playwriting career. Anouilh's Becket, on the other hand, is still another illustration of human alienation from a sterile universe but one presenting a more mature, positive hero than had his earlier plays.
Christopher Fry's A PhoenixToo Frequent: A Study In Source and Symbol
Authors: Wiersma Stanley
Published: April 2013

"THE STORY WAS GOT FROM Jeremy Taylor who had it from Petronius," Fry informs us of A Phoenix. The story is all, however, that the three works have in common. Petronius is cynical: loving until death is a pretty intention that disregards the human need for sex. Taylor is moralistic: immoderate grief leads to other immoderate passions.3 Fry is ecstatic: the widow's decision to live demands celebration. The present study will demonstrate that Fry's unique handling of his identified sources is to be explained in part by its specifically Christian content. This study will also suggest a probable and hitherto unnamed Christian source.
Synge's Playboy as Mock-Christ
Authors: Pearce Howard
Published: April 2013

EVEN THOUGH CRITICS FREQUENTLY GRANT Riders to the Sea or Deirdre of the Sorrows to be the "greatest" of Synge's plays, Playboy of the Western World has for many the most hearty appeal of all. One may wonder, though, at reasons for such popularity in view of the profound gulf that separates the two most commonly held interpretations of the Playboy himself: on the one hand he is thought to become a hero in the final act, and on the other a mock-hero. I find little attempt among the critics to justify one view or the other, on the contrary the fundamental understanding of his character usually colors or generates a concept of the play. Alan Price, in the most thorough and recent study of Synge, thinks of Christy as a hero, seeing in this play, in contrast to The Well of the Saints, Synge's fusion of the "dream" and the "actuality," watching Christy develop through the action "from weakling to hero." Una Ellis-Fermor likewise sees him developing, "not merely into 'a likely man,' but into a poet-hero, 'the only playboy of the western world,’" H. H. MacLean devotes an article to exploring Christy's Christ archetype, which makes of Christy a myth-generated hero. I have severe doubts about rigorously applying archetypal patterns to the play, but it might be interesting to look at the Christ parallel again to see if Synge has not used the myth to ironic purposes not entirely consistent with MacLean's reading.
Bertolt Brecht's Baal: The Structure Of Images
Authors: Lyons Charles
Published: April 2013

BERTOLT BRECHT'S FIRST PLAY, Baal, written in 1918 has meaning on a variety of levels. For example, on one level it is a dramatic rehearsal of the relationship of Rimbaud and Verlaine. On another level, it stands as Brecht's reaction to the sentimental treatment of the dissolute poet in Der Einsame, Hans Johst's dramatic biography of Christian Grabbe. While Brecht's amoral presentation of the dissolute poet in the image of Baal does ridicule Johst's idealization and while his play was generated in his reaction, the work has its own integrity and transcends its original satiric intent. Baal is a satire of Johst's expressionistic exploitation of the traditional moral license granted the poet. However, Baal is also an unrestrained poetic statement about a chaotic, irrational, and self-destructive world and a celebration of the intense animal energy of its hero, who sees this world and calls it beautiful. To a degree, the play is also a kind of Ubu Roi in its .outrageous affront to the spectator's or reader's sensibilities. And it exists as an even stronger affront to ethical idealism and the conception of the integrity and continuity of the human personality. Hofmannsthal's "Prologue to Brecht's Baal" senses the disintegration of the traditional concept of human personality in the comments of his players who portray an acting company discussing the play: "The actor is the amoeba among all living things and therefore he is the symbolic man. The amoeba, that indeterminate primitive creature, which lets the situation dictate whether it should be animal or plant."
Montherlant's Aesthetics
Authors: Price Jonathan
Published: April 2013

THE PLAYS OF HENRY DE MONTHERLANT stem from an aesthetic that can often seem a bit uncongenial to less hardy souls. He is ferocious, and his artistic principles often seem a little puzzling to people who are less austere.

How then does Montherlant think of his artistic output? How does he deal with the raw materials-the characters, the themes, the style? The way he shapes these will suggest the effect he wants to make on his audience. His relation to his audience is a peculiar one, deriving, from the concepts of renoncement, alternance, and the neant sublime. In fact, his plays seem to be designed to enable his spectators to experience many of the feelings he himself moves through.
Bibliography on Michel de Ghelderode
Authors: Draper Samuel , Alworth Lois
Published: April 2013

Bibliography on Michel de Ghelderode
The Essential Brendan Behan
Authors: De Burca Seamus
Published: April 2013

ON ONE OCCASION Brendan said to me: "Whoever writes my biography will get no help from my letters. . . . I never write any." I never got a letter from Brendan in my life. He wrote to our uncle Peadar Kearney after he had been arrested in Liverpool (1939) with gelignite on him. He explained he had been pinched in almost the same manner as Tom Clarke in 1883. Clarke had been convicted of carrying explosives and was sentenced in the name of Wilson. He served sixteen years in British prisons. The British knew exactly who they had in 1916, and he was among the first to be executed.
Roger Blin At Work
Authors: Fletcher John
Published: April 2013

BECKETI"S FRENCH DIRECTOR AND CLOSE FRIEND, Roger Blin, was in Toulouse, in southern France, recently, spending about a month with a local company rehearsing En attendant Godot. The company, Le Grenier de Toulouse, founded in March 1945 by the dynamic Maurice Sarrazin, who still runs it, has risen from humble student origins to become one of the six official National Drama Centers in the big cultural decentralisation plan pushed forward by Andre Malraux. Le Grenier now plays all over France and has a national reputation, but is chiefly concerned to bring theater of quality to the South-West. Until now, it has been based in the grandiose antiquated opera-house that is the municipal theater of Toulouse, the Theatre du Capitole, but this year it moves into a newly-designed modern theater (Thé Âatre Daniel Sorano) of its own. Until now, too, it has largely been concerned with producing the classics and with taking them around the region, but from now on it will be increasingly concerned with presenting the drama of our time to the population of the area. Thus it comes about that the company's bus is currently carrying Waiting for Godot to the sub-prefectures and market towns of Languedoc. But since the play is not an easy one, it was natural for them to ask Roger Blin down from Paris to produce it for them.
Yeats's Introduction Of The Heroic Type
Authors: Byars John
Published: April 2013

To WRITE OF THE HERO IN Yeats's dramas on Irish legend beginning in 1903 is to confront a critical problem, namely the ambivalent critical attitude towards these figures. Although critics seem to recognize that there are differences between these heroes and those in Yeats's earlier dramas, they tend to group all the central figures in his dramas under one general category exemplifying the so-called "Yeatsian hero."[…]

The difficulty with such a definition is that it is too inclusive. The definition does not apply to the central characters in Yeats's earliest "miracle plays" based on Irish folklore for a very important reason. Ellmann describes the Yeatsian heroic prototype as one who has an independent force of will, suggested by the following excerpts from his definition: "the part they have decided on," "their chosen image of themselves," and "what they have aimed at." Terms involving choice and purpose, however, run counter to the nature of the saints of Yeats's early plays, for it is precisely their lack of will, or suspension of choice, which makes them different from the later heroes. Yeats introduced in 1903 an essentially different hero in the dramas On Baile’s Strand and The King’s Threshold. The distinguishing element in that hero is his force of wil1. In expressing that force of will, the hero follows a peculiar pattern which establishes him as a distinct dramatic type.
Elmer Rice: A Bibliography
Authors: Hogan Robert
Published: April 2013

Elmer Rice: A Bibliography
W. B. Yeats On Plays And Players
Authors: Ayling Ronald
Published: April 2013

THE FOLLOWING CONTRIBUTIONS to newspapers by W. B. Yeats show a common concern for the maintenance of a free theatre in Ireland and the preservation of high dramatic standards in that theatre. They are of particular interest because none of these items is recorded in Allan Wade's A Bibliography of the Writings of W. B. Yeats or in his The Letters of W. B. Yeats; nor have they, to the best of my knowledge, been reprinted since the original publication.
Yeats's Drama And The No A Comparative Study In Dramatic Theories
Authors: Stucki Yasuko
Published: April 2013

IT IS A WELL KNOWN FACT TO STUDENTS OF William Butler Yeats that the Japanese No Drama had some influence upon his later plays, beginning with Four Plays for Dancers published in 1921. On numerous occasions, the similarities of his dramatic theory and practice to the No have been brought to our attention, such as various theatrical devices in mask, dance, chorus, and musicians, or such ideas as ritual, spiritualism, "anti-naturalism" in the No which Yeats seems to have found congenial to his own idea of drama.1 Not only the studies, but also Yeats's introductory essay itself, which he wrote for a collection of No plays translated by Ernest Fenollosa and refined by Ezra Pound, consider his principal beliefs about drama as essentially similar to some of the major characteristics of the Japanese dramatic tradition. These similarities, however, would tend to mislead us into a superficial association of Yeats's dramas and the No, since they are after all the products of different times and places. This study attempts to examine the concepts and contents involved in both dramas, so as to see beyond the terms commonly describing the characteristics of the Japanese dramatic traditiop and Yeats's plays. By doing this, I hope to focus upon a more meaningful relation between the two dramas than has been taken for granted.
Carl Zuckmayer's The Devil's General As Autobiography
Authors: Glade Henry
Published: April 2013

CRITICS GENERALLY AGREE that Carl Zuckmayer entered a new creative phase about 1940. This new period, beginning with The Devil's General, is primarily characterized by Zuckmayer's choice of contemporaneous subject—matter and his centering on ethical objectives that are obtained through the phenomenon of encounter; characteristically now in the sense of friendship and trust, along with the equation of love to a belief in the essential decency of humanity.

The creation of The Devil's General is the result of Zuckmayer's own travails of conscience and attempts to come to grips with the phenomenon of Nazi Germany which altered the whole course of his life. Self—exiled from Germany in 1933, with an interim period in Austria and Switzerland, Zuckmayer immigrated to America in 1939. The Devil's General was written while he was farming in Vermont. If rumor can be credited. Zuckmayer for one fleeting moment was considering the possibility of staying on in Germany and going along with the powers—that—were. Thus through the writing of The Devil's General Zuckmayer seems to recreate such a possibility for himself.