bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Mary M. Nilan
Authors: Nilan Mary
Published: April 2013

EDWARD ALBEE'S THE ZOO STORY centers about two themes: the polarization of modern society and the difficulty of human communication. To date, most commentators have viewed Peter, the representative of "those who have," the insiders of modern society, as the chief obstacle to any real communication; whereas Jerry is seen as one filled with compassion for his fellow beings, willing to sacrifice himself to save them. For example, for Rose Zimbardo, Jerry is a Christ-figure in a "modernized scene of Gethsemane" and the theme is one of "human isolation and salvation through sacrifice." Peter she conceives as Everyman who will not reveal his true self for fear of being "known" as a person. Jerry, on the other hand, is seen as desperately desiring to "know," to reach an understanding with another. CharlesR. Lyons sees Jerry as attempting two means to establish some contact: "compassion" (with the dog) and "an act of sacrifice" (with Peter). Jerry's sacrifice is compassionate, Lyons maintains, because "it functions to initiate Peter into an acute awareness of his reality." George E. Wellwarth adds another dimension to this portrait of a compassionate, self-sacrificing character when he notes that Jerry represents for him "the person cursed (for in our society it undoubtedly is a curse) with an infinite capacity for love" and thus he sees the drama as "about the maddening effect that enforced loneliness of the human condition" has on such a person.
Earth Imagery in Graham Greene's The Potting Shed
Authors: Boyd John
Published: April 2013

CRITICAL DISCUSSION OF GRAHAM GREENE'S The Potting Shed has, for the most part, centered on the search motif with its element of suspense, James Callifer's "miraculous" restoration to life, the nature and likelihood of Father William Callifer's "loss of faith," and the dramatic calibre of a play having such challenging hurdles to negotiate. In these pages I shall discuss what seems to be a neglected element in the play, namely its frequent use of earth imagery as a major factor in its thematic development. This discussion, in turn, may throw some light on the various critical interests just mentioned.
Le Bourgeois ou la Poesie du Rire
Authors: Barrault Jean-Louis
Published: April 2013

IL Y A QUELQUES ANEES, le monde entier a celebre Shakespeare. II s'agissait de sa date de naissance. Au cours de l'annee 1973, Ie monde entier egalement celebrera Moliere. Il s'agit cette fois de sa mort. Pourquoi cette nuance? Ne continuent-ils pas a etre vivants tous les deux? Que l'on emerge du Mystere ou que l'on y replonge, Ie phenomene, avouons-Ie est pratiquement le meme.
Religious Ritual in John Arden's Serjeant Musgrave's Dance
Authors: Adler Thomas
Published: April 2013

IN A RECENT ARTICLE, Mary B. O'Connell suggests that John Arden's Serjeant Musgrave's Dance is "a contemporary folk ritual" whose "characterization and plot development" are modeled on the medieval Mummers Play of Plough Monday, which traditionally was "a mime slaying of winter." The purpose here is not to dispute Miss O'Connell's suggestion, since the Plough Monday play might well be the inspiration behind some elements in Arden's drama, especially the second dance near the end during which "Each man takes his drink, swigs a large gulp, then links wrists with the previous one, until all are dancing around the centre—piece in a chorus, singing.,, I suggest, however, that the first dance in the play, undertaken near the beginning of Act III by Musgrave alone, partakes of ritual elements of a more specifically religious nature. Here Musgrave, "waving his rifle, his face contorted with demonic fury," dances around "an articulated skeleton dressed in a soldier's tunic and trousers," hanging from "the cross—bar" in the town square (p. 84), in what is obviously a grotesque parody of the Christian "slaying of winter" — the Crucifixion — and a perversion of its essential meaning.
Actions that a Man Might Play: Pinter's The Birthday Party
Authors: Kaufman Michael
Published: April 2013

ALTHOUGH HAROLD PINTER has been writing for the theatre for more than fifteen years, his achievement is still very much in question. The reasons for this uncertainty are complex, and to a large extent the complexity stems from the plays themselves: from the carefully contrived ambiguities that refuse to offer ultimate coherence; from the minimal plots, adumbrated characters, and the multiplicity of inferences his dramatic actions excite. Early in his career Pinter acknowledged Kafka and Beckett as the major influences in his treatment of plots and characters. But perhaps even closer in spirit to Pirandello, Pinter exhibits the same contempt for absolute Truth and Reality.
Truth at the Bottom of a Well: Synge's The Well of the Saints
Authors: Eckley Grace
Published: April 2013

SYNGE'S CONSCIOUS STRNING IN The Well of the Saints to accomplish his ideal "to produce a myth more beautiful than nature" stands revealed in such revisions as, first, the change in title from When the Blind See; second, his alteration of Mary Doul's mirror from "a bit of a bowl of tin" and later "a big glass was done in the town" to the final "I seen myself in them pools"; and third, his departure from the original story of new sight which concluded with the child's exclamation, "Oh Mother look at the beautiful flowers.” (The setting is autumn and winter and the golden furze is only expected at the end of Act III; nothing blooms during the play.) These three items alone present the archetypes of water and well and seasons. Further, what Mary saw in her mirror — the long hair that brings her new hope for physical glory —adds a prominent fourth. Also there is the blind couple's spiritual odyssey, complete with departure and return and new knowledge, and the obvious prelapsarian mental and physical state of Martin and Mary Doul; they have escaped the curses of work and childbirth. At the close of the play, when they serenely set forth alone, aware of wet and hazardous footing, along unknown paths with no domicile except the earth itself, they are what Synge said Hie artist should be — "a soul in harmony with some mood of the earth.” That mood for them is the freedom of a wet south wind and a singing bird. For his blind primitives, Synge could make certain that the springtime of the local life is not forgotten, though for contrast there stands Timmy the Smith whose pious goal and doubtful glory is to turn the harvest immediately into bricks.
The Polyvalence of the Theatrical Language in No Exit
Authors: Sakharoff Micheline
Published: April 2013

IN ATIEMPTING TO DEFINE the fundamental characteristics of the new theater, Martin Esslin, in The Theatre of the Absurd, contrasts it with that of Camus and Sartre. According to Esslin, both Camus and Sartre have been satisfied to express new thoughts within the limits of a ready-made and conventional form. And Esslin feels that while the Theater of the Absurd, less logical and less discursive, reflects the art of the poet, the plays of Camus and Sartre reveal the attitude of the philosopher. When Michel Corvin or Genevieve Serreau study the avant-garde theater, they also leave these two playwrights outside the boundaries of their studies, and for the same reasons as Esslin. Ruby Cohn, however, in her recent book on contemp'orary theater, asks, without totally refuting Esslin's point of view, the only valid question: whether theater, however philosophical, is ever an expression of philosophy. And she suggests that it may be time to look at the plays of Camus and Sartre as plays. This is what I propose to do here, limiting my study to one of Sartre's plays: No Exit.
The Absurdity of Dread: Pinter's The Dumb Waiter
Authors: Carpenter Charles
Published: April 2013

IT HAS GOTTEN SO THAT NO ONE CAN SPEAK OF ABSURDITY any more without forcing the corners of his mouth to stay down. The last of the critics quoted above, for instance, takes Ben and Gus very seriously indeed. Since Camus' Myth of Sisyphus, since the recent canonization of Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Sartre, above all since The Bald Soprano and Waiting for Godot, the classical adage that one must not treat serious things lightly has almost developed a contemporary equivalent, one must not treat light things lightly. Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter is an excellent case in point. Because it is another early play by the author of The Room, The Birthday Party, and A Slight Ache, it has been persistently labeled a "comedy of menace," with the accent on "menace." Actually it is a mock-melodramatic farce.
Pinter's Old Times: The Memory Game
Authors: Martineau Stephen
Published: April 2013

"WELL, WELL, AND THEY DIDNT EVEN TAKE THEIR CLOTHES OFF!" As the curtain closed on a performance of Pinter's Old Times at Guildford, this was the first response that floated over to me across the auditorium. The tone was bewildered and somewhat aggrieved and, to a point, one could sympathize: there were two beds all ready, a mood of intense desire, and any number of sexual variations that had been suggested as a possible resolution to the situation. Yet the final tableau presented one woman lying stretched out on one bed, fully clothed; another woman sitting buddha-like on another bed, fully clothed; and one man sitting slumped and bowed over an armchair. In fact the remark pointed to more than taking off clothes; it raised the essential question of the play — what was it that had kept the audience in rapt attention for one and a half hours?
Foreword
Authors: Marker Frederick
Published: April 2013

Foreword
Shaw and the Passion of the Mind
Authors: Salmon Eric
Published: April 2013

SHAW HAS BEEN PRAISED FOR ALMOST AS MANY ATTRIBUTES and qualities as he has been condemned for and, indeed, his stature (by which I do not mean merely reputation) as a dramatist is such that it would be very surprising if the nature of his plays were a simple monolith capable of being described in one simple way. His great plays — of which there are not many, but what there are, are very great indeed — have all the variety and complexity which all great works of art possess. Nevertheless, in spite of all the variety and complexity, there is discernible in his work as a whole one particular total gesture which is readily identifiable and which constitutes a unique contribution to English—speaking drama. It appears in no other playwright — at least not in so pure, so concentrated and so extended a form. It is the capacity for seeing the dramatic experience itself in terms of pure intellect: Shaw sees the dramatic tension of the world as if represented by a system of intellectual concepts held in a true and perfect balance.
Embers and the Sea: Beckettian Intimations of Mortality
Authors: Alpaugh David
Published: April 2013

DESPITE HUGH KENNER'S INVITING CHARACTERIZATION of Embers as "Beckett's most difficult work" and one which "coheres to perfection," this radio play has received remarkably little critical attention. Perhaps the play's emotional tone and un-Beckettian "surface realism” pose ironic enigmas for readers who have learned to reach essentially intellectual meanings through the absurd surfaces of Waiting for Godot and Endgame. The failure of communication between Henry and his family; the internal fiction of nameless need and utter isolation that Henry weaves around the old men, Bolton and Holloway; and the sense of emotional washout which closes the drama are all presented with a lyrical simplicity which seems to defy protracted analysis. It is not surprising, then, that most of the play's critics have hesitated to go beyond paraphrase. Several have denied that the play merits critical attention at all. Richard Coe dismisses Embers as "banal and melodramatic" and Michael Robinson declares that here "the chaotic pain of life shows through the artisan's attempt to give it coherence.”

Are these critics justified in suggesting that Embers is little more than a poignant emotional outburst?5 Does Beckett purchase the play's realism by sacrificing the symbolic dimension which has so fascinated readers of Godot and Endgame? Or have these critics simply overlooked such a dimension?
Laudisi's Laughter and the Social Dimension of Right You Are (If You Think So)
Authors: Dombroski Robert
Published: April 2013

CRITICISM HAS MORE OR LESS AGREED that Pirandello's intention in writing Right You Are (If You Think So) was to illustrate his conviction that truth does not exist absolutely, but merely as a product of the individual mind. From here it became a question of whether the play was successful as drama and to what extent the thesis may be said to either enhance or diminish the work's emotional content. Is Right You Are a "sensitive" and "provoking" expression of Pirandello's philosophy? Or is it nothing more than — as Gramsci would have it — "a superficial fact of literature: a pure and simple mechanical aggregate of words"? (A VANTI!, Oct. 5, 1917) Contemporary criticism has rescued the play from a type of discussion based on whether Pirandello did or did not succeed in dramatizing his relativist Weltanschauung by shifting the perspective from the work's philosophical content to its social bearings and the existential turmoil of its main characters; that is, from Laudisi's arid reasoning about the relativity of truth to the sufferings of the Ponza-Frola group. Eric Bentley, for example, views the play as a social satire, Pirandello's aim being to demonstrate how the "idle curiosity" and "nosiness" of the townspeople is detrimental to the sufferers' struggle for life in its inner essence and private depths. And Robert Brustein goes a step further, describing the work as a "drama of social revolt." According to him, "the play is a protest against [he quotes Bentley] the 'scandalmonger, the prying reporter, and the amateur psychoanalyst' and [he himself adds] the sob sister, the candid cameraman, and the Congressional investigator — those who recklessly probe the secrets of others.”
Liberty Begins with the Comic
Authors: Marceau Felicien
Published: April 2013

In Phedre a woman wails disparingly at losing Hippolyte. In The Miser a man rages over losing his bank roll. These two situations are identical; why then does the former move us and the latter make us laugh? Because there is something comical in the idea of a bank roll which is lacking in the idea of a son-in-law? Not at all convincing. Is it then because there is death in Phedre? But Phedre's drama lies less in the death of Hippolyte than in the impossible nature of her passion for him. Moreover is it not obvious that in these two situations a slight modification of the conditions would reverse the effects? Consider the plight of an old man whose life savings have been stolen; is this not moving? On the other hand, a mature woman who clings to a young man brings to mind the comic character of Mme Putiphar.
From Ritual to Romance in Within the Gates and Cock-a-Doodle-Dandy
Authors: Rollins Ronald
Published: April 2013

SEAN Q'CASEY SIMULTANEOUSLY MIMICS and modifies some distinguishing dimensions of myth, both Christian and pre-Christian, in his Within the Gates (1934), a modern morality set amidst the vanishing greenness of a crowded London park, and in his Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (1949), an Aristophanic allegory situated' in a drought-seared, fence-enclosed Irish garden. Indeed, O'Casey's mythopoeic imagination achieves a marriage of myths in these two dramas as Christian clerics collide with fertility figures, maypole dancing challenges formal Christian worship, and ancient fertility symbols like the silver shaft and the cock's crimson crest contrast with the pious parishioners' cross and rosary beads. O'Casey's basic intent, however, seems to be a desire to use myth both structurally and satirically: (1) to employ myth as a means of organizing his dramas into ritual sequences, and (2) to employ myth as a satiric stratagem which accentuates the difference between the function of mythico-ritualistic elements in the lives of ancient and modern man. Emphasizing the degenerative adaptation of antique mythical patterns — patterns designed to restore potency to people and provinces — O'Casey apparently laments modern man's reluctance to enter joyously into the rites of revivification which could redeem and revitalize both self and society — the sick soul and the modern wasteland.
Widowers' Houses: A Question of Genre
Authors: Dukore Bernard
Published: April 2013

IT IS F AIRL Y OBVIOUS that one of Shaw's dramatic strategies consists of thwarting audiences' expectations. "Never mislead an audience, was an old rule," says Shaw in The Quintessence of Ibsenism. "But the new school will trick the spectator into forming a meanly false judgment, and then convict him of it in the next act, often to his grievous mortification." A member of the new school, Shaw employs such strategies in his treatment of genre.
"Damn Everything but the Circus": Popular Art in the Twenties and him
Authors: Smelstor Marjorie
Published: April 2013

IT IS POPULAR ... BUT IS IT ART? This query was one of the key questions for the aesthetic critics of the 1920s when they pondered the significance of the emerging "pop art" of the period. How "artistic" are the comic strips, the burlesque, the movies, the circus? How does one compare Charlie Chaplin’s "art" with John Barrymore's? How can "Yes, We Have No Bananas" be as "aesthetic" as an aria from Madame Butterfly? These kinds of questions posed a problem of artistic evaluation for the critics of the time and, consequently, resulted in an underlying tension between the "lively" and the "great" arts.
Uncle Tom's Cabin and Modern Chinese Drama
Authors: Meserve Walter , Meserve Ruth
Published: April 2013

MODERN DRAMA IN CHINA, according to Chinese drama historians, dates from mid-1907. It was at this time that a group of Chinese students studying in Japan produced a play version of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Six years previously Lin Shu (1852-1924) and Wei Li had translated Mrs. Stowe's novel under the title The Negro Slave Sighs to Heaven. Reacting to the Sino-1apanese War of 1894, the exclusion of Chinese from the American continent, and, indeed, the depressed condition of the Chinese people, the translators saw both a political and a humanitarian purpose in this work. As Lin Shu wrote in an epilogue to the work, "[we] have translated this novel not because we wish to show our gift for relating sad stories and to evoke the reader's tears without justification, but rather because the approaching shadow of slavery over our race has impelled usio sound a note of warning to the public.”
A Ritual Drama: Yeats's Plays for Dancers
Authors: Gorsky Susan
Published: April 2013

"I NEED A THEATRE; I believe myself to be a dramatist"; "I have always felt that my work is not drama but the ritual of a lost faith." Thus Yeats asserts a conflict inherent in his dramatic theory and in his plays. He moved in his plays increasingly further from dramatic realism, yet he did not wish to diminish dramatic intensity; he desired popular acceptance and acclaim, although he knew that his experiment would alienate his audience; he increasingly felt that drama should be distanced and strange, and still he hoped that by presenting fundamental human needs and conflicts, he could appeal directly to the fundamental and human in all of us. Poetic drama held an exalted position for him: it could (if properly approached by playwright and audience) recapture hidden or forgotten truths, reawaken its audience to the dignity and value of the past heroic world, remind its spectators of basic and unchanging values; that is, drama could — and should — renew a "faith" which man (especially his contemporary countrymen) had "lost." As Yeats wrote and rewrote his plays, making major revisions in plays already performed and constantly experimenting with new forms for new plays, he was attempting both to define and to write a new kind of drama: he was reaching towards the ritual drama which could fulfill his basic demands.
Narrative Salvation in Waiting for Godot
Authors: Jones Louisa
Published: April 2013

CRITICS FREQUENTLY COMMENT ON BECKETT'S QUESTIONING of language and its tenuous links with the shadowy phenomena known as reality. On the one hand, language appears the only means to a sense of existence, the very form of being. At the same time, in all of Beckett's works, the process of communication may appear circular, as if words referred back to themselves, never beyond. Characters discuss the meanings of the words they use, never concluding, so that the debate produces a sound pattern of rhythmically repeated words, a result remaining on the level of the language-object or significant. Linguists call language used for the examination of language problems "metalanguage," and Beckett constantly uses this device for evaluating the communication process. Strikingly parallel techniques appear in Beckett's presentation of narrative: one could perhaps speak of "metanarrative" elements in his works. The author continually emphasizes passages which raise questions about what "story" can mean, their dubious inconclusiveness expressing the same pessimistic ambivalences about narrative that other parts convey about language. Examples abound in all the works; the analysis of anyone would prove rich in implications. A typical passage is Beckett's favorite parable of the thieves at Calvary, as told by Vladimir to Estragon early on in Waiting for Gadat. Here we have an example of story within story, Gide's famous "mise en abime" approach, in which the microcosm reflects and comments on the
Berenger and his Counterpart in La Photo du colonel
Authors: Martin George
Published: April 2013

IONESCO'S PROTAGONIST, BERENGER, first sees the light of day as the narrator-hero of a series of short stories collected under the title of the second, "La Photo du colonel," and published in 1962. In these he has no name, except in "Le Pieton de l'air," when his wife admonishes him as "Herbert"; he is simply "a gentleman who says 'I.'" Nor is he a writer (save, once again, in "Le Pieton de rair"). Yet in a sense he is an "author," etymologically speaking, when you consider that particular experience originates with him which he allows to enlarge in his mind.
Cosmic Theatre: The Little Chariot of Flames and Voices
Authors: Knapp Bettina
Published: April 2013

SPACE TRAVEL HAS ALTERED MAN'S FRAME OF REFERENCE. The launching of satellites has made possible measurements of solar rays and of radiation; the photographing of cloud formations and mineral deposits have modified philosophical and scientific concepts. Such expansion into outer realms has been accompanied by concomitant journeys into man's inner world — his unconscious — uncovering in this arcane region another dimension replete with infinite riches. The probings accomplished in both exterior and interior worlds have resulted in two main attitudes. The first is pessimistic. Man feels his isolation and his helplessness in the limitless universe. He is flooded by various sensations which lead to a kind of vertigo. He feels uprooted, as if set adrift in some spaceless and timeless area. He loses his bearings, his identity, his raison d'etre and looks upon his existence as absurd. The religious and philosophical concepts which he had accepted have now scattered, like dead leaves blown in the wind, in a ceaselessly altering world devoid of a center and focal point. Pascal expressed these feelings in a precise manner: "The silence of these infinite spaces frightens me ... " The second attitude is optimistic. Because of man's expanded universe and the increased knowledge at his disposal, he not only gains faith in his own capacities and accomplishments, but fills his lungs and mind with renewed energy. His desire, like that of an Einstein, to search still further in the fabulous mysteries buried within the universe, burns insatiable within him.
Book Reviews
Authors: Messenger Ann , Jones John , Dietrich  , Armato Philip , Parker Brian , Banham Martin , Meserve Walter , Riese Laure , Parkin Andrew , Imhof Rudiger
Published: April 2013

James Reaney, Masks Of Childhood: The Easter Egg, Three Desks, The Killdeer, reviewed by Ann P. Messenger

Robertson Davies, Hunting Stuart and Other Plays, reviewed by Ann P. Messenger

Robert Gurik, The Hanged Man, reviewed by Ann P. Messenger

Marcel Dube, The White Geese, reviewed by Ann P. Messenger

David French, Leaving Home, reviewed by Ann P. Messenger

John H. Ferres ed., Twentieth Century Interpretations Of The Crucible, reviewed by John Bush Jones

Paul A. Hummert, Bernard Shaw's Marxian Romance, reviewed by R. F. Dietrich

Frederick Lumley, New Trends In 20th Century Drama: A Survey Since Ibsen And Shaw, reviewed by Philip M. Armato

Travis Bogard, Contour In Time: The Plays Of Eugene O'Neill, reviewed by Brian Parker

Bakary Traore, The Black African Theatre And Its Social Functions, reviewed by Martin Banham

Melvin Landsberg, Dos Passos' Path To U.S.A: A Political Biography 1912 - 1936, reviewed by Walter J. Meserve

E. Freeman, The Theatre Of Albert Camus. A Study, reviewed by Laure Riese

E. H. Mikhail, A Bibilography OF Modern Irish Drama 1899 - 1970, reviewed by Andrew Parkin

Simon Trussler, The Plays Of Harold Pinter: An Assessment, reviewed by Rudiger Imhof
Patterns of Structure and Character in Ibsen's Rosmersholm
Authors: Carlson Marvin
Published: April 2013

IN HENRIK IBSEN'S FINAL PLAY, When We Dead Awaken, the reader can scarcely escape an impression of careful and conscious arrangement of elements. The progression of the settings from a veranda near the fjords to the high fells, then to the mountain site of the final apotheosis, has the clear symbolic shape of a Strindberg pilgrimage drama. The main characters form complementary and contrasting patterns so consciously balanced that some critics have likened the working out of the play to the construction of a string quartet.

Ibsen's last drama, however, merely brings to the surface a concern with the careful patterning of character and situation which can be found throughout the dramatist's work, even in the plays of his middle period, where a basically realistic approach tends to mask its importance. Taking Rosmersholm as an example, I propose to demonstrate how an awareness of the patterns beneath the surface of this play, perhaps the most complex Ibsen ever created, can guide us through much of its dynamic.
Ibsen's Endgame: A Reconsideration of When We Dead Awaken
Authors: Barranger
Published: April 2013

WHEN WE DEAD A WAKEN, IBSEN'S FINAL PLAY written seven years before his death, has been treated by critics as an epilogue to his previous work, as a personal confession, and as a forerunner of the symbolist movement in European drama. In two respects this last play, subtitled "A Dramatic Epilogue," is the conclusion to a series of four plays: The Master Builder (1892), Little Eyolt (1894), John Gabriel Borkman (1896), When We Dead Awaken (1899). In When We Dead Awaken are to be found such characteristic themes of the latterday Ibsen as the conflicting claims of artistic vocation and personal life as well as the incompatibility of the desire for success and the need for happiness.
Eliot's The Cocktail Party: Comic Perspective as Salvation
Authors: Davenport Gary
Published: April 2013

T. S. ELIOT'S PLAYS, LIKE HIS POETRY, have always inspired critical extremes; few writers have had such loyal disciples or such violent detractors. The Cocktail Party (1949), the first of his post-war comedies, is no exception. Its problematical nature, one feels, is largely the result of Eliot's ambitious attempt to reconcile two seemingly incompatible elements: high moral seriousness and "light" comedy in the Noel Coward idiom. Thus, much of the discussion of the play has rightly centered on its comedy. In his final chapter to the third edition of Matthiessen's book on Eliot, C. L. Barber draws attention to the importance of the comic tone of the final argument between Edward and Lavinia Chamberlayne in the consulting room of Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly, maintaining that it is instrumental in showing the audience the absurdity of the life of pretense, and that it ultimately conveys "the comic sense that life is larger than personalities." But there is another important function of the comedy — an "internal" one — which has not yet been recognized: the all-important "salvation" of such characters as Edward (a salvation usually discussed only in religious terms) depends directly on their ability to develop and sustain a comic overview of life and a sense of their own potential absurdity. As Eliot makes clear in the play, laughter can occur only where there is detachment and objectivity, and detachment from self is the first requisite to salvation — Christian or otherwise.
Christopher Fry's Curtmantle: The Form of Unity
Authors: Woodfield
Published: April 2013

CURTMANTLE IS A PLAY SADLY NEGLECTED by performers and literary critics. Despite its fast action, strong conflicts and firm characterization, it has appeared few times on stage largely because of its cast of forty-four. Its neglect by the critics is harder to understand because it is the culmination (up to 1961) of Fry's work in both thematic content and expressive technique.
Counter–Components in Yeats's At the Hawk's Well
Authors: Vogt Kathleen
Published: April 2013

BY NOW MANY HAVE GNEN ATTENTION to At the Hawk's Well as a turning point in Yeats's drama and as a peculiar sort of play. But much remains to be said about its exact nature and the point in Yeats's development it represents. Allegorical readings, equally contrary pronouncements about tone, considerations of dramatic influences and resemblances — are interesting and do seem to have been invited by the play itself. For, to a degree unusual in Yeats, At the Hawk's Well is enigmatic and unfinished. It hints at themes it fails to express clearly or develop fully; it is composed of structural elements that are novel and contradictory. The work seems to need further shaping, but it is rich in shapes. Most significantly, it gives images suggestive of man's physical and emotional being the place in Yeats's theatre which he had previously granted only the ratiocinative mind and the rhetoric expressive of it.
"Pinteresque"
Authors: Marker Frederick
Published: April 2013

"That word! Those damn words and that word Pinteresque particularly," Harold Pinter retorted in his often-reprinted Paris Review interview with Lawrence M. Bensky in 1966. "I don't know what they're bloody well talking about." Increasingly since then, the continued development of Pinter's career has foiled - and to some extent silenced - those critics determined to pin down and classify the common denominator of his achievement. This special issue of Modern Drama, at the peril of adding to the long list of twenty-odd books and uncounted articles on Harold Pinter, is devoted entirely to critical studies of his work. It attempts to bring together a provocative sampling of current scholarship which, no longer comfortable with simplifications like "Pinteresque," tries to explore and debate the complexities and techniques of Pinter's dramaturgy.
Game Playing in Three by Pinter
Authors: Burghardt Lorraine Hall
Published: April 2013

THE DRAMA OF PINTER, because of the elusiveness of meaning and the refusal of the dramatist to explicate his own work, tends to cry out for interpretation, though such interpretation may, in the long run, do more to rend the play than to render it comprehensible. The difficulty for many critics in assessing meaning and evaluating techniques can be summed up by Schechner's observations that Pinter leaves the audience (and the critic) "to supply whatever conceptual framework it can, because no single rational frame will answer all the questions." Yet it is precisely this single frame which critics have sought and found in Pinter's use of language, non-language, elaborate ritualism, Freudianism, and even confusion. Yet all these approaches are not as diverse as they may initially appear; many of these theories are built on a concept which has remained unarticulated. I postulate that the "games people play," the concept of game playing, is that frame which serves as a key to the meaning of Pinter plays and which can be elaborated upon extensively. This approach, while speculative, is all the more useful because it finds an explanation where none is proferred by the dramatist, because of the immediacy of its impact on an audience, and because of its uncanny adherence to many of the basic tenets of Absurdism.
Pinter as a Radio Dramatist
Authors: Miller Mary Jane
Published: April 2013

IN ITS MOST EXPERIMENTAL FORM, the radio play has become a performing art familiar to comparatively few people since the advent of television. For a radio play to receive serious attention now, it usually has to become something else — a stage play or a film — and even when its author is the focus of reviews, articles, books or popular attention, the radio work of writers like Samuel Beckett, Tom Stoppard, Bill Naughton or Robert Bolt is neglected unless it has been adapted for another medium. Yet it is a fundamental premise of dramatic criticism that the form and the content of a play should be inseparable.
Mother and Whore: The Role of Woman in The Homecoming
Authors: Osherow Anita
Published: April 2013

IN THE HOMECOMING THE CHARACTERS of Ruth and of Jessie, the dead mother, demonstrate a strange dichotomy in the concept of the female as both vacillate between the role of mother and the role of whore. This is, of course, not the only time Pinter explores this psychological area, but in no other play, including The Lover, does he place such emphasis upon the ambiguous role of the woman.
Pinter's Four Dimensional House: The Homecoming
Authors: Jiji Vera
Published: April 2013

IN THE HOMECOMING, AS VARIOUS CRITICS HAVE NOTED, Pinter dramatizes the ancient archaic rite of the sacrifice of the ritual king and the mating of the fertility goddess with the new conqueror. Since this rite corresponds roughly to the infantile desires of the Oediphal phase (in which the young child fantasizes that he is the new conqueror who can possess his mother after killing his father) the play can also be seen as the enactment of the Oedipus myth. But what gives this play its unique quality is that Pinter has dared not only to base his characters' motives and actions on unconscious processes, but he has also dared to put on stage the very language and thought processes of the unconscious (insofar as it can be said to have a language and thought process of its own). At the same time, Pinter places these startlingly primitive and alogical manifestations in the context of the trivial social rituals of modern lower-middle class life.
Pinter's Silence: The Impossibility of Communication
Authors: Imhof Rüdiger
Published: April 2013

SILENCE WAS COMPLETED IN JANUARY 1969 and was put on the stage for the first time in a double bill with its companion piece Landscape by the Royal Shakespeare Company on July 2,1969. The very fact of their joint performance already points to a similarity of a certain nature between the two plays. As in Landscape, the dramatis personae reminisce in cross-cut monologues over past events, and they do so without any apparent consistency underlying their skipping from one subject to another. And since the dramatic figures are equally confined to speaking, the lack of dramatic action or plot in the traditional sense of the term renders any attempt at summarising the play as difficult as with Landscape.
Pinter's Night: A Stroll Down Memory Lane
Authors: Adler Thomas
Published: April 2013

AS ONE CRITIC REMINDS US in a recent article, there is a readily noticeable "change of emphasis" in the tone and techniques of the plays which Harold Pinter has written after The Homecoming (1965). And although several commentators have analyzed Pinter's better known stage works from this post—Homecoming period — Landscape (1968), Silence (1969), and Old Times (1971) —, there has been practically no attention directed towards the brief dramatic sketch entitled "Night," which was performed in England in 1969 as part of an evening of short plays under the collective title Mixed Doubles, and is published along with Landscape and Silence. Perhaps its brevity (only seven pages) has disarmed some critics. Yet it is interesting and important not only as "a coda" to the situation in Landscape and as a prelude to the dramaturgy and themes of Old Times, but primarily in and for itself as a very compressed, intense, and poetic short drama that expresses a point of view very atypical for its playwright. For this is perhaps the only time in the whole range of Pinter's dramatic output that we find portrayed a completely satisfactory and mutually satisfying relationship between a husband and wife.
"They Can't Take That Away from Me"; Myth and Memory in Pinter's Old Times
Authors: Highes Alan
Published: April 2013

ENIGMA LIES VERY CLOSE TO THE HEART of Pinter's dramatic method. It is sometimes difficult to remember that the critic's work is not complete when all the ambiguities in a new Pinter play have been enumerated, related to similar themes in his other works, and the more plausible factual solutions offered. Such a line of enquiry is necessary, but it can provide only the materials for an interpretation, not the interpretation itself. Pinter has warned us that there may be no answers to his riddles: "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." In an article on The Homecoming, Hugh Nelson argues that the answers do not matter anyway: "All we are to expect ... is a gradually expanding knowledge of the inner lives of the characters. This knowledge almost always reveals an imbalance which we can count on the resolution to bring to a new equilibrium. Pinter's vision of human relationships is basically dialectical. Contradictions lead to a new synthesis which in turn may break apart." This general principle can be applied profitably to most of Pinter's works, and suggests one direction in which we might look for a coherent interpretation of Old Times.
"All These Bits and Pieces": Fragmentation and Choice in Pinter's Plays
Authors: Gillen Francis
Published: April 2013

THE PRESENTATION OF HIS THREE MOST RECENT PLAYS, Landscape, Silence and Old Times, has frequently been regarded as the point where Pinter's drama took a new turn. Each of these plays, dealing with spots of time which form no coherent whole, emphasizes both the fragmentation of the world in which Pinter's characters exist and the anguish of that fragmentation. Yet a brief survey of the majority of Pinter's earlier plays shows that his characters have always been fragmented beings caught between a world of fact which does not satisfy them and a world of meaning which eludes them. In The Room Rose's matter-of-fact existence in her secure room is threatened by a message which neither she nor the audience can comprehend; in The Dumb Waiter mysterious and impossible demands whose source is never known are passed down through a dumb waiter to two hired killers; in The Birthday Party Stanley is abducted for reasons which neither he nor his captors understand. Disson in The Tea Party is hopelessly trapped between the physical world of his bidets and the incomprehensibly cultured world of his new wife, Diana. At the end of The Homecoming Teddy, who possesses intellectual traditions of which the others "wouldn't have the faintest idea," abandons his wife to a life of prostitution so that he may return to his abstract theorizing. Each of these plays, then, presents either a relatively secure world threatened by the unknown, or a world of fact which cannot merge with the world of meaning. Lenny, in The Homecoming, probably best expresses the dilemma of the majority of Pinter's characters when he asks: "apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?"
All My Sons and the Larger Context
Authors: Gross Barry
Published: April 2013

ARTHUR MILLER HAS ALWAYS MAINTAINED that his plays have not been immediately understood, that After the Fall was not about Marilyn Monroe and Incident at Vichy was not about anti-Semitism, that A View from the Bridge was not about longshoremen and The Crucible was not about McCarthyism, that Death of a Salesman was not about the business world and All My Sons was not about war-profiteering. What, then, twenty-five years later, is All My Sons about?
Being and Perception: Beckett's Film
Authors: Murphy Vincent
Published: April 2013

IN SPITE OF THE FACT that Beckett's Film has been published in book form for several years and condenses in it some of the most consistent and recurrent themes in the Beckett canon, little work has been done on it by otherwise active Beckett scholars. The early critical opinion that the film was "too simple, too obvious in its symbolism" may now be accepted as axiomatic by Beckett observers who should by hard experience know otherwise.
Dada, Surrealism, and the Genesis of NOT I
Authors: Brater Enoch
Published: April 2013

WITH THE EXCEPTION OF THE INVISIBLE MR. GODOT HIMSELF — who never materializes on the Board where Gogo and Didi steadfastly await his appearance — none of Beckett's creations for the stage is so literally disembodied as the Mouth who speaks unendingly in Not 1. The play itself is an irreducible simplicity: we see Mouth, faintly lit from close—up and below, the rest of the face in shadow, limited to a rudimentary function: words. They begin even before the audience has had enough time to settle down — as the house lights dim, Mouth is already speaking, a voice at once unseen and unintelligible. "Suddenly, gradually," t9 quote from Mouth itself, a disturbing image confronts an uneasy audience: we see and hear a disembodied mouth, its words now intelligible but only minimally comprehensible. There is, as well, a tall standing figure, faintly lit, "sex undeterminable," enveloped from head to foot in a loose djellaba. Beckett has accustomed us to severe constrictions of physical mobility on stage: Mouth can move only lips and tongue, shaping words, while Auditor makes four brief movements consisting in simple sideways raising of the arms from sides and their falling back, in what the script tells us is "a gesture of helpless compassion." The movement lessens with each recurrence and is scarcely perceptible at the third. Not I ends where it began — the house lights go up, the images on stage fade out, Mouth continues unseen, unintelligible, and finally unheard.
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 not only 1974 and further 1973 publications, but also a selection of missed 1972 items. The M LA International Bibliography for 1972 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 1973 should come out early this summer
A Calendar for the Production and Reception of Cathleen Ni Houlihan
Authors: Coleman Antony
Published: April 2013

20 JANUARY 1902, Yeats writes to Lady Gregory.

"[Maud Gonne] is anxious by the by to play Kathleen ny Hoolihan for us. She will certainly be a draw if she does. Fay could easily find all the rest of the company."

Yeats had written to Ellen O'Leary, in 1889, "Did I tell you how much I admire Miss Gonne? She will make many converts to her political belief. If she said the world was flat or the moon an old caubeen tossed up into the sky I would be proud to be of her party." W.G. Fay claims that Yeats persuaded Maud Gonne to take the title part. His account of the production continues
Singular Voices: Monologue and Monodrama in the Plays of W.B. Yeats
Authors: Parkin Andrew
Published: April 2013

THE CONNECTIONS BETWEEN MONOLOGUE in the oral and epic traditions of poetry, in the novel, in music hall and its widespread appearance in modern drama are too copious for treatment in a short essay; suffice it to say that monologue, used so abundantly by the epic poets and the dramatists of the ancient world, persisted in masterful form in Shakespeare; it seems French par excellence in Corneille and Racine; it is brilliantly theatrical in Cyrano. Though the very untheatrical conventions of stage naturalism tended to hide the long speech, the soliloquy and the aside, the monologue endured. It continued a little while in music hall. It popped up irrepressibly in the modern novel, where it found its masters in Joyce and Woolf and Beckett. It provided a major device for dramatizing ideas in the plays of George Bernard Shaw. It is a fascinating weapon for satirists, tragedians and even sentimentalists. It has been faithful to such diverse talents as those of Cocteau and Pinter. That such an important and persistent stage device, a basic building block of dramatic and poetic structures, with a vast and significant history reaching into the ancient oral traditions of Greeks and Celts, should have so little written about it, is a matter for regret and astonishment.
Biblical Myth Shavianized
Authors: Stone Susan
Published: April 2013

SHAW'S PLAYS CONTAIN a wide assortment of mythic and legendary material, reflecting his interest in the way myth and legend are propagated, their relationship to historical fact, and the qualities that make them durable. Despite his obvious interest in legends, however, he often sounds dubious about their value. In Everybody's Political What's What? Shaw notes that he read "the first chapter or so" of Frazer's The Golden Bough when it was first published, "but soon got oppressed with the sameness of its instances of human delusion." This apparently negative verdict on myth and legend is reinforced by Shaw's reference in the Notes to Caesar and Cleopatra to "the vulgar and sanguinary senationalism of our religious legends." His reservations about the value of these religious legends are voiced by Lavinia as she faces martyrdom in Androcles and the Lion. Reflecting on Spintho's abortive attempt to escape the lions, she concludes, "a man cannot die for a story and a dream. None of us believed the stories and the dreams more devoutly than poor Spintho; but he could not face the great reality .... It is since all the stories and dreams have gone that I have now no doubt at all that I must die for something greater than dreams or stories." Lavinia speaks for Shaw here in her recognition of the relative unimportance of the myths associated with her religious faith.
Book Reviews
Authors: Estrin Mark , Donhue Joseph , Grecco Stephen , Dukore Bernard , Lazenby Walter , Neglia Erminio , Wall Richard
Published: April 2013

Dan Vogel, The Three Masks Of American Tragedy, reviewed by Mark W. Estrin

Garff B. Wilson, Three Hundred Years Of American Drama And Theatre: From Yebearand Yecubb To Hair, reviewed by Joseph Donohue

Malcolm Goldstein, The Political Stage, reviewed by Stephen Grecco

Stanley Weintraub, Saint Joan Fifty Years After: 1923/24 — 1973/74, reviewed by Bernard F. Dukore

Charles A. Berst, Bernard Shaw And The Art Of Drama, reviewed by Bernard F. Dukore

J.L. Wisenthal., The Marriage Of Contraries: Bernard Shaw's Middle Plays, reviewed by Bernard F. Dukore

J.P. Wearing, The Collected Letters Of Sir Arthur Pinero, reviewed by Walter Lazenby

Jose Ramon Cortina, Ensayos Sobre El Teatro Moderno, reviewed by Erminio G. Neglia

Peter Rene Gerdes, The Major Works Of Brendan Behan, reviewed by Richard Wall