bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Metaphoric Structure Of A Man For All Seasons
Authors: McElrath Joseph
Published: April 2013

IN HIS PREFACE TO A Man For All Seasons Robert' Bolt relates that one of his intentions as a playwright is to construct a ""bold and beautiful verbal architecture'" (xvii), not unlike a poem in that metaphor and imagery are consciously employed (xv). In "Robert Bolt: Self, Shadow, and the Theatre of Recognition," Anselm Atkins has already discussed Bolt's use of the structural dialectic that may be seen in considering the relationship between Sir Thomas More and the Common Man-which results in a synthesis of apposite and opposite points necessary to the success of any kind of "architecture." My purpose here is to examine another aspect of Bolt's craftsmanship: his use of metaphor to reinforce the theme of conflict between More's selfhood and the demands of Henry's England.
Albee's Box And Ours
Authors: Cohn Ruby
Published: April 2013

"A PLAYWRIGHT-UNLESS HE IS CREATING ESCAPIST ROMANCES (an honorable occupation, of course)-has two obligations: first, to make some statement about the condition of 'man' (as it is put) and, second, to make some statement about the nature of the art form with which he is working. In both instances he must attempt change. In the first instance- since very few plays are written to glorify the status quo-the playwright must try to alter his society; in the second instance-since art must move, or wither-the playwright must try to alter the forms within which his precursors have had to work." This excerpt from Albee's introduction to his "Two Inter-related Plays" summarizes a decade of his dramatic writing. Often, he blends the two obligations, trying to alter his society through alteration of his forms.
Arrabal And Surrealism
Authors: Gerstenberger Donna
Published: April 2013

"My THEATRE IS NOT SURREALIST and is not only realist," declares Fernando Arrabal; "it is realist including the nightmare." Le theatre panique is the term he prefers for it-the theater of panic-playfully suggesting that Pan is the real muse or deity of the theater and seriously reiterating the Artaudian concept that panic should be one of the primary emotions evoked in an audience.

No one would deny that there are elements of realism, perhaps even of naturalism, in Arrabal's plays. In fact, it is these very elements, and the recognition they elicit, that give to his work that Kafkaesque or nightmarish quality for which it is partly known. In Guernica~ for example, his play inspired by the Picasso canvas of the same title, such realistic touches as the old woman's being caught in the water closet, the rubble continuing to cascade about the characters, and the simple, earthy dialogue about urination and erection contribute immeasurably to the audience's unconscious realisation that Fanchou and Lira are real people who suffer privately and personally from the larger, public gestures of war and oppression.
Bonnie And Clyde And Christy Mahon: Playboys All
Authors: Gerstenberger Donna
Published: April 2013

THE FILM VERSION OF THE STORY OF Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow uses methods explored over a half century ago in John Millington Synge's The Playboy of the Western World. The haunting relationship of the two works is confirmed by audience reaction to the film, which is as uncertain and uncomfortable as audience reaction to The Playboy generally is. The director of the film achieves his effects by handling the material of the film in much the same way as Synge had dramatized his material in his "shocking" 1907 comedy; and the results are the same.
Dürrenmatt's Dialogue With Brecht: A Thematic Analysis Of Die Physiker
Authors: Morley Michael
Published: April 2013

IN ITS ANALYSIS OF THE PROBLEM OF THE scientist's responsibility for the results and application of his work, Die Physiker stands as a rejoinder to Brecht's Leben des Galilei. But the conflict worked out in Dürrenmatt's comedy can be seen, at least in part, as an ironic confirmation of the major conclusion reached and stated by Galileo in the course of Brecht's "Schauspiel" -namely, that the scientist has a responsibility towards his fellow men. The purpose of this article is to analyse Dürrenmatt's treatment of the themes of scientific, personal, and social responsibility. At the same time I hope to indicate how Diirrenmatt, in rebutting others of Brecht's arguments, has at the same time taken over from the earlier drama attitudes and ideas and examined their implications in a manner which shows that he in fact retains the letter of these attitudes while modifying their spirit.
The Nature Of The Tragic Experience In Deirdre Of The Sorrows
Authors: Farris Jon
Published: April 2013

SYNGE'SDeirdre of the Sorrows IS COMMONLY LABELLED a tragedy, but the nature of the tragic experience in the play seems elusive. All too often the question is passed over by a casual use of the generic term tragedy with a lack of discrimination that renders the designation practically meaningless. Where the question has been addressed, the efforts are curiously abbreviated and the results less than satisfactory. Most recently Herbert V. Fackler, having just emphasized the difficulty in demonstrating the essence of the tragedy in Synge's Deirdre, attempts in one brief paragraph to show that "the true essence of Deirdre's tragic story is in the inability of the major figures to control their will and avert the final destruction of all." One does not so much disagree with Fackler's definition of the tragedy as desire its thorough development; surely a problem which, as Fackler states, has confused critics for decades cannot be disposed of with a single broad stroke. F. L. Lucas, in an equally brief treatment of the question of Deirdre's tragedy, identifies the playas a tragedy of hubris, “hubris against the most powerful of gods, whose name is Time," because Deirdre tries to defeat old age by dying young. But Lucas, like Fackler, abandons the subject immediately, having offered only this invocation of Aristotelian terminology to define the tragic experience.
The Price Of Salvation: Moral Economics In Major Barbara
Authors: Albert Sidney
Published: April 2013

"IN ALL MY PLAYS," Bernard Shaw wrote to Archibald Henderson in 1904, "my economic studies have played as important a part as a knowledge of anatomy does in the works of Michael Angelo.” But the inclusion of economics in his plays, he always maintained, did not make them mere tracts. "My plays are no more economic treatises than Shakespear's," he declared in his Sixteen Self Sketches. "It is true that neither Widowers' Houses nor Major Barbara could have been written by an economic ignoramus, and that Mrs Warren's Profession is an economic exposure of the White Slave Traffic as well as a melodrama. There is an economic link between Cashel Byron, Sartorius, Mrs Warren, and Undershaft: all of them prospering in questionable activities. But would anyone but a buffleheheaded idiot of a university professor, half crazy with correcting examination papers, infer that all my plays were written as economic essays, and not as plays of life, character, and human destiny like those of Shakespear or Euripides?"

Shaw's comments invite inquiry into how economics functions aesthetically in his dramas: how it affects not only thematic content, but characterization and dramatic structure as well. From this standpoint it may be useful to consider the influence economics exerts on "life, character, and human destiny" in one of the plays he mentions, Major Barbara.
Synge's Tragic Vision Of The Old Mother And The Sea
Authors: Durbach Errol
Published: April 2013

TRAGEDY IS REMARKABLY ECONOMICAL IN ITS exploitation of grea.t visual archetypes-those stark icons which radiate behind the tragic action and illumiriate the universal agony within the private grief. The literature of Western Christianity has, indeed, given dramatic expression to so few images of visual intensity that the tragedian, working within the limited imagistic range of the tradition, is often obliged to exploit an iconographical situation which has already passed into the 'repertory stock of all drama; and to make it radiate his particular tragic vision is, of course, the measure of his genius.
The Christian Concept In Murder In The Cathedral
Authors: Virsis Rasma
Published: April 2013

ELIOT IS CONCERNED WITH THE IMPACT OF an unusual event, an event that partakes of eternity, on the passive, mystical women of the parish who are submerged in the temporal. They are witnesses being instructed to go through a purgatorial experience.

There are really two struggles in the play, Becket's to do the right deed for the wrong reason, and the chorus's to witness, to accept, and to consent to the suffering and insecurity the martyrdom of Thomas will bring. The second ends in acceptance at the end of the play: the first ends in success at the end of the first section.
Yeats's Symbolic Farce: The Player Queen
Authors: Hinden Michael
Published: April 2013

ONLY AFTER A DOZEN YEARS OF difficult travail-with Ezra Pound acting as a midwife-did Yeats permit himself to be delivered of The Player Queen. According to Richard Ellmann's account, it was Pound, acting as advisor and personal secretary to Yeats during the winters of 1913- 1916, who first suggested that the play might be written as a comedy. Intermittently, Yeats had spent six or seven years trying to write the playas tragedy, but the manuscript continually displeased him. Then, having accepted Pound's proposal, he subjected the play to a series of massive revisions, and gradually the work evolved into its present form. Yeats's own account of his struggle with The Player Queen (while omitting mention of Pound's influence) records this story and in an important way contributes to our understanding of the play's intent.
Book Reviews
Authors: Gale Steven , Tyson Brian , Reinert Otto , Fuegi John , Page Malcom , Hinchliffe Arnold , Hogan Robert
Published: April 2013

Ronald Hayman, Harold Pinter, reviewed by Steven H. Gale

John Russell Taylor, Harold Pinter, reviewed by Steven H. Gale

John Lahr ed., A Casebook On Harold Pinter's The Homecoming, reviewed by Steven H. Gale

Robert O'Driscoll, Theatre And Nationalism In 20th-Century Ireland, reviewed by Brian F. Tyson

by Michael Meyer, Ibsen: A Biography, reviewed by Otto Reinert

Hans Heiberg, Ibsen: A Portrait Of The Artist, reviewed by Otto Reinert

Julian H. Wulbern, Brecht And Ionesco: Commitment In Context, reviewed by John Fuegi

Ulick O'Connor, Brendan, reviewed by Malcolm Page

Alrene Sykes, Harold Pinter, reviewed by Arnold P. Hinchliffe

Katherine H. Burkman, The Dramatic World Of Harold Pinter—Its Basis In Ritual,, reviewed by Arnold P. Hinchliffe

Robin Skelton, The Writings Of J. M. Synge, reviewed by Robert Hogan
Bernard Shaw: The Career of the Life Force
Authors: Lawrence Kenneth
Published: April 2013

Shaw’s Passion for a more substantial and utilitarian theatre than the theatre of his day offered led him naturally to a drama of ideas. His own words on the topic are so curiously chosen that it may clarify matters to quote them: “…the play in which there is no argument and no case no longer counts as serious drama.” The word “argument” with its philosophic and rhetorical resonances, the legalistic “case” and the approbative adjective “serious” emphasize the bent of Shaw’s thinking on the subject/ Yet one more quotation (one could present dozens from the same book" The Quintessence of Ibsehism: "The dramatist knows that as long as he is teaching and saving his audience, he is as sure of their strained attention as a dentist is, or the Angel of the Annunciation." The educational' ("teaching") and the redemptive ("saving") functions of the new dramatic art (it was of course, an old, established form of dramatic event) are underlined by the compelling comparisons of the dentist and the angel, i.e., the utilitarian and the religious.
Exorcism And Baptism In Leroi Jones's The Toilet
Authors: Witherington Paul
Published: April 2013

LEROI JONES'S The Toilet HAS ATI'RACTED several unfavorable reviews and little constructive criticism. Opinion generally is that the play's unpleasant setting and violent obscenity are meant only to shock, and that the sentimentality of the ending does not redeem the harshness that goes before. The play is certainly brutal, but its brutality is carefully staged to suggest the acting out of a ritual. Language and setting indicate that this ritual is an adolescent exorcism of the maternal, ironically changing course near the play's end to emphasize Jones's point that maternal values must be incorported, rather than destroyed.
Lorca And Twentieth-Century Spanish Theater: Three Precursors
Authors: Higginbotham Viginia
Published: April 2013

GARCIA LORCA IS GENERALLY ACKNOWLEDGED to be the most important Spanish playwright of the twentieth century. His plays have won critical acclaim, however, not for their expression of modern life, but because of their affinity with the theater of the Golden Age. Perhaps because much of Spanish theater in this century has been "un-dynamic" and uninspired, critics have concluded that, as a dramatist, Lorca "appears almost out of nowhere." For Alfredo de la Guardia, Lorca's plays are entirely without relation to the theater of his day: "It is clear that, barely glancing at any of the modern theater of his country, he chose to pattern his own plays after the comedies and tragedies of the Golden Age." Study of Lorca's dramaturgy has been so concentrated upon his debt to Lope, Cervantes, and Calderon, that his plays have come to be regarded more as a revival of traditional forms than as an expression of modern theater. Yet Lorca did not inherit Lope's drama without adapting it to express contemporary social and artistic preoccupations. The poetic theater of Eduardo Marquina, the attitudes toward women dramatized by Benavente, and the parodies of society portrayed by Valle-Inclan modernized Spanish drama and thus made possible the theater of Garcia Lorca.
William Saroyan: Romantic Existentialist
Authors: Shinn Thelma
Published: April 2013

WILLIAM SAROY AN IS A CONTRADICTION OF TERMS. He is unabashedly: romantic, yet his romanticism is portrayed within the frequently sordid realism of the run-down bar and the lives of derelicts and prostitutes, escaped convicts and gamblers. He is buoyantly optimistic (an attitude violently attacked and rejected by the egotistical view, that modern society is the first society to recognize the hopelessness of life and the destructiveness of man), yet he writes of murder and disillusionment. He uses the simplest, most realistic dialogue and characters in plays with little discernible reality of plot and—sometimes – setting.
King Lear and Hickey: Bridegroom and Iceman
Authors: Frazer Winfred
Published: April 2013

WHEN EUGENE O'NEILL, IN The Iceman Cometh, made the bridegroom of love the iceman of death, he was playing on the same ironic paradox which Shakespeare saw in the human psyche. In the "coming" of the "little death," in the "dying" at the climax of love, he was perplexed by the same enigma which troubled the greatest of playwrights. The iceman who, in the barroom joke, has not yet "come" but is "breathin' hard" — the basis of his title according to O'Neill — is the bridegroom — King Lear — who is about to "die bravely." The "double death" meaning of his title, which O'Neill thought so exactly fitted the content of the play, includes the double implication of the iceman as death and of the "coming" as also in slang parlance being the "dying" which Shakespeare makes King Lear face in his ironic exclamation to Cordelia's Gentleman.
A Case of Identity: The Source of Pirandello's As You Desire Me
Authors: Rey John
Published: April 2013

LUIGI PIRANDELLO'S PREOCCUPATION WITH THE CONCEPT OF PERSONALITY is well known. The recurrent themes of his plays are his belief that we are not one person, but many; that life often plays us the cruel trick of forcing upon us a mask which others believe is us while behind the mask the real person tries to emerge; that life and art are inalterably opposed, in that life is movement, change, while art is fixation, eternity. Life is constant change. There is a perpetual struggle between this dynamic and the effort of the personality to anchor, to "fix" itself into some eternal form in which it can say: "Look! this is what (or who) I am!" while a mocking life-stream sways with "No! that is what you were; now you are this; in a little while you will be that." Costruirsi is a favorite Pirandellian verb. It means to construct one's own personality oneself, from nothing. All his heroes are busy with the construction of a personality which they hope would be the same for all others and for all circumstances. Pirandello was, indeed, the fore-runner of the Existentialists. "Recently asked who was the most timely modern dramatist, the author of Le Diable et Ie Bon Dieu answered: 'It is most certainly Pirandello.” In Pirandello and the French Theatre, Thomas Bishop has amply given evidence of Pirandello's influence on the most advanced French dramatists. In a sense, Pirandello was also one of the first to proclaim the theory of the Absurd. In his Six Characters, the Father exclaims: "You know that life is full of infjnite absurdities which have no need whatsoever of appearing true because they are true." Bishop says that "the absurd is the bond between Camus and Pirandello… and the French critic Francis Jeanson compares Camus' Caligula to Pirandello's Enrico IV. However, more often than is thought, Pirandello went to real life for his material, on the correct belief that no writer could invent situations or create characters more fantastic, more preposterous or eccentric than those found in everyday life.
Chehov's Magic Lake: A Reading of The Seagull
Authors: Sagar Keith
Published: April 2013

IN MODERN DRAMA, (SEPTEMBER, 1965) Dorothy U. Seyler suggests, in a most unconvincing article, that Chehov's seagull is a parody of Ibsen's wild duck. She tries to pass off Chehov's remark to A. L. Vishnevsky that Ibsen was his favourite author as a "family joke" by setting against it a number of Chehov's criticis111s of Ibsen plays, including The Wild Duck. All these criticisms are of Ibsen's ideas, not his technique, except the reference to the white horses in Rosmershoim, which are certainly far less effective symbols and far less organic than the wild duck. There is every reason to believe that Chehov at that stage of his career would admire the way in which Ibsen had succeeded in breaking through the usual limitations of naturalism by incorporating "naturalistic" symbols such as the wild duck. Miss Seyler's case rests on her assumption that the seagull symbol is "too consciously contrived to be taken completely seriously." The point of this essay is to see how seriously we can take it.
Two Stage Versions of Montherlant's La Reine morte
Authors: Edney
Published: April 2013

IN ITS CONTACT WITH THE PUBLIC since its debut in December 1942, La Reine morte of Henry de Montherlant has undergone a process of modification; the production that Paris theatre-goers have seen at the Comedie-Fran9aise in the late 1960s is different in several respects from the first version of the work. The production of Pierre Franck in 1966 gave a new light to the play which had previously been performed at the ComedieFran9aise for many years in a version directed by Pierre Dux. In addition to the changes in staging brought about by the new production, the text has also undergone gradual modification. As the work is a long one, several cuts have naturally been made for performance, and some of these are shown in the editions of the play published since 1947. (Other cuts have successively been made but not indicated in any published edition.) Whereas most of the early stage omissions appear in the printed text in brackets, some have disappeared entirely from the definitive version of the text. The author, then, has had some part in these changes.
Tennessee Williams Enters Dragon Country
Authors: Kalson Alberte
Published: April 2013

IN THE BAR OF A TOKYO HOTEL (1969) seems a conscious expansion and reworking by Tennessee Williams of one of his earliest one-act plays, I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix (1941). Seen side by side in a new collection of his work, Dragon Country, the two plays - the former an account of an American artist's death abroad, the latter an account of D. H. Lawrence's death in France - make clear what has been frequently overlooked in Williams' work: a continuing preoccupation with the relationship and interdependence of life and art. That the dramatist has allowed them to be published together suggests that the two plays span the distance of Williams' entire career-journey, from its explosive beginnings in his belief in the life-force of the Lawrence an artist-hero to its whimpering end, or at least temporary rest-stop, in disillusion and even doubt concerning the validity of his art.
Keble's Hymn and Yeats's The Words Upon the Window—Pane
Authors: Rogal Samuel
Published: April 2013

YEATS'S THE WORDS UPON THE WINDOW—PANE (written and initially performed in 1930; published in 1934) contains two verses of four lines each from the Anglican hymn, "Sun of my soul, Thou Saviour dear." At the first reading of the play, the two verses may appear to have been inserted by Yeats for no other reason than to create — as Mrs. Henderson announces just prior to the seance — "the right conditions." Indeed, in this announcement she states that the hymn is "the same we had the last time" (p. 946). However, an examination of the " full text (the one Yeats probably knew) of "Sun of my soul" reveals the two verses to be useful in the context in which the playwright cites them.
Forward
Authors: Marker Fredrick
Published: April 2013

Once again in this issue of Modern Drama, our customary range of critical studies is extended by a more impressionistic piece by a practicing theatre artist — in this case lean—Louis Barrault, one of the contemporary theatre's foremost directors. Throughout most of a long career that began with his acting debut under Charles Dullin in 1931, Barrault has remained one of the most exciting forces of renewal in the French theatre.
Conventional Albee: Box and Chairman Mao
Authors: Hopkins Anthony
Published: April 2013

THERE IS LITTLE IN EDWARD ALBEE'S PLAY(S) Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse—Tung that obviously conforms to even an expressionistically liberal definition of "normal" drama. Such things as plot, character, setting, dramatic conflict, dialogue hardly exist in any conventional sense. In Box there is only the stark outline of a large cube and the epithets from a disembodied female voice. The set directions for Chairman Mao specify "the deck of an ocean liner," but the outline cube from Box also remains present throughout. Of the four characters in Chairman Mao, one — the Minister — never speaks, and the others utter interleaved but essentially independent monologues. Part way through the play the Voice from Box begins to be heard as well and; like a reprise, lines from Box end the play(s).
Faulkner's Drusilla and Ibsen's Hedda
Authors: Tucker Edward
Published: April 2013

THE SCENE SEEMS FAMILIAR. In the last section of The Unvanquished by William Faulkner, entitled "An Odor of Verbena," Drusilla, like a "Greek amphora priestess of a succinct and formal violence," presents two identical duelling pistols to Bayard Sartoris, who has returned home upon the death of his father. Pressing the pistols into his hands and watching with a "passionate and voracious exaltation," she says: "Take them. I have kept them for you. I give them to you. Oh you will thank me, you will remember me who put into your hands what they say is an attribute only of God's, who took what belongs to heaven and gave it to you ... the long true barrels true as justice, the triggers ... quick as retribution, the two of them slender and invicible and fatal as the physical shape of love" (p. 273). Bayard stares at 'her "face tearless and exalted, the feverish eyes brilliant and voracious" as she continues: "How beautiful: ... to be permitted to kill, to be permitted vengeance, to take into your bare hands the fire of heaven that cast down Lucifer" (p. 274).
Pinter's Landscape
Authors: Eigo James
Published: April 2013

HAROLD PINTER'S PLAYWRITING is frequently a triumph of non-communication between his characters. Their dialogue abounds in contradictions, repetitions, delayed reactions, and small talk suggesting their reluctance or their inability to communicate. At moments of extreme tension, the dialogue can narrow to monologue. Pinter's first play, The Room, opens with a monologue that falls on deaf ears; in The Caretaker Aston's long speech establishes him as a sympathetic character. Not until Landscape,however, does Pinter limit all his dialogue to monologue.
Echoes of A Resounding Tinkle: N. F. Simpson Reconsidered
Authors: Fothergill
Published: April 2013

WHEN REVIEWING CRESTA RUN at the Royal Court Theatre, J. R. Taylor said of Simpson, "Simpson, I find, is one of those writers it is impossible to argue about. You either find him funny or you don't, and there is no possibility to compromise .... A lot of the humour … is too painfully strenuous and fourth-form to pass muster even as absurd, let alone Absurd.” That he should speak so disparagingly of Cresta Run is not surprising; Anger and Afteralready established Taylor's opinion of Simpson's merit. However, there is another and equally vocal point of view. George Wellwarth calls Taylor "humorlessly obtuse” and joins with Martin Esslin3 in a paean of praise for Simpson's Absurdist skill. The question remains - does Simpson amount to anything?
Inside the Circle: On Rereading Blood Wedding
Authors: Hutman Norma
Published: April 2013

BLOOD WEDDING IS A PLAY THAT GOES NOWHERE, intentionally. Insofar as we have tried to make it move from beginning through middle to end, we have misrepresented the play, falsified it in critical studies as on stages and found ourselves — as usually happens when one puts something together from the wrong blueprints — with a few pieces left over, as for example Death and the Moon.
Encounters with Eduardo De Filippo
Authors: D'aponte Mimi
Published: April 2013

January 4,10:00 p.m. Teatro Eliseo, Rome

"PEOPLE DO BECOME MONUMENTS." Eduardo De Filippo is sitting alone in his dressing room, smoking. I come in without an introduction (having made my way backstage between Acts 2 and 3 of II Monumento by looking stranded and murmuring something about an American study of Neapolitan theatre), and he immediately gets up and shakes my hand. He invites me to sit down, returns to his chair, and continues smoking. I explain my real wishes in nervous Italian (may I speak with him about his work when he returns to Naples in the spring?) and his answer is honest and to the point: "I won't remember your name. Tell my secretary you spoke with me in Rome." I compliment him on the first two acts of his new play. De Filippo is dedicated to II Monumento's philosophy, and words begin to pour out of him as he launches into a discussion of Ascanio Penna's character — his character. He speaks of Penna's entombment, both physically and psychologically, within his ideals. We sense someone standing at the door, and turn together to see my husband who has come to learn if I have found Eduardo. De Filippo greets him as warmly and openly as he had me, and picks up his thread of thought regarding the play. "People do become monuments because ... " The stage manager knocks and calls out, "It is time, Maestro," and the philosopher turns actor and is ready for his cue. He thanks us for coming and urges me to call him in Naples. He is off.
The Modern Theatre as Autonomous Vehicle
Authors: Parker Gerald
Published: April 2013

DESPITE THE OPPRESSIVE PRESENCE in modern drama and theatre criticism of many highly progenitive terms — some the obvious product of hard-sell critical propaganda — it can possibly be argued that two principal directions have been taken in modern drama and theatre. The first of these is the concern with the art of the playas text (thus, in a sense, as literature): the exploration of literary, and rooted in the literary, various theatrical means of presenting new ideas and visions of human society and the human personality.
The World is a Stage: Sartre versus Genet
Authors: Curtis Jerry
Published: April 2013

IT IS NO SECRET THAT JEAN GENET is the self-proclaimed Bastard of Society. This infant without mother, this "effect without a cause," as Sartre has named him, has stated that he likes being an outcast, although "the act of revealing myself to be a homosexual, thief, traitor and coward," he admits, "put me in a situation that wasn't exactly safe, a situation that made it impossible for me to write works that society could easily digest.”
The Corrupted Warrior Heroes: Amiri Baraka's The Toilet
Authors: Tener Robert
Published: April 2013

AMONG THE FEW WHO HAVE WRITTEN. CRITICALLY AND FAVORABLY about Amiri Baraka's (LeRoi Jones') The Toilet, Paul Witherington in "Exorcism and Baptism in LeRoi Jones's The Toilet" has demonstrated that the play is "the acting out of a ritual” dramatizing the passage from boyhood to manhood of a group of black teenage boys. The final events signify their leader's "mature victory over the hyper-masculinity of the gang and over his own divided self.” Embedded in this essay, however, is another idea that Witherington has not developed as fully, namely "that private level of response is the only feasible one for expressing genuine mature feeling in a world dominated by stereotyped responses.” That this is one of the major concerns of the play can be shown by examining the ritual which Baraka develops, the movement from boyhood to manhood.
The "New" Radio Drama: Recent Radiophonic Experiments in Germany
Authors: Usmiani Renate
Published: April 2013

THE TERM NEUES HORSPIEL, "the new radio play," was coined by Klaus Schoning in 1967, and is broadly defined by him as "an opening up of all possible avenues of radio as a medium." Viewed historically, it represents a total and often violent reaction against the "Golden Age" of the 50s, when writers such as Eich, Weyrauch and Bachmann created for the radio audience an "inner stage" of the imagination, often considered the last stronghold of poetic expression in the traditional sense. The revolutionary quality of the "new" radio play is underlined by the adoption of a new technology: stereophonic, rather than monaural, sound, and the preference of the cut over the traditional fade in connecting scenes. Plot structure gives way to elaborate collage techniques. Composition is no longer strictly literary: "I exchange my desk for a seat at the control board of the sound engineer," says Paul Portner, one of the artists of the new school, "my new syntax is the cut, my texts are recorded via microphones, tape recorders, sound steering and filters, many elements are put together to form the collage which makes up the final play ... chance also plays a part ....” The concept of individual authorship becomes increasingly ambiguous as the part played by the technical team in the studio takes on a major importance.
Tragic Heroism in Rosmersholm
Authors: Chamberlain John
Published: April 2013

IN THE INTERPRETATION OF ROSMERSHOLM considerable emphasis has been placed upon the ideas of expiation and atonement and upon the complementary theme of a conflict between pagan and Christian forces in the play reminiscent of that in Emperor and Galilean.” In terms of mood, the work has been long and generally regarded as exalted and tragic. William Archer, for instance, writes of the play's "complex yet clear and stately harmony” and Muriel Bradbrook remarks that "Architecturally Ibsen never produced anything so harmonious: it is his most Sophoclean play.” It is certainly true that the play continually evokes an elevated mood appropriate to the dignity of tragedy, and that its structure is generally suitable for the presentation of the kinds of heroic action already defined. Less often noted, however, is that both Rosmer and Rebekka are invested with ironic identities which function as a sardonic commentary on the high seriousness of their tragic roles and which run counter to the tragic enactment by strongly suggesting the ultimate implausibility of certain conventional kinds of heroic conduct in a nineteenth- century context.
Book Reviews
Authors: Weintraub Stanley , Davison Peter , Bermel Albert , Archer Marguerite , Fuegi John , Meserve Walter , Smith Sylvester , Imhof Rudiger , Mueller Martin
Published: April 2013

Maurice Valency, The Cart And The Trumpet: The Plays Of Bernard Shaw, reviewed by Stanley Weintraub

J. S. R. Goodlad, A Sociology Of Popular Drama, reviewed by Peter Davison

Albert Bermel, Contradictory Characters: An Interpretation Of The Modern Theatre, reviewed by Albert Bermel

Kathleen White Kelly, Jean Anouilh: An Annotated Bibliography, reviewed by Marguerite Archer

Walter Hinck, Das Moderne Drama In Deutschland, reviewed by John Fuegi

Maurice F. Brown, Estranging Dawn: The Life And Works Of William Vaughn Moody, reviewed by Walter J. Meserve

Allan Chappelow, Shaw — "The Chucker-Out,", reviewed by Warren Sylvester Smith

Gunther Klotz, Individuum Und Gesellschaft Im Englisch En Drama Der Gegenwart: Arnold Wesker Und Harold Pinter, reviewed by Rudiger Imhof

Robert W. Corrigan, The Theatre In Search Of A Fix, reviewed by Martin Mueller
Harold Pinter's Ear
Authors: Salmon Eric
Published: April 2013

IN 1957, WHEN THE ROOM WAS FIRST PRODUCED at the Hampstead Theatre Club, and again in the following year when Pinter arrived (for a rather brief stay) in the West End with The Birthday Party, two things about his work stood out and attracted much critical comment: one was the atmosphere of half—hidden violence and indefinable menace; the other was the accuracy with which he had caught the exact cadence and texture of local London speech, several layers down into the sub—culture. The latter of these two qualities — though certainly real and considerable — proved to be a stumbling—block to critics, more especially, perhaps, to theatre critics (as distinct from literary critics whose task is easier, since they have a text before them and are not called upon for instant decision and opinion). The difficulty about that uncannily—well—observed naturalistic dialogue was that it tended to direct attention to the idea of the plays as direct, surface portraiture of the East End of London, more especially since it was by then known that Pinter himself had grown up there. That photograph, on the dust jacket of the first edition of his early plays, of Pinter leaning on the counter of an all—night coffee stall and listening attentively to the old man who served the coffee, represented a popular misconception of what the main thrust of his early work was to be.
Pinter's Homecoming on Celluloid
Authors: Brater Enoch
Published: April 2013

WORKING FROM A SCENARIO especially adapted for the occasion by Harold Pinter and securely anchored in the theme and movement of the stage play, Peter Hall's 116–minute production of The Homecoming was one of a series of eight cinematic ventures undertaken by Ely Landau's American Film Theatre in 1973–74. Pinter's screenplay demonstrates the writer's changing concept of the same characters and the same situation with which his imagination is working, an attempt to "wring the play's neck once more" before the elusive protagonists "withdraw into the shadOWS." In the process we witness not so much a shift in meaning or value as a reconsideration of mood and theatrical effects, the curious disconnection of similitudes in a playwright's changing sense of a work's shape and validity as he translates from one medium into another.
Book Reviews
Authors: Nethercot Arthur
Published: April 2013

Louis Sheaffer, O'Neill: Son And Artist, reviewed by Arthur H. Nethercot
The Action and Its Significance: Arthur Miller's Struggle with Dramatic Form
Authors: Överland Orm
Published: April 2013

"THERE ARE TWO QUESTIONS I ASK MYSELF over and over when I'm working," Arthur Miller has remarked. "What do I mean? What am I trying to say?" The questions do not cease when a play is completed but continue to trouble him. In the "Introduction" to his Collected Plays Miller is constantly asking of each play: "What did I mean? What was I trying to say?" These questions and the playwright's attempts to answer them are directly related to his account of how he planned and wrote his next play.
Book Reviews
Authors: Knapp Bettina , Fuegi John , Percy Smith  , Davies Robertson , Messenger Ann , Mittenzwei Werner
Published: April 2013

Franco Tonelli, L'esthetique De La Cruaute, reviewed by Bettina L. Knapp

Werner Hecht ed., Bertolt Brecht Arbeitsjournal, 3 Vols, reviewed by John Fuegi

Alan P. Barr, Victorian Stage Pulpiteer: Bernard Shaw's Crusade, reviewed by J. Percy Smith

Bernard F. Dukore, Bernard Shaw, Playwright: Aspects Of Shavian Drama, reviewed by Robertson Davies

Robert Bechtold Heilman, The Iceman, The Arsonist, And The Troubled Agent: Tragedy And Melodrama On The Modern Stage, reviewed by Ann P. Messenger

Werner Mittenzwei in cooperation with Manfred Berger,. Manfred Nossig, et al. ed, Theater In Der Zeitenwende: Zur Geschichte Des Dramas Und Des Schauspieltheaters In Der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik 1945-1968, reviewed by John Fuegi
To Make a Short Beckette Piece
Authors: London Merrie
Published: April 2013

To Make a Short Beckette Piece
The Aggressive "Theatrum Mundi" of Edward Bond: Narrow Road to the Deep North
Authors: Barth Adolf
Published: April 2013

As a rather late but outstanding instance from the variety of Spanish "autos sacramentales," the Gran Teatro del Mundo by Calderon de la Barca can well be chosen as a model for comparison. Calderon's picture of the world from the Christian theocentric perspective and his use of allegory are both metaphysical. For that matter, his structural concept is also perfectly in line with the pattern of the ancient Greek metaphor of the "theater of the world" which provided the play's title: the role performance of each figure and all display of worldly affairs are shown to become meaningful only under the eyes of God. From a more mundane point of view, however, the empirical impact of the "stage" itself will remain the most important issue of the concept. Although the metaphysical dimension may be removed and the observer become restricted, as it were, to a more limited perspective, the performance ought still to be a challenging object for investigating the foundations as well as the ultimate meaning of man's existence.
Beckett's Play: The Circular Line of Existence
Authors: Vigal Shoshana
Published: April 2013

THE REAL ACTION of Beckett's Play is a direct result of the spatial tableau. The abstract, almost empty stage, presents a strict linear structure. The rectangular frame of the stage contains a horizontal line, consisting of “three identical urns," from which three heads protrude. The heads are said to "face undeviatingly front throughout the play." Their "speech is provoked" by a single spotlight, situated at the center of the footlight (p.23), and thus not breaking the line-continuity. These physical conditions suggest a certain concept of existence which Beckett tends to reject and to ironize in all his work. this will be referred to as "the linear concept of existence." The linear image derives from the belief that human life has a purpose, it leads in a definite direction towards a final aim. In short, it has meaning. Meaning, in this sense, is related to a transcendental object, (e.g., the beginning, the end, the source of movement). It is symbolized many times by Beckett in his different works, Godot being the most famous embodiment of that idea, and the goad in Act Without Words, II the most concrete one. The two tragicomic tramps in Waiting For Godot live and wait on a "road" which, they believe, leads from one point to another. But the whole play in effect eventually refutes this "meaningfulness" of the road and proves the absurdity of their circular existence. Play achieves the same effect with less words and mainly by a "frozen mise-en-scene" inside the stage-frame.
Book Reviews
Authors: Davies Robertson , Aveline Claude
Published: April 2013

Allardyce Nicoll, English Drama 1900 – 1930: The beginnings of the modern period, reviewed by Robertson Davies

Claude Aveline, Anti-Theatre; Or The Excommunication Of Theramene
Physical Imagery in the Works of Griselda Gambaro
Authors: Cypress Sandra Messinger
Published: April 2013

ONE OF LATIN AMERICA'S more prominent dramatists is Griselda Gambaro of Argentina. Her reputation is well established in her own country and she has begun to gain recognition in the United States as her plays have become more readily available. Her dramatic world has been compared to the Theatre of the Absurd in general. In addition, Tamara Holzapfel has already stated her belief that Gambaro fulfills the "basic requisites of the theatre as envisioned by Artaud by using non-rhetorical language integrated with gestures and all kinds of sound, by incorporating psychological cruelty and physical violence, and by assigning primary importance to the mise-en-scene." It is the purpose of this paper to offer a detailed examination of the four available plays of Gambaro in relation to the Artaudian theories on the importance of physical imagery on stage.
The Child and the Old Man in the Plays of Edward Bond
Authors: Duncan Joseph
Published: April 2013

THE RELATIVELY FEW published studies of Edward Bond show that he is a skillful and self-conscious artist well aware of his own aims, ideas, and methods, and suggest that many aspects of his work remain to be explored. One of these, central both to his ideas and his dramatic method, is his use of the child and the old man as recurring figures. Through their many shifting roles in Bond's five major plays, the child and the old man are keys to his depiction of a society after the fall, but one for which there is still an almost irresponsible hope. Bond has described the stoning of the baby in the pram in Saved as a "dramatic metaphor" for the way in which we "batter" children with "the weight of aggression in our society." The destruction and corruption of the young is a major theme in Bond's work. The old man may be a victim like the child, the oppressor who helps to victimize the child, or both; the youth may become figuratively identified with the old man. The children in Bond's plays almost always lose their lives or are psychologically injured; those children who become old men usually contribute to the injustice of a fallen society, but sometimes they point the way toward escape or salvation.
Book Reviews
Authors: Chinoy Krich , Percy Smith  , Teets Bruce , Adler Thomas , Paul Norman , Parkin Andrew
Published: April 2013

Lise-Lone Marker, David Belasco: Naturalism In The American Theatre, reviewed by Helen Krich Chinoy

Vincent Wall, Bernard Shaw: Pygmalion To Many Players, reviewed by J. Percy Smith

Chester A. Garrison, The Vast Venture: Hardy's Epic-Drama "The Dynasts", reviewed by Bruce E. Teets

C.W.E. Bigsby ed., Edward Albee: A Collection Of Critical Essays, reviewed by Thomas P. Adler

Jacques Copeau, Registres I. Appels, reviewed by Norman H. Paul

Robert O'Driscoll and Lorna Reynolds, Yeats And The Theatre, reviewed by Andrew Parkin
Insanity and the Rational Man in the Plays of David Storey
Authors: Kalson Albert
Published: April 2013

THE VERSE WHICH a provincial schoolteacher recites to his wife in act one of David Storey's first play, The Restoration of Arnold Middleton, may well stand as an epigraph for the Yorkshireman's entire dramatic output. In six of the first seven plays which Storey has written since 1966, at least one character is on the verge of insanity, an idiot or a certifiable lunatic. To grasp Storey's dramatic use of madness which is frequently at the center, occasionally on the periphery of his work, is to understand an artist's attempt to reconcile himself to a bewildering universe where the line between sanity and insanity is often invisible. Unlike those characters of Pirandello who was also obsessed by the relativism of sanity, Storey's do not question the fact of reality. His dramatic world is an artist's conscious rendering of the real one, and the question which Storey's characters must ask themselves is, "How does one cope with the reality one is forced to accept?" For some of them, to lose the mind is to gain the self.
Book Reviews
Authors: Halsey Martha , Dietrich  , Champigny Robert , Lamont Rosette , Cohn Ruby
Published: April 2013

Marion P. Holt, The Contemporary Spanish Theater (1949-1972), reviewed by Martha T. Halsey

Daniel Dervin, Bernard Shaw: A Psychological Study, reviewed by R.F. Dietrich

B.A. Lenski, Jean Anouilh: Stages In Rebellion, reviewed by Robert Champigny

Bettina Knapp, Off-Stage Voices, Interviews With Modern French Dramatists, reviewed by Rosette C. Lamont

Clas Zilliacus, Beckett And Broadcasting: A Study Of The Works Of Samuel Beckett For And In Radio And Television, reviewed by Ruby Cohn
Birthday Mutterings
Authors: Weales Gerald
Published: April 2013

ONE OF THE JOBS of the play reviewer is to send regular messages back from the artistic front, praising, damning, describing individual artifacts as they find their way to the stage. One of the duties of the drama critic is to impose order on disorder — to domesticate trends, to track the Zeitgeist to her lair, to be ever ready to explain where American drama is today. My own messages have become intermittent since I no longer review regularly and, although I have done a deal of pigeonhole stuffing in my day, my only impression of the current theatrical scene is that everyone is riding off in all directions. In a recent article in the New York Times Hilton Kramer explained that all the arts, drama included, are returning to conventional (classic) forms, and shortly after that Arthur Sainer reported in the Village Voice that the avant-garde is alive and occasionally well in Baltimore, where the New Theatre Festival brought companies from all over the country to the University of Maryland campus. One's sense of the way things are is further addled by Bicentennial obliquity. In what other year could one expect to find The Battle of Brooklyn and Col. Robert Munford's The Patriots cheek-by-jowl with Arrabal off-off-Broadway, or a play like Ann Hawkes Hutton's The Decision mounted in a real theater with a star of sorts - Hugh O'Brian (Wyatt Earp as George Washington). Hutton's play is a compendium of cliches of the Paul Green-Kermit Hunter school of outdoor drama; at least, the first act is. I left at the intermission because the reviewer I was with, bound to his seat by duty, said he would never speak to me again if I stayed.
Dramatic Values, Yeats, and the Countess Cathleen
Authors: Orel Harold
Published: April 2013

THE VIEW THAT WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS was never much of a playwright has been expounded so often that it is now a truism of the theater. Eric Bentley, for one, deplores Yeats's fascination with the literary language of the nineteenth century, "the feeblest language in all modem literature." It is possible, as Bentley suggests, that blank verse has long since exhausted its dramatic possibilities. "One cannot quote from his plays any passage of indubitable greatness or many of indubitable brilliance."
The Metamorphoses of the Shaw Review
Authors: Weintraub Stanley
Published: April 2013

BULLETIN NUMBER ONE of the newly-founded (1950) Shaw Society of America appeared in February, 1951. It was a modest affair of eight pages, but represented much spadework on the part of the editor, William D. Chase of the Flint (Mich.) Journal. On the first page was a message from GBS, written just a few months before he died in November, 1950. Inside were comments of an elegiac turn, and news of Shavian interest. The second issue took on the dignity of "Volume 1, Number 2," and added some pages of articles and a continuing current bibliography of Shaviana. By Number Three the journal had definitely grown from Society organ to become The Shaw Bulletin, and contained valuable pieces on Shaw letters and manuscripts, a critique of Buoyant Billions by Felix Grendon, and other articles.