bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Friedrich Dürrenmatt And The Tragedy Of Bertolt Brecht. An Interpretation Of Die Wiedertäufer
Authors: Hammer John
Published: April 2013

RELATIONS BETWEEN FRIEDRICH DÜRRENMATT and his critics have never been good, and they worsen, considerably, whenever the question is raised of the dramatist's debt to Bertolt Brecht. In view of the numbers who seem intent on proving that Brecht still dominates the German stage, there can be little wonder that a writer as independent as Dürrenmatt should seek to free himself from influence, though, in so doing, he has only strengthened the argument of those who are convinced of his preoccupation. There can be little doubt that he owes much to Brechtian stage-technique, but most writers on the subject have displayed a tendency to separate form and content, to treat the manner of expression as something apart from what is expressed. Thus, Joseph Strelka, conceding that Dürrenmatt’s style is Brechtian, goes on to say that the contents of the plays have been anti-Brecht from the start, a view maintainable only if one insists on placing the two dramatists in opposite camps, Communist and non-Communist, and ignoring the humanistic elements in both, something one is less inclined to do, once it has been realised that Brecht was poised precariously between the two and at home in neither. In fact, he has-paradoxically-become a tragic figure, a situation lucidly described by Martin Esslin in his book: Brechet, The Man and His Work (New York, 1960). It might even be claimed that one purpose of Durrenmatt's Paradox Theatre is to intensify the tragedy, in which case it is certainly not correct to speak of direct opposition.
South Africa's Plague: One View Of The Blood Knot
Authors: Green
Published: April 2013

Two Brothers, Morris And Zachariah Pietersen, are living in a one roomed shack in Korsten, an African location in Port Elizabeth. One brother is black: the other light enough to pass as a white man; their world is a room in South Africa. And yet, despite the setting and the pigmentation of the play's two characters, The Blood Knot, is not merely a dramatisation of the evils of apartheid: of course the play is firmly embedded in a particular and specific environment, but Athol Fugard has transcended the immediate and topical issues of political and racial injustice by writing a play that has universal resonances. This, to me, is the greatness of The Blood Knot: it speaks both to South Africa and to Everyman.
R. C. Trevelyan And His Edwardian Sisyphus
Authors: Collins
Published: April 2013

ROBERT CALVERLEY TREVELYAN (1871—1951) was one of a group of four English poets—all close friends—who wrote mythological verse plays over the first four decades of this century. The experimental dramas of Trevelyan and his companions—T. Sturge Moore, R. Laurence Binyon, and Gordon Bottomley—received scant attention in their own time and they are all but completely neglected today. Many of the plays were never performed at all; others enjoyed only short professional runs, or were given by amateurs or verse reciters to meagre audiences— frequently in the provinces. Perhaps the principal reason for the neglect suffered by these verse dramatists is that their experiments impress today just as they impressed the majority of contemporaries— as both anachronistic and esoteric, at a quaint remove from the compelling urban problems which were concerning prose playwrights and novelists. Indeed, the general tendency of all Edwardian Georgian verse drama was escapist: the attempt was to wed tragic materials (either mythological, folk, or contemporary rustic) to idyllic and aesthetic ideals which were essentially late—Victorian. And the atmosphere was that of a lost cause: solemn and stifling.
The Grotesque Children Of The Rose Tattoo
Authors: Starnes Leland
Published: April 2013

THAT REALISM SHOULD BE THE CONVENTION fundamental to the work of Tennessee Williams is altogether logical. Until his late adolescence, Williams had little opportunity to see any form of theater other than the American cinema, and this form, of course, is firmly grounded in the realistic approach. Even the external shape of Williams's theater shows especially clear evidence of this cinematic influence: a succession of episodes, “fade-outs" and "fade-ins," background music, gauze scrims, and expressive lights focussed to simulate "close-ups"—all devices immediately recognizable as• film technique, itself a more poetic kind of realism.
O'Neill's Marco Millions: A Road To Xanadu
Authors: Stroupe John
Published: April 2013

IT IS A COMMONPLACE OF O'Neill criticism that the areas of action within his plays are neatly coincident with his own moral universe that as an obsessed dramatist, his entire canon is a search for meanings in a world he finds sterile and corrupt. Certainly the complexity of O'Neill's obsessions and their relationship to his well-known psychological difficulties are the sources of his unique virtues and defects as an artist; the author's psychological state is the catalyst bringing together artistry and idea, linking each play to his own core concern. His conclusions are thus often far less interesting than the various means he uses to analyze his material.
Book Reviews
Authors: Adler Jacob , Ziegler Carl , Johnson Walter , Carpenter Fredrick , Falk Signi , Erickson John , Miller Jordan , Brandon James
Published: April 2013

Milton Levin, Noel Coward, reviewed by Jacob H. Adler

John M. Spalek, Ernst Toller And His Critics, reviewed by Carl Ziegler

Egil Tornqvist, Drama Och Teater, reviewed by Walter Johnson

Tifno Tiusanen, O'Neill's Scenic Images, reviewed by Frederic I. Carpenter

Robert E. Gard, Theatre In America: Appraisal And Challenge, reviewed by Signi Falk

. Anthony N. Zahareas ed., Ramon Del Valle-Inclan: An Appraisal Of His Life And Works, reviewed by John D. Erickson

Louis Sheaffer, O'Neill: Son And Playwright, reviewed by Jordan Y. Miller

James L. Peacock, Rites Of Modernization: Symbolic And Social Aspects Of Indonesian Proletarian Drama, reviewed by James R. Brandon
The Tempters In Albee's Tiny Alice
Authors: Campbell Mary
Published: April 2013

WHILE CONTROVERSY OVER THE MEANING AND, by corollary, the worth of Edward Albee's Tiny Alice has been considerable, at least on one point critics are pretty much in harmony-the play is non-realistic and is indeed essentially symbolic, allegorical, allusive. If one acts on this assumption and examines in depth the structural lines of the play, the thesis that then reasonably tends to emerge is this: a man in modern Western civilization encounters as many difficulties as ever in being fully human-creature of both flesh and spirit-and nowadays yet other exigent, subtle difficulties besides; for he lives among the material easements and spaciousness that present-day scientific achievements increasingly afford, surrounding him to such a degree that the spiritual aspects of his nature may dwindle unnoticed, the more so if the spiritual guidance on which he relies itself turns renegade, leaving him to the hazard of being finally stripped of the essentials of his humanity, the merest dead soul. To phrase this more specifically, at the primary level the model mansion, importantly highlighted in Miss Alice's library, takes on significance very early and gradually presents itself as a shrine, altar, temple, place of magic, which is sacred to the powerful, wholly unfeeling goddess, Alice; at the same time one becomes aware of its having yet other, insistently notable peculiarities, of the kind most likely to be found in a delicately-formed specimen of modern scientific machinery, such as, for example, a computer center. On the upper level of such a drama, then, the model mansion represents the remarkable world of materialistic advantages and easement wrought by contemporary achievement in the natural sciences, mathematics, and yet other sciences that build on these, and Alice herself is the potent sway that such a world can have over the minds and lives of modern men.
Arthur Miller And The Meaning Of Tragedy
Authors: Martin Robert
Published: April 2013

(Interview by Robert A. Martin)

R.M. In earlier essays and statements you have said that tragedy reflects certain qualities, and I take it that when you wrote All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and A View from the Bridge, tragedy was a definable quality to you. For example, "Tragedy makes us aware of what the character might have been"; "Tragedy is the consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly"; and later, in the "Preface" to the Collected Plays, you said, "The less capable a man is of walking away from the central conflict of a play, the closer he approaches the tragic existence."
Political Allegory In O'Casey's Purple Dust
Authors: McLaughlin John
Published: April 2013

IT IS NO LIBEL TO SAY THAT Sean O'Casey was a Marxist; he proudly proclaimed his Communism and never hesitated to express his admiration for Stalin and the USSR. However, O'Casey was never caught up in "socialist realism," the literary net that has entrapped so many leftist writers. He established his reputation with the realistic Abbey Theater plays, but as he became more confirmed in his Marxism he abandoned realism and began to experiment with such "revisionist" dramatic forms as expressionism and symbolism.
The Elusive Horses In The Sea Gull
Authors: Kendle Burton
Published: April 2013

AN ELABORATE REFRAIN emerges from the apparently random requests for horses in The Sea Gull. As they try, usually unsuccessfully, to secure the horses that promise escape from the boredom and spiritual imprisonment of Sorin's estate, Chekhov's characters deepen the resonance of this refrain. The motif of unavailable horses is introduced humorously as merely another example of the steward Shamreyeff's blundering tyranny over his social superiors, a theme familiar in Chekhov's early plays and still effective in the butler's comic, yet touching, despotism over the weak-witted Protheros in Mary McCarthy's The Group. Though a half-foolish, half-pathetic figure in his nostaligia for the theater of his youth, Shamreyeff rules his domain absolutely. Indeed his absolutism seems partly an attempt to order the present, as his reminiscences are attempts to order his past. But not even the older characters share his interests or his recollections. As Arcadina says, "You keep asking me about someone before the flood-how should I know?" (Act I; all quotations are from The Sea Gull, trans. Stark Young, New York, 1939.) Ironically, Shamreyeff is as trapped as are those characters to whom he denies the horses.
The Social Theme In Osborne's Plays
Authors: Karrfalt David
Published: April 2013

JOHN OSBORNE'S VIEW OF MAN is primarily social. The condition of failure and despair in which modern man finds himself is not necessarily man's final state for John Osborne, and the world in which modern man exists does not have to remain an absurd world. In Luther, Osborne has Martin say: "Seems to me there are three ways out of despair. One is faith in Christ, the second is to become enraged by the world and make its nose bleed for it, and the third is the love of a woman." This states a basic theme that Osborne plays variations upon through all of his plays. For those who are not only intelligent enough but also sensitive enough to know the despair, the job of living becomes the problem of how to cope with this despair. The most common way to cope with the despair turns out to be anger.
Philip Barry: A Dramatist's Search
Authors: Meserve Walter
Published: April 2013

AFTER SEEING A NUMBER OF Philip Barry's successes and failures on Broadway, drama critic Frank Nugent dubbed him a "lightning bug" -"now he lights up, now he doesn't." In terms of Broadway where Barry's plays achieved erratic success from 1923 through 1949, the metaphor was apt and clever. In terms of Barry's desires, the "lightning bug" was a "black comedy": his brilliant successes were slight tricks, while his revealed soul-searching failed on stage. Reared a Catholic, Barry had always accepted ideas which as a mature individual he felt compelled to test and discover for himself. As a dramatist, therefore, Barry was motivated throughout his career by a single idea-man's need for freedom-which he found basic in man's constant attempt to understand himself, to discover truth, to find something in which to believe.
Interview With Martin Walser
Authors: Knapp Bettina
Published: April 2013

MARTIN WALSER WAS BORN IN Wasserburg (Bodensee) on Lake Constance in 1927 His parents were inn-keepers and also owners of a small coal business. As a result, Martin Walser was surrounded by the local folk during his early youth. He listened to them talk, became fascinated with their speech patterns, their intonations, their peculiar way of stating ideas, their emotions and their simple and earthy mannerisms. Itinerant acting companies, choral societies and traveling circuses also attracted his attention. When Martin Walser's father died, the young man, at an early age, was obliged to help out at the inn and in the family's coal business.
The Theater Of Buero Vallejo 1949-1969
Authors: Giuliano William
Published: April 2013

ANTONIO BUERO VALLEJO, AFTER TWENTY YEARS of continued success, is generally considered Spain's most important contemporary dramatist. He has confounded those critics who have affirmed that the Spanish theatrical public would not support a serious dramatist, that is, one whose aim was not primarily to entertain his audience.

Since the now historic success. of Historia de una escalera (Story of a Staircase) in 1949 flung open the doors of a career as playwright to him, Buero, unlike other popular dramatists, has written slowly and carefully, having had produced only thirteen full-length plays and one one-act play. One or two others remain unproduced, while another has been recently published.

It would not be amiss at this time to take an overall view of the work of this author who has added a new dimension to contemporary Spanish drama, to examine his works in order to see which are the dominant themes and ideas that have won approval from critics and public alike.
Melodramas For Puppets And Playlets For Silhouettes: Four Stageworks By Valle-Inclan
Authors: Lima Robert
Published: April 2013

WHILE THE THIRD AND FINAL PERIOD of his theatrical career began in 1920, Valle-Inclan had to wait for several years thereafter before he would see the production of another of his works. La cabeza del Bautista (The Hea" of the Baptist) opened at Madrid's Teatro EI Centro on October 17, 1924, accompanied by Valle-Inchin's earlier one-act play Cuento de abril (April Tale). Thus began a new era for the dramatist, an era of enthusiastic reinvolvement with the stage.
Dutchman And The Slave
Authors: Ferguson John
Published: April 2013

HAMPTON INSTITUTE IS ONE OF THE leading predominantly Negro colleges in the U.S. It was founded as long ago as 1868, and has an extended record of fine service; Booker T. Washington was among the early graduates and Martin Luther King's father another. Although the Institute is predominantly Negro its members have a remarkable colour-blindness, and white faculty and students have no problem of acceptance; people are persons. At the same time there is a proper awareness of and involvement in social problems, and Black Power has its representatives on campus. It was an imaginative decision for the Hampton Players to offer a programme of plays of protest for 1968-9, and to open with two short plays by LeRoi Jones, both of which required an integrated cast.
Pinter's Dialogue: The Play On Words
Authors: Wray Phoebe
Published: April 2013

WORDS ONCE HAD ENORMOUS POWER" a power contained within themselves as spirit, apart from their meaning. The white magician’s command, "I forbid thee, Lucifer, to enter within this circle," for instance, was believed to awe the Devil himself into obedience and prompt action. Over the centuries, and especially since the invention of movable type, words have lost their evocative and spiritual power. “Get it in writing" usurped the place of a man's sacred oath. Ossified in print, then disseminated by electronics, language seems to have become more denotative than connotative.
Metaphysical Silence In Absurd Drama
Authors: Stein Karen
Published: April 2013

MELVILLE DEVOTES A CHAPTER OF Moby-Dick to analysis of the color white. He states that white has great terror and power because it is the absence of all color. Into this void each man projects his own significance. The white whale becomes a potent symbol, all the more so because of its ambiguity. Of great importance in contemporary absurd drama is a similar symbol of emptiness with rich but ambiguous interpretations—silence.
The Divina Commedia As Model And Anti-Model For The Investigation By Peter Weiss
Authors: Salloch Erika
Published: April 2013

CRITICAL REACTION TO DOCUMENTARY THEATER and particularly to Peter Weiss's The Investigation, has been predominantly negative. "Never was an author less important," is one theme of the criticism. The Investigation is, to date, the most extreme case of the genre of documntary theater because its text follows so closely the documents of the trial in Frankfurt and other published reports on the history of Auschwitz.

This paper will not deal with the content of the play, but only with its form, in order to reveal its artistic structure. Its structure as creative effort does not spring from the writer's free imagination, but from the effort to imagine-literally to have the image before his eyes-of the things, the events, and the men of Auschwitz. Just as a collage artist does not manufacture the parts of his composition, the newspaper clippings and the rags, but uses what he finds, so Weiss forms his play from existing elements.
GÜnter Grass: A Kashubian G.B.S.
Authors: Redmond James
Published: April 2013

IN THE LONDON THEATER, the summer of 1970 was notable mainly for the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Günter Grass's play The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising.The play was four years old, but it had not been seen in Britain before, and Herr Grass, much admired here as a novelist for the past ten years, has for the first time made an impression on the English theatrical consciousness. The impact of the play has been forceful, but the reactions of the reviewers have been remarkably confused; several journalists, normally comfortable in a professional blandness, have reacted to the play with a degree of waspishness which suggests they are out of their critical depths.
A Private Mythology: The Manuscripts And Plays Of John Whiting
Authors: Robinson Gabriele
Published: April 2013

AT FIRST SIGHT ONE MIGHT SUPPOSE that the major plays of John Whiting (1917-1963) were not written by the same man. A Penny for a Song, Saint's Day, Marching Song, and The Devils are bewildering not only for their occasional obscurities but also for the disparity in their content and execution. A brief summary will make the point.
William Vaughn Moody: The Dramatist As Social Philosopher
Authors: Pickering Jerry
Published: April 2013

WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY, POET, PLAYWRIGHT, AND SCHOLAR, was born in Spencer, Indiana in 1869, and achieved maturity in one of the most challenging and turbulent eras in the American historical experience. One can easily get a glimpse into what Grant C. Knight has called the "strenuous age" in American literature by delving into Moody's "reflective" drama, his verse trilogy and especially his two prose plays, The Great Divide (1906 under the title of The Sabine Woman) and The Faith Healer (1909). Yet the importance of Moody's dramas as indicators of the social milieu must also take into consideration the impact that Moody has made on American theatrical history. Therefore, what Robert E. Spiller calls "historical criticism," and what Wilbur S. Scott calls the "sociological approach to literature" provides the necessary access to what Moody has revealed in the body of his dramatic work. Such an analysis must, however, be preceded by an appreciation of both the then existing social milieu and its effect on the total body of his work. Thus it becomes necessary to explore briefly Moody's background prior to 1900 and the first of his verse dramas, The Masque of Judgment. Some attention must also be paid to the period from 1900 to 1909, when he published both Divide and Healer.
Yeats'sRepudiation Of Where There Is Nothing
Authors: Thatcher David
Published: April 2013

ALTHOUCH EARLIER HISTORIANS OF THE Irish Renaissance, such as Boyd and Malone, thought highly of “Where There is Nothing modern critics are almost unanimous in their condemnation. “Where there is Nothing has been rather overlooked by Yeatsian scholars, and for good reasons: from a literary point of view it is not distinguished." "The play is a bad, clumsy one." "This five-act affair, overburdened by too much talk, is loose and vague in development." "In Where There is Nothing there is very little that is solid at all-a mist of ideas imperfectly enclosed in a ragged envelope. " Knowing that Yeats himself repudiated the play in favour of The Unicorn from the Stars,these commentators seem unwilling to dissociate themselves from his point of view. Yet the reasons Yeats gives for this rejection are demonstrably unconvincing, as a preliminary account of the play's eventful history will help to show.
A Shaw Concordance
Authors: Bevan
Published: April 2013

THE ADVENT OF COMPUTERS on the literary scene has drastically altered the making of concordances, as it has altered so many other tasks. Important authors whose works formerly seemed too extensive for the long and painstaking scribal labor that went into a "hand-made" concordance were suddenly placed well on this side of possibility. And foremost among these, in point of both length (his plays and prefaces alone run to more than two million words, and at that are only about a third of his total works) and importance (more books and articles are published about the man and his works than any other figure in English or American literature except Shakespeare) is George Bernard Shaw.
Reflections On Shaw And Psychoanalysis
Authors: Albert Sidney
Published: April 2013

By BRINGING TOGETHER A NUMBER OF Bernard Shaw's scattered obiter dicta on psychoanalysis, Arthur Nethercot has performed a distinct service to Shavian scholarship. His article, "Bernard Shaw and Psychoanalysis"! launches a useful exploration into Shaw's relation to the psychoanalytic movement. Not only does it helpfully direct our attention to a hitherto neglected aspect of Shaw's thought, but assembles much material essential to its proper appraisal. .But it is necessary to point out that this pioneering article is only an introduction. to its subject, and one that stands in need of correction in a variety of respects. Indeed, the author, who has written more perceptively about Shaw in the past, has in this case allowed his own predilections to lead him into a series of critical pitfalls. Inclined to regard Shaw's prevailing assessment of Freudian psychoanalysis as misguided, if not perverse, he is much too willing to attribute this seemingly inexplicable outlook to obliviousness or indifference. What is more, in presuming no data to exist where he found none, he is impelled to subscribe to divers premature and untenable conclusions.
Pinter's Dramatiic Method: Kullus, The Examination, The Basement
Authors: Rosador Kurt Tetzeli
Published: April 2013

IN 1949 PINTER WROTE A DRAMATIC DIALOGUE, Kullus,which seems to have served as a scenario for his television play The Basement, first presented by B.B.C. Television on February 20, 1967. Like Kullus the short story The Examination, published along with The Collection and The Lover in 1963,2 shows Pinter's dramatic techniques and methods in statu nascendi and allows insights into the use of his basic theme, which, as I shall attempt to show, is the conflict of dominance and subservience, the battle for positions. Furthermore, there is an evident connection between all three works: a connection which is not limited only to the emphasis on a few but important props, like a door, a window, a stool, the fire in the grate, but includes also the identity of names, the general progress of the story, and the relations of the dramatis personae who are occupied with an unmotivated and relentless power struggle. It appears, therefore, necessary to examine all three works together.
Bicycles And Balloons In Arrabal's Dramatic Structure
Authors: DeLong-Tonelli Beverly
Published: April 2013

FERNANDO ARRABAL" IN DESCRIBING HIS more recent theater as a ceremonie “panique" provides a valuable clue for understanding his earlier works. For this young Spanish playwright, who is better known in France than in his own country, theater is a rigorously ordered ceremony wherein it is indispensable that, beneath an apparent disorder, the presentation be a model of precision, in order that the chaotic confusion of life may be reflected with mathematical clarity. Such concern for precision, though achieving its purest expression in the “Thedtre panique,” is manifestly evident in a 1958 work, not included in the «panique" and largely ignored by critics, La Bicyclette du Condamne. In this one-act piece, the playwright achieves order within chaos by virtue of a circular structure which encompasses even the stage properties and goes far beyond the paradoxical juxtaposition of love-cruelty, goodness-evil, child-man usually mentioned as basic characteristics of Arrabal's work.
Golgotha Again?
Authors: Schwartz Barry
Published: April 2013

IT IS DISCONCERTING TO EXPERIENCE the world on the stage, but in The Killer it is there all the same. The atmosphere hovers over the action, a metaphysical cloud in our midst; on the stage, the machinations of our humdrum, hurried world. Only now our dream of the radiant city is realized, a corporate crystal construction, a perfection of architectural logistics, programmed, prefabricated, ready for occupancy. Who built it? It doesn't matter. There are many possibilities, many contractors. Pick an ideology, any ideology. The radiant city is yours for the asking, with .its architect servant of the system, protected and cleansed by the powers that be; with the poJitician calling for an end to (blank) and a reconstruction of (blank) ... step up ... sign here ... step up. The there is Edouard, your friend, petty, small, weak, servile, neutral and quite dead. His death accomplishes the death of his age. There is the liberal man of intelligence, calling for heroes and dying in an alcoholic catharsis. Finally, there is Berenger, you and me (for do any of us own up to being any of the characters other than Berenger?). He is middle class, middle aged, paunchy, common, regular, median, and human. On the stage, the social milieu, in the air, the cloud of our condition; in our chairs, home, safe, you and me. Comfortable. For a while.
Book Reviews
Authors: Wellwarth George
Published: April 2013

Ted E. Boyle, Brendan Behan, reviewed by George E. Wellwarth
The Ascent To Heaven: A Shavian Pattern (Early Plays, 1894—1898)
Authors: Ganz Arthur
Published: April 2013

IT IS THE PECULIAR CHARACTER OF Shaw's plays that from the first they embody Romantic optimism and Romantic disillusion simultaneously. One is reminded of William Archer's account of seeing Shaw for the first time in the British Museum studying alternately the French translation of Das Kapital and the score of Tristan und Isolde. Characteristically Shaw could be attracted not only by optimism, progress, and social action but by their opposites, passivity, withdrawal, and fulfillment in death.
The Cosmology Of Man And Superman
Authors: Wisenthal
Published: April 2013

IN 1921 SHAW STATED THAT Man and Superman was his major attempt before Back to Methuselah to write a play that would be a contribution. towards a modern religion. But the new religion in Man and Superman went unnoticed, he said, because it was confined to one part of the work and obscured by the rest. "I took the legend of Don Juan in its Mozartian form and made it a dramatic parable of Creative Evolution. But being then at the height of my invention and comedic talent, I decorated it too brilliantly and lavishly. I surrounded it with a comedy of which it formed only one act, and that act was so completely episodical (it was a dream which did not affect the action of the piece) that the comedy could be detached and played by itself." This view, that the religious element in Man and Superman is to be found in one detachable scene-the Hell Scene-has been the prevalent one over the years. It is my feeling that Man and Superman as a whole, including both the Hell Scene and the closely related Comedy, is much more of a religious drama than is usually recognized, and that a view of the relationship between hell, heaven and earth underlies the whole of Man and Superman and unites it. The key to the symbolic nature of the play is in the Hell Scene.
Shaw In The Hispanic World: A Bibliography
Authors: Rodriguez-Seda Asela
Published: April 2013

OF THE BIBLIOGRAPHIES CONCERNING George Bernard Shaw which have been so far compiled, none of them adequately reveals the attention which has been accorded his works in Spain and Latin America. As a result, the non-Spanish Shavian is left with the incorrect impression that the Irish dramatist is relatively unknown in the Hispanic world. The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, for example, lists only two Spanish items on Shaw, and the two part bibliography of books and articles on Shaw from 1945 to 1955 compiled by Earl Farley and Marvin Carlson (in Modern Drama, September and December 1959) contains only four items. More recent articles and studies on Shaw are chronicled in the annual bibliography of PMLA., but even there one only rarely finds the contributions of Spanish critics.
The Spectator Seized By The Theatre: Strindberg's The Ghost Sonata
Authors: Parker Gerald
Published: April 2013

THE DIVERGENCE OF CRITICAL RESPONSE TO Strindberg's The Ghost Sonata is adequately represented by Eric Bentley and Maurice Valency. Bentley writes: "For all the heterodoxy of style and the fantasy of the action, the play is simple in structure and straightforward in its symbolism. The three compact scenes constitute a statement, a counterstatement, and a conclusion." Valency, on the other hand, states that "Unquestionably the play has many faults. Its underlying narrative is fantastically complex. The relation of its three movements is neither close nor entirely apparent." The play, Valency concludes, is "a momentary glimpse of the world through the eyes of madness." Although it has frequently proved a temptation to locate, in Strindberg's art and vision, more of the apoplectic than the apocalyptic, to over-emphasize, or indeed to take refuge in psychoanalysis rather than criticism, the extraordinary sense of form which is apparent in much of Strindberg's art would seem to argue that Bentley's sensitivity to the overall clarity of design in The Ghost Sonata is valid.
The Ambivalence Of The Cocktail Party
Authors: Sena Vinod
Published: April 2013

IF ELIOT'S AIM WAS TO revitalise the theatre by bringing back religious values into it, and his strategy for poetic drama in our times to enter "into overt competition with prose drama," The Cocktail Party must be deemed an unqualified success. It was an immediate hit on Shaftsbury Avenue and Broadway and while starting with the world of cocktails and social scandal of drawing-room comedy, managed to graduate to the theme of sin and expiation. But the very extent of the critique that grows up around a popular work may be symptomatic of an ambivalence, and that of The Cocktail Party (surely the largest for any Eliot play) helps to remind us of a certain unsatisfactoriness at the heart of its success. One can detect the ghost of an 'if' or a 'but' in the most enthusiastic first reviews, and the vast body of critical essays that has grown up since has tried to account for the defect from every possible view-point.
Winterset: Four Influences On Mio
Authors: Tees Arthur
Published: April 2013

MAXWELL ANDERSON'S 1935 VERSE TRAGEDY, Winterset, has elicited more critical comment than any of his other plays, and with good reason. It is his deepest work, both in complexity of plot and in quality of characterization. Often scholarly comment has contributed to an appreciation of this American slum tragedy; occasionally it has obscured the author's intentions by misunderstanding the major struggle of the play—Mio Romagna's change from a vengeful pursuer of those who wrongly condemned and executed his father to one who would forgive and forget the past.
Beyond The Waste Land: An Interpretation Of John Whiting’s Saint's Day
Authors: Robinson Gabriele
Published: April 2013

FROM ITS FIRST PERFORMANCE IN 1951 the obscurity of John Whiting's Saint's Day has caused anger. It was Whiting's first major work and he did not know how much to expect from his audience. I believe he was so at home in its world of mysterious coincidences and symbolic acts that he saw no need for detailed explanation; and since the play is highly original the spectators were bound to be baffled. But then Whiting kept telling us not to worry about analysing symbols but to allow the play as a whole to work on our senses. And in that area at least one cannot deny its force. Moreover Whiting deliberately uses ambiguity with the purpose of upsetting our expectations and involving us immediately in the chaotic world of his play.
Peacocks And Mothers: Theme And Dramatic Metaphor In O'Casey's Juno And The Paycock
Authors: Durbach Errol
Published: April 2013

O'CASEY CRITICISM HAS GROWN WEARY, AT LAST., of raking through the ashes of barren controversy-the superior excellence of the Abbey plays over the later, or (conversely) the "expressionistic" drama over the "realistic," or the Dublin O'Casey over O'Casey the exile. The lean years of inept and irrelevant critical judgments have been superseded in the last decade by passionate apologia, full scale studies of the dramatist, and a reading of the plays which suggests a far closer stylistic unity between the realism of the Abbey plays and the later expressionism than had previously been acknowledged. His symbolism and incipient expressionistic methods have revealed a stylistic bridge over the gulf between the two general areas of O'Casey's career; and the oversimplified view of the early O'Casey as a rude proletarian realist is yielding now to the recognition of dramatic qualities in the Abbey plays inconsistent with "slice-of-life" drama and the "photographic realism" with which he has frequently been (dis-) credited.
Tennessee Williams' Fugitive Kind
Authors: Costello Donald
Published: April 2013

Orpheus Descending, A PLAY PRODUCED PRECISELY IN THE MIDDLE OF the career of Tennessee Williams-seven published full length plays before it and seven after it-provides us with a vocabulary for an interpretation of his whole body of dramatic work. Although all Williams' plays sound like Tennessee Williams, the inadequately regarded Orpheus Descending, a 1957 Broadway failure which lasted only 68 performances at the Martin Beck, sounds like all of Tennessee Williams. That is probably its trouble. It is the most obvious statement of his major theme, and it is jam-packed with his favorite devices. It concentrates-in obvious imagery and precise language the thematic and formal concerns which have become almost obsessive with him over the period of his life's work. This play is unmistakably Tennessee Williams: Four sensitive human beings in a Southern town are lonely fugitives trying to escape earthly corruption. The basis of the corruption is that the earthly representatives treat human beings as objects. The dramatic technique used to communicate this corruption is a vivid theatricality of violence and horror, overlaid with a mystical non-realism made heavy with symbolism. Light-dark imagery helps to separate the unearthly fugitives from the earthly corrupted. The fugitives' attempts to escape corruption are marked by the retaining of a childlike, free, or wild nature, by attempts to recapture a lost past of innocence, by sacramental purification of fire and water, by attempts to escape into artistic visions or sex, by attempts to counter barren death with fruitfulness, and by seeking as a symbol of hope some pure natural object which has risen above earthly taint.
The Red Lantern: A Study Of The Impact Of The Cultural Revolution On Drama In China
Authors: Tung Constantine
Published: April 2013

THE PROMOTION OF THE DRAMA-ON-CONTEMPORY-THEMES or "hsien-taihsi" has been a major movement in the literary scene in Communist China since the early 1960's, and it has been an integral part of the Great Cultural Revolution commenced in 1965. The Chinese dramatist, or "drama-worker" as he is called today, must reflect in his play contemporary reality and topical themes, and he must fulfill the task of portraying a positive hero, the bearer of the Communist ideal of the world's transformation. Since the early 1960's hundreds of plays on contemporary themes have been written and performed, but few have ever successfully presented to the audience an impressive and memorable hero as a model for the Communist society.
The Cornell Letters: Eugene O'Neill On His Craftmanship To George Jean Nathan
Authors: Highsmith James Milton
Published: April 2013

THE LETTERS WRITTEN TO GEORGE JEAN NATHAN BY Eugene O'Neill constitute a wealth of material for any study of the dramatist, as recognized by his major biographers, Barbara and Arthur Gelb in O'Neill (New York, 1964) and Louis Scheaffer in O'Neill: Son and Playwright (Boston, 1968). What has not been adequately appreciated, however, is that these letters present one of the most significant commentaries by any modern dramatist upon his own craftsmanship, as this illustrated description of the Cornell Collection will suggest.
To Our Readers
Authors: Edwards
Published: April 2013

A notice to readers.
The Danger Of Empathy In Mother Courage
Authors: Woodland Ronald
Published: April 2013

IT IS BY NOW A CRITICAL COMMONPLACE that Brecht's Mother Courage and her Children owes its success, if indeed it has any, not so much to the author's implementation of his many theories of playwriting as to his inability, in spite of himself, to put these theories into full practice in his own work. Thus, it is claimed, we respond not to the story of Mother Courage but to the character herself. We are inspired by the woman's courage and sent home from the theater admiring her fortitude, ourselves encouraged to emulate her ineffably good qualities. We respond to the play in terms of our response to its title character. In short, we identify with Mother Courage, make her character our own, and turn her survival into an encouraging affirmation of our own human will to survive. Mother Courage is, ultimately. truly courageous, and her courage sees her through all her tribulations: so we, as audience to her courage, take comfort and gain succor through seeing ourselves in Mother Courage.
Book Reviews
Authors: Sprinchorn Evert , Parkin Andrew , Loney Glen , Orel Harold , Arestad Sverre , Salmon Eric , Albert Sidney
Published: April 2013

Martin Lamm, August Strindberg, reviewed by Evert Sprinchorn

John Rees Moore, Masks Of Love And Death: Yeats As Dramatist, reviewed by Andrew Parkin

Gerald Weales, Clifford Odets: Playwright, reviewed by Glen Loney

Harold Orel, Letters To Molly, John Millington Synge To Maire O'Neill 1906-1909, reviewed by Harold Orel

Orley I. Holtan, Mythic Patterns In Ibsen's Last Plays, reviewed by Sverre Arestad

Dan H. Laurence ed., The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays And Their Prefaces, reviewed by Eric Salmon

Stanley Weintraub, Journey To Heartbreak: The Crucible Years Of Bernard Shaw 1914-18, reviewed by Sidney P. Albert
Beckett and Shakespeare
Authors: Cohn Ruby
Published: April 2013

"THE PLOT [OF KING LEAR] is as Beckettian as anything out of Molloy or Malone Dies; the scene, a metaphysical farce which ridicules life, death, sanity and illusion. This (Act IV, Scene vi) has been the germinal scene in Brook's production of King Lear, and it has conditioned all the scenes with which it connects. In discussing the work of rehearsals, our frame of reference was always Beckettian. The world of this Lear, like Beckett's world, is in a constant state of decomposition."
The Form and the Pressure: Shakespeare's Haunting of Bertolt Brecht
Authors: Fuegi John
Published: April 2013

WITH SEEMING FINALITY, PETER BROOK DECLARES IN The Empty Space: "No one seriously concerned with the theater can bypass Brecht. Brecht is the key figure of our time, and all theater work today at some point starts or returns to his statements and achievements.” Yet, having granted the primacy of Brecht's importance to the modern stage, we find Mr. Brook declaring only pages later: "So it is in the second half of the twentieth century in England where I am writing these words, we are faced with the infuriating fact that Shakespeare is still our model.” Though Mr. Brook does not tie the two statements together in the tendentious way I have done so here, the statements themselves may be juxtaposed in order to illuminate a major paradox of the contemporary theater. If Brecht be the innovative artist and original thinker that Brook suggests he is - and that Brecht himself so often claimed to be (for example, "I am the Einstein of the new stage form”) - how then is it possible that a representative of late feudal thinking in England should still manage to serve the late twentieth century as a model? Why have we not totally jettisoned Shakespeare's supposedly antiquated model, with its burden of hierarchical values, ghosts, and other claptrap, and wholeheartedly embraced instead a new model created specifically for a new world view in our scientific century by our leading Marxist theoretician and playwright? Whatever "answers" can be given to such deliberately provocative questions can best come, I believe, from a close examination of Brecht's own lifelong love-hate relationship with his Elizabethan forerunner. Only if we can understand both Brecht's early vitriolic statements and his later rapprochement with Shakespeare can we then explain why a close study of the "new" (Brecht) has led us, however reluctantly, back to the "old" (Shakespeare).
Genet-Triana-Kopit: Ritual as "Danse Macabre"
Authors: Murch Anne
Published: April 2013

MAN AT ODDS WITH HIMSELF AND HIS WORLD - groping for a new image… Is Man behind his times, or is he ahead of them? Is he hankering after some mythical past where charisma was there f9r the taking, or projecting himself into some utopian, McLuhanish future of "tribal," electronic bliss? Either way he is a misfit in the present and this condition is reflected in the drama he creates…

One recurrent element in that drama is ritual action. We shall consider such action in three contemporary plays: Genet's The Maids, Triana's The Night of the Assassins,and Kopit's Chamber Music, Belonging respectively to the French, the Spanish-Cuban, and the North American cultures, these plays illustrate in their striking analogies a much talked-about phenomenon: the emergence of a planet-wide culture, whose common denominator, in the western world, seems to be the individual's show of alienation.
Ibsen and Nietzsche: A Reading of The Master Builder
Authors: Hinden Michael
Published: April 2013

VERY LITTLE HAS BEEN DEFINITELY ESTABLISHED concerning the relationship of Nietzsche and Ibsen, although it seems unthinkable that the two should not have known each other's works. It is particularly difficult to ignore the likelihood of influence in the case of Ibsen's The Master Builder, which appears to draw directly upon one of Nietzsche's most celebrated essays, On the Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche's essay was published in 1887; Ibsen, we know, read German; his work on The Master Builder was begun in March, 1892 - but (it must be admitted) beyond these bare facts we have little external information upon which to base our surmises. A major piece of evidence is contained in a letter to Nietzsche written by Georg Brandes dated November 23, 1888, in which Brandes claims: "Believe me, I spread your propaganda everywhere I can. So late last week I earnestly recommended Henrik Ibsen to study your works. With him too you have some kinship [the other reference is to Strindberg, for whom Nietzsche had professed an admiration], even if it is a very distant kinship. Great and strong and unamiable, but yet worthy of love, is this singular person."
Alexander Popovic: Sound—Images, Metaphor—Scenes, and Audience—Involvement
Authors: Czerwinski
Published: April 2013

ALTHOUGH ALEKSANDAR POPOVIC is the most produced playwright in Yugoslavia and has probably written more dramatic works (hundreds of radio and television scripts, several series, and fifteen full—length plays) than any other living writer, he remains the most controversial and the least understood dramatist in his country. So far as the rest of the world is concerned, Popovic is a Serbian oddity — bewildering, untranslatable, and therefore impossible to produce. As a result his plays have yet to be seen in translation outside of his own country. It is true that the Italians have recently shown interest in his work and that translations have already been made into Czech, German, French, and English. Notwithstanding all this activity, Popovic's works are virtually unknown outside of Yugoslavia.
The Manuscripts of Beckett's Play
Authors: Admussen Richard
Published: April 2013

The manuscripts of Play, translated into French as Comedie, demonstrate the care with which Beckett works. The number of drafts alone is indicative; there are ten typescript versions of the play, Many are heavily rewritten, and the variety of inks used in the corrections give evidence of at least twenty-two separate reworkings. Moreover this process took place over a period of many months. The first dated typescript, the fourth, reads: “Corrected August 1962," and the tenth and last, conforming with the published version, is marked December 1963. Since three versions already existed before August 1962, we can assume that Beckett worked at the creation of Play for at least a year and a half; two years is probably more accurate.
Peter Weiss and Documentary Theatre: Song of a Scarecrow
Authors: Niemi Irmeli
Published: April 2013

IN ITS ATTEMPT TO ILLUSTRATE MAN'S CONDITION and the world of our time the theater has two alternatives. It can create on the stage a reality of its own where the laws of the world outside the theater are only partly valid. The other alternative is to approximate to the world outside and to start with the social and historical facts. The type of Piscator's "agitprop" theater has appealed strongly to writers and directors in the theater of the 1960s and this has resulted in a new wave of social and political activity. At the same time the theater itself has undergone great changes: the similarity of views required for participation in political documentary theater has favored the formation of small, free-form theatrical groups. The actors of the play are often obliged to have the same view of life and the same political ideas as those expressed by the author and his play.