bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Shaw's Blakean Vision: A Dialectic Approach To Heartbreak House
Authors: Leary
Published: April 2013

ARIADNE UTTERWORD, ONE OF CAPTAIN SHOTOVER'S DAUGHTERS, provides the thread out of the maze of interpretation that surrounds Heartbreak House with her statement that "there are only two classes in good society in England: the equestrian classes and the neurotic classes." She is referring to the inmates of Horseback Hall, the compulsive obsessionals who act without desire or imagination and the schizoids of Heartbreak House who dream without will or action. In following the clue's complex windings through the labyrinth of these faculties of desire, imagination, will and action, I make use of the writings of William Blake, not so much to show the direct influence of the Romantic poet on Shaw as to suggest Shaw's connection with the whole mythopoetic content of English art. Specifically, the dialectic quest of the play is for a synthesis of Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall, for a way of reconciling soul and body, contemplation and action. More generally, the dialectic moves from this play, through other major plays, to the world that Shaw's drama continues to reflect. In this second sense, the dialectic tends towards a synthesis of what must, I fear, be described somewhat forbiddingly as the mythopoetic and archetypal aspects of the play.
Book Reviews
Authors: Barclay  , Meserve Walter , Proffer Ellendea , Sidnell Michael , Marker Lise-Lone
Published: April 2013

Francisco Ruiz Ramon, Historia Del Teatro Espanol. Siglo XX, reviewed by T.B. Barclay

Lois Wheeler Snow, China On Stage, reviewed by Walter J. Meserve

C.H.Bedford, The Early Plays Of Mikhail Bulgakov, reviewed by Ellendea Proffer

E. H. Mikhail, Sean O'Casey: A Bibliography Of Criticism, reviewed by Michael J. Sidnell

Paul F. Breed and Florence M. Sniderman, Dramatic Criticism Index, reviewed by Lise-Lone Marker

Carl J. Stratman, Britain's Theatrical Periodicals, reviewed by Lise-Lone Marker
Scene Thirteen Of Bond's Saved
Authors: Babula William
Published: April 2013

IN AN INTERVIEW SOON AFTER THE ORIGINAL PRODUCI'ION OF Saved, Edward Bond stated, "If a problem matters to you, you have a solution or at least you have feelings towards a solution." In Saved the problem is the survival of hope. The solution, or at least the feeling towards a solution, is suggested by Bond's comment in an author's note on the conclusion of his play, "Clutching at straws is the only realistic thing to do." In Scene Thirteen Edward Bond gives his audience the straw to clutch at as he gives it to his characters on the stage. It is a moment of desperate optimism and a mad pantomime of affirmation. Yet Scene Thirteen gives the title of the drama its significance. Without that closing bit of action it would be almost impossible to find out who or even what is saved. Indeed, it is difficult to do so given Scene Thirteen.
Harley Granville Barker's The Madras House And The Sexual Revolution
Authors: Ritchie Harry
Published: April 2013

IT IS JUST WITHIN THE REALM OF POSSIBILITY that one day the Woman's Liberation Movement will quote Harley Granville Barker in much the same way the Suffragettes supported their cause with the works of Ibsen and Shaw. Possible but not probable. Barker is best remembered now as a young actor who appeared in some of Shaw’s original cast lists, a director of promise in the early 1900's, an experimenter with repertory theater who cost his backers fortunes, or even as the genius who divorced his wife and English theater, married an American millionairess, and emigrated to write the Prefaces to Shakespeare, which is the main source of his reputation today. But he was also a playwright, and with the exception of Shaw and Wilde. probably the best of his day. And his play The Madras House, written in 1909 and first produced in 1910, is not only a brilliant picture of the Edwardian mind grappling with the moral and sexual issues of marriage, it is a recapitulation of the Nineteenth Century evolution of the "New Woman" and a clear prophecy of the inherent difficulty of such a woman's role in contemporary society. It is, in the words of Gerald Weales, "one of the subtlest examinations of sex in the English theatre, one that-alas for the success of the play-made and makes great demands on an audience conditioned to think of sex in terms of melodrama or the open zipper."
Ibsen's “Strange Story" In The Master Builder: A Variation In Technique
Authors: Barranger
Published: April 2013

CRITICS OF HENRIK IBSEN'S STRUCTURAL TECHNIQUES have concentrated upon his innovations in the well-made formula, his attention to unities of time and action in his realistic prose dramas, and his masterful technique of retrospective exposition. Although major critics have commented upon new directions in Ibsen's last plays, his use in The Master Builder of the strange story as an experimental structural device has largely gone unnoticed. Instead critics of The Master Builder have concentrated upon Ibsen's autobiographical confession in the guise of master-builder Solness or upon language and symbol as innovations in the play rather than upon significant departures in structural technique.
Dance And Rhythm: Their Meaning In Yeats And Noh
Authors: Kim Myung
Published: April 2013

IN YEATS AND THE NOH POETRY emerges primarily through symbols and ideas. Yet their poetry truly exists when they are elevated into the dimension of a static art where transcendent calm and repose lend an atmosphere of dreamy torpor. This is stasis or yugen of poetry, the supreme moment of aesthetic suspension that brings the mind into harmony with the ways of the universe as well as with its own inner self. The harmony is a musical one, orchestrated toward, an epiphany and vision, sustained by a poetic image powerfully symbolizing its deep spiritual import. As Yeats himself tells us, this is a condition of chimera, an experience that imparts the maiden truth that "art is art, because it is not nature." Being remote from nature and reality, their poetry is necessarily "strange." This strangeness and tranquility in Yeats and the Noh is primarily derived from the ambience of dance and rhythm, a matter not too clearly understood now despite the fact that dance and rhythm frequently constitute the whole meaning of their drama.
Modern Drama: A Backward Glance
Authors: Marker Frederick
Published: April 2013

WITH THIS ISSUE Modern Drama moves its headquarters to the University of Toronto, where it becomes the official publication of the Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama. The change is dramatized by the new cover, the creation of the prize-winning Canadian book designer Allan Fleming. Behind the new cover and beneath the new address, however, the aims and principles of the journal's founder, Professor A. C. Edwards, remain strong.
From Macbeth to Macbett
Authors: Lamont Rosette
Published: April 2013

"THE TITLE OF MY PLAY has two t's so that people won't get it confused with that of Shakespeare's, familiar, I imagine, to a good many." When interviewed, Ionesco the Prankster — he who enjoys saying that he belongs to "the cabaret school of literature" — is sure to make his entrance. The author of Macbett, however, though still in command of his great sense of humor, is a serious political thinker.

Like Picasso's drawings based on Manet's Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe, Macbett is art on art. Yet the aesthetic aspect here is, if not forgotten, transcended. Politics is lonesco's concern in his latest play, as it was in Rhinoceros, but whereas in the latter the playwright presented a monstrous happening, a moment of savagery, of regression to the beast in the development of civilization, the present play deals with the relentless, cyclic return of destruction, the playing and the playing out of political ambition.
Heartbreak House: Shaw's Lear
Authors: Weintraub Stanley
Published: April 2013

IN A MUSICAL REVIEW IN 1893 "G.B.S." joked, "It is impossible to say what a man can do until he tries. I may before the end of this year write a tragedy on the subject of King Lear that will efface Shakespear's; but if I do it will be a surprise, not perhaps to myself, but to the public. It is certain that if I took the work in hand I should be able to turn out five acts about King Lear that would be, at least, grammatical, superficially coherent, and arranged in lines that would scan." At the time Shaw had completed only one play, Widowers' Houses; and was working on a second, The Philanderer, one of his least successful efforts. The likelihood of a Shavian Lear was remote. A dozen years later, when he tried to interest classicist and translator of Euripides Gilbert Murray in "a great dramatic theme ... — a Woman Lear with three sons — just the sort of Aeschylean subject in modern life you want,,, the idea was no longer a flippant aside.
The Play-Life Metaphor in Shakespeare and Stoppard
Authors: Babula William
Published: April 2013

SCRIPT IS DESTINY. For Ros and Guil in Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead destiny lies in the plot of an Elizabethan revenge tragedy. Stoppard's play owes much to the techniques developed by the absurdists, and particularly to the devices employed in Waiting for Godot. C. J. Gianakaris has demonstrated the "innumerable ... parallels" that "reveal how consciously Stoppard has mined Beckett's seminal drama." Like Beckett's hobos, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern wonder "what are they to do without adequate instructions in their blank context.” Gianakaris continues: "Guildenstern speaks archetypal words for all those caught in the modern universal dilemma ... " Yet their context is not blank; it is Hamlet. If the two men are caught in a universal dilemma, they are also trapped in a script. They are not "escapees from Shakespeare's tragedy," but victims, as Hamlet is a victim, of the story-line.
O'Casey's Shakespeare
Authors: Blitch Alice
Published: April 2013

IN READING SEAN O'CASEY'S PROSE WORKS, one is struck by his frequent allusions to Shakespeare's plays. In his earliest essays, which appeared in The Irish Worker and Irish Opinion between 1913 and 1918, brief quotations from Macbeth, 3 Henry VI, Coriolanus, and Julius Caesar served as highly functional introductions to O'Casey's polemic; and he was to resort to the same device in "The Sacrifice of Thomas Ashe" and "The Story of the Irish Citizen Army." Shakespeare was, in fact, so much a part of O'Casey's thinking that one hesitates to label "allusion" his frequent Shakespearean echoes. And this is true not only of the earlier works, but the later ones as well, essays and the many-volumed autobiography written after his fame had been established. Were O'Casey to have enjoyed a standard education, there would be little noteworthy in such recognition of Shakespeare; and had he not been influenced as a writer by Shakespeare's methods, the entire matter would be at best academic. But in fact O'Casey was self-educated and, as I shall demonstrate, he was decidedly influenced by Shakespeare's ways of creating character.
Shakespeare on the Modern Stage: The Need for New Approaches
Authors: Salmon Eric
Published: April 2013

IN A LECTURE DELNERED IN LONDON in May, 1971 to the Society for Theatre Research and published in Theatre Notebook (Spring, 1972) John Russell Brown drew attention to and discussed the fact that originality in the production of Shakespeare's plays has, in the twentieth century, shifted its ground. Whereas formerly the originality that was so much prized by Hazlitt, for example, rested essentially on the actor. and his interpretation of the character, both in that character's individual aspects and in his relation to the sense of the play as a whole, the very word "originality" has now come to mean either a radical "interpretation" of the play through the superimposition from outside of some more or less extraneous thematic idea or else it refers purely to some novelty of physical device in the stage presentation of the play. In neither case does the originality spring from either the text or the actor; in the former case the originator is the director, in the latter it is either the director or the designer. John Russell Brown argues, and with cogency, that what is needed is a return to a manner of Shakespearean production which is actor—orientated rather than director—orientated and in which our major actors return over and over again — as Macklin and Garrick and Kemble and Kean and Macready did — to the playing of the major Shakespearean roles, so that what one got in a performance would be the sensibilities and resonances of the play distilled through a lifetime's experience of the interpretative means.
Richard III and the Modernizing of Shakespeare
Authors: Parker Brian
Published: April 2013

THE PROBLEMS OF MODERNIZING ARE PERENNIAL, and the basic arguments, pro and con, so well known that to repeat them is like entering a nightmare in which one tries to explain the difference between red and blue. l The audience beats one with white sticks, and one deserves it.

Instead, I should like to suggest certain areas of agreement which may allow us to see these problems as a dialectic, not a deadlock. One is that we all now acknowledge that drama exists properly only in performance, not as something which is merely read; and, though drama may include permanent and continuing truths, the actual performance is necessarily — and quite properly — ephemeral. When the curtain falls, the show is over; and no repetition will be quite like it again. Secondly, I think we must admit that there is no such thing as performing a play "straight." This demand is the opposite heresy from the demand for topicality. In its extreme form, it is really only a sophistication of the romantic argument that it is better to read plays (to put them on, as it were, in the "theatre of the mind") than to see the limitations of even the best performance. This was Charles Lamb's opinion about King Lear. But, as John Russell Brown amongst others has pointed out, there are many different ways of saying almost every line (Hal's "I do. I will" to Falstaff, for instance, or Lear's own "Never, never, never, never, never"); and the actor's choice of reading will always depend on his understanding of the line's context; which, in turn, will not infrequently involve his interpretation of the whole play. Readers may happily hold in suspension several possibilities at once, but performance always requires an existential choice — in a word, it requires interpretation. Lastly, a third principle which seems common sense (though I have heard it denied): such interpretation is bound to be modern, strained through the sensibilities of actors, directors, designers, and audience which, willy nilly, have been set — "programmed," if you like — by the conditions of modern experience.
Book Reviews
Authors: Page Malcom , Salmon Eric , Johnson Walter , Wagenknecht Edward , Bree Germaine , Hetrick Phyllis , Matlaw Myron , Giankaris  , Decoster Cyrus , Riese Laure , Saul Brandon , Marker Lise-Lone
Published: April 2013

John Russell Taylor, The Second Wave: British Drama For The Seventies, reviewed by Malcolm Page

Dan H. Laurence ed., The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays With Their Prefaces, Vol 4, , reviewed by Eric Salmon

Dan H. Laurence ed., Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters, Vol 2, reviewed by Eric Salmon

Anthony Swerling ed., In Quest Of Strindberg: Letters To A Seeker, reviewed by Walter Johnson

Gerda Taranow, Sarah Bernhardt: The Art Within The Legend, reviewed by Edward Wagenknecht

Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, L'Expressionisme Dans Le Theatre Europeen, reviewed by Germaine Bree

Bernard F. Dukore, Bernard Shaw Director, reviewed by Phyllis B. Hetrick

Morris Freedman, American Drama In Social Context, reviewed by Myron Matlaw

Anne Paolucci, From Tension To Tonic: The Plays Of Edward Albee, reviewed by C. J. Gianakaris

Rafael Martinez Nadal, El Publico. Amor, Teatro Y Caballos En La Obra De Federico Garcia Lorca, reviewed by Cyrus Decoster

Harold Wilson, Claudel's Immortal Heroes: A Choice Of Death, reviewed by Laure Riese

Michael J. Sidnell, George P. Mayhew, and David R. Clark, Druid Craft, The Writing Of The Shadowy Waters, reviewed by George Brandon Saul

Richard Moody, Lillian Hellman, Playwright, reviewed by Lise-Lone Marker
Entretiens avec Eugene Ionesco
Authors: Riese Laure
Published: April 2013

CONVERSER A LOISIR AVEC UN AUTEUR TEL QUE IONESCO ne peut etre qu'un enrichissement, une redecouverte. II a verse un eclairage nouveau et en profondeur aux questions que je lui posais qui permet de s'interroger differemment sur telle ou telle de ses pieces, de leur donner pour ainsi dire une interpretation personnelle. Bien des problemes ont ete elucides grace a ses reponses. II m'a emportee plus haut et plus loin dans son theatre. On sent que ce qu'il compose est Ie resultat d'efforts acharnes vers sa verite, quoiqu'illa cache souvent sous un ton badin. Cependant il sait donner a tout ce qu'il percoit une attention particuliere.
Krapp's Last Tape as Tragicomedy
Authors: Dukore Bernard
Published: April 2013

FIRST THINGS FIRST: the title, followed by the subtitle. Virtually every word of both is a pun: Krapp's Last Tape: A Play in One Act. As numerous critics have observed, Krapp is both the man's name and excrement; man is therefore symbolized by and reduced to excrement. As Ruby Cohn points out, Tape may refer both to the recording device and to an alcoholic beverage. A Play, a work for the stage, also describes how one records and how one listens to a recording device; and such meanings of the word as amusement, game, or diversionary activity (as distinguished from meaningful employment) are apposite. Perhaps more important in the context of tragicomedy are the remaining words. Last may mean final or it may mean the most recent. Descriptive of the theatre piece, One Act at the same time suggests that all of Krapp's tape recording sessions are ultimately the same, are essentially one act. Thus, Krapp's final and/or his most recent tape is essentially the same as the others.
The Radical Idealism of The Screens
Authors: Scarborough Margaret
Published: April 2013

RICHARD COE, COMMENTING ON THE IDEOLOGICAL EVOLUTION OF JEAN GENET, remarked that he seems to have become "engage malgre lui." However The Screens is viewed, one cannot deny that Genet's hero, Said, is acting from some idealistic commitment and that the value of this commitment precludes all other value. With all the frantic urgency of a child, Genet strips action and characters of conventional assumptions to leave us, in the end, with a character who is little more than a song. But Jacques Guicharnaud, whose sense of moral outrage often inclines him to a myopic view of Genet, is too reductive when he tells us that "the whole play" may be reduced to a "decoration" and a "song.” Genet's concern, like that of many of his predecessors, particularly the "poetes maudits," is immediate intense and active. It is with the dynamics of being and nothingness as they impinge upon value, aesthetics and human identity. Idealistic and singular of purpose, Genet leads Leila and Said relentlessly through every sort of dejection into freedom and song, into authenticity and the world of art.
Artaud's Use Of Language, Sound, And Tone
Authors: Labelle Maurice
Published: April 2013

"OH, FOR A LANGUAGE TO WRITE DRAMA IN," Eugene O'Neill wrote in 1929. "I'm so strait-jacketed by writing in terms of talk! But where to find that language?"l His cry of frustration reiterated the feelings of one of his French contemporaries, Antonin Artaud (1896-1948). Although O'Neill failed to answer his question, Artaud, in his plays and poems, undertook a long series of experiments in language, sound, and tone in an attempt to develop new means of communication.

The Spurt of Blood (Le Jet de sang) (1925), a play which was the highpoint of his early period (1924-1931), demonstrates the subservient role Artaud assigned to language. The work is a montage of short, highly visual episodes. Briefly, the work opens with a love scene between a young couple, which is interrupted by a cosmic convulsion in which parts of human anatomy, temples, and insects fall from the sky. After the storm, the man and girl leave, and then a Knight and Nurse enter. Following their sexually suggestive actions and discussion, the Young Man returns. His conversation with a Priest is terminated when God reaches down and grabs a Whore, who has appeared on the scene. Resisting His action, she bites His wrist; at once blood spurts across the stage. God, wounded, retreats in a fury of lightning. The action then quickly moves to a highly imagistic and erotic scene which concludes the play.
Strindberg, Antoine and Lugné-Poë: A Study in Cross-Purposes
Authors: Senelick Laurence
Published: April 2013

"A PLAY OF MINE HAD BEEN PRODUCED AT A PARIS THEATRE, the dream of all contemporary authors in my country, but one which I alone had realized. But now the theatre was repellent, as in everything that one has Attained…” So wrote Strindberg in later years, when the glamor of his Parisian success had tarnished. But the productions of his plays staged by the Theatre Libre and the Theatre de l'Oeuvre between 1889 and 1894 are cited in most textbooks of drama as the breakthrough that won the Swedish playwright the success and publicity that he deserved. Antoine and Lugne-Poe, their directors, are consistently extolled as daring innovators who championed the cause of unappreciated genius and whose productions perfectly embodied what Strindberg had in mind. The textbooks implicitly suggest that the road was now clear for Strindberg's triumphal chariot to travel unimpeded from one succes d'estime to the next, and that owing to the farsightedness of French experimental theatre, his place in world drama was henceforth assured.
Robert Lowell's Benito Cereno
Authors: Estrin Mark
Published: April 2013

BENITO CERENO, ROBERT LOWELL'S DRAMATIZATION of Melville's novella of 1855, has received scant critical attention since its initial production in 1964. The longest and most interesting play in a trilogy that takes the American flag for its unifying metaphor, Benito Cereno comes to terms with the social and political anguish of American life to a degree that one could barely have predicted at the time of its appearance. The play explores through the conventions of a poetic, ritualistic drama the racial conflict in the national experience and in the process achieves an impact impossible to find elsewhere in American dramatic literature of the past decade.
Synge and His Critics
Authors: Michie Donald
Published: April 2013

AT THE TIME OF HIS DEATH IN 1909, John M. Synge's drama was being criticized for the wrong reasons. Scant attention was being paid to the artistic value of his drama in Ireland except by some of his intimate friends such as William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, AE, and Padraic Colum, all of whom were in the theatre movement. Most of the criticism leveled at Synge's drama was political. Arthur Griffith, editor of the nationalist newspaper, The United Irishman, spear-headed the attack on Synge by other fervent nationalists such as James Connally and Maud Gonne. They supported the Irish National Theatre Society so long as it remained Irish and nationalist, and as long as it was not antithetical to the aims of the Gaelic League and the Irish Nationalists. Some plays, like Yeats's Cathleen Ni Houlihan, were considered worthy of the Irish cause, but Synge's plays, particularly The Shadow of the Glen, The Tinker's Wedding, and The Playboy of the Western World, were blasted as "unwholesome productions." Other critics, along with Griffith, attacked the plays on moral grounds as well as political, because the plays had nothing Irish about them and because they were more characteristic of Continental "decadent" literature than of Irish literature. Synge was labelled a subversive who was undermining the morality and the hallowed customs of the Irish people and defaming the sanctity of the Roman Catholic Church; his plays were considered to be an affront to the dignity of the proud, nationalistic Irishman. Not only did the nationalistic newspapers attack Synge and his drama, but playgoers also hissed, booed, and rioted, not in protest against Synge the dramatist, but because they completely misunderstood his portrayal of the common Irish peasant.
Book Reviews
Authors: Parker  , Cohn Ruby , Leggatt Alexander , Neglia Erminio , Esslin Martin
Published: April 2013

Mardi Valgemae, Accelerated Grimace: Expressionism In The American Drama Of The 1920s, reviewed by R. B. Parker

Eric Bentley, Theatre Of War, reviewed by Ruby Cohn

Walter Lazenby, Arthur Wing Pinero, reviewed by Alexander Leggatt

Robert Lima, Ramon Del Valle-Inclan, reviewed by Erminio G. Neglia

Nicholas Hern, Peter Handke, reviewed by Martin Esslin
From the Actor to Ubu: Jarry's Theatre of the Double
Authors: Spingler Michael
Published: April 2013

MANY OF THE MAJOR INNOVATIONS of the modern avant-garde theatre depend upon the discovery that plays can share with dreams the capacity for dramatizing unconscious processes through archetypal images. Alfred Jarry is one of the first modern playwrights to have put this discovery into practice by attempting an anti-realistic theatre of irrational suggestion. His plays have been often mistaken for iconoclastic farces, but their effect does not depend primarily upon the mechanisms of farce. He says of Ubu Roi: "Really, there's no reason to expect a funny play, and the masks establish that the comedy should be, at the most, the macabre comedy of an English clown or of a dance of death." The play is rather a violent dream play in which there is a grotesque distortion of the world. Jarry's theoretical writings reveal that he is calling for a theatre which is remarkably like Antonin Artaud's; a theatre which will actualize myths of the obscure regions of the mind.
The Psychoanalyzing of Eugene O'Neill: P.P.S.
Authors: Nethercot Arthur
Published: April 2013

THE QUESTION OF EUGENE O'NEILL'S KNOWLEDGE of psychoanalysis and the extent and degree of its influence on him and his plays has long concerned the critics, scholarly, literary, and journalistic, and I have made my own contribution to the discussion — which has often come close to a controversy — in certain articles in Modem Drama. The first of these was entitled "The Psychoanalyzing of Eugene O'Neill," and came out in two parts, in December 1960 and February 1961. This extended review of the subject was supplemented in September 1965 by a short "Postscript," prompted by the publication of the Gelbs' massive biography of O'Neill, many passages of which corroborated my earlier speculations and conclusions. Now, several years later, new discoveries and reflections call for a post postscript, which may perhaps stimulate further examination of the subject.
Albee's Attack on Fiction
Authors: Wallace Robert
Published: April 2013

IN A WIDELY PUBLISHED ARTICLE ENTITLED "What's the Matter with Edward Albee?" Thomas Driver attacks the basic situation of The Zoo Story maintaining that Peter's passive acceptance of Jerry's aggressive behavior is illogical and unrealistic. Driver states that no "sane, average-type person would be a passive spectator in the presence of behavior obviously headed towards destructive violence." In the same article Driver makes a similar criticism of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? arguing the improbability of Nick and Honey's remaining at George and Martha's when the older couple obviously "want only to fight the whole night through.” Driver's criticism of both plays misses a fact which is central to their development and to an understanding of Albee's work in general. Peter remains on the park bench for the same reason that Nick and Honey remain at George and Martha's: he is entertained by story-telling, particularly when the story-teller is very obviously his opposite.
Dramaturgic Concepts of the English Group Theatre: The Totality of Artistic Involvement
Authors: Jurak Mirko
Published: April 2013

AMONG THE LITTLE EXPERIMENTAL THEATERS which existed in England in the 1930s the Group Theatre occupies an important position not only because it first produced a number of new English politico-poetic plays, but also because the Theatre wanted to realize an avant-garde idea of the total theater, joining different arts into a synthetic whole. It attempted to diminish the alienation between actors and spectators, or rather, to annihilate the barrier preventing an active participation of the public in theatrical art.
Pancakes and Soap Suds: A Study of Childishness in Pinter's Plays
Authors: Shiff Ellen
Published: April 2013

HAROLD PINTER'S CHARACTERS frequently resemble children in the manner in which he presents them to us, in their behavior, which is either distinctly juvenile or manifests the conditioning associated with childhood, and in the way in which we react to them.
Formal Patterns in The Iceman Cometh
Authors: Reinhardt Nancy
Published: April 2013

MOST CRITICS AGREE with Eugene O'Neill's estimation that his The Iceman Cometh is "among the few very best things I've ever done, I know." Some add that the success of his later plays is the result of earlier experimentation in expressionistic theatre and the subsequent integration of these experiments with a more autobiographical realism. Timo Tiusanen has reexamined the later plays in relation to the development of O'Neill's dramatic art: from his early naturalistic and expressionistic experiments to the "dynamic realism" of his later plays where unobtrusively "behind the surface of realism there is a purposeful patterning.” The subtle melding of symbolism and realism in a play like The Iceman has often been contrasted with the obvious, even "gratuitous and excessive" patterning in the "masks, asides, soliloquies, choruses, split characters and the like" of the earlier experimental plays. But, to my knowledge, there is no full study in English of the visual and aural "purposeful patterning" of The Iceman Cometh.
The Birth of Tragedy and The Great God Brown
Authors: Hinden Michael
Published: April 2013

EUGENE O'NEILL'S DEBT to the philosophy of Nietzsche, particularly his enthusiasm for Thus Spoke Zarathustra, by now is a matter of record. O'Neill discovered Nietzsche's writings in the spring of 1907. Later, in a letter to Benjamin De Casseres dated June 22, 1927, he wrote: 'Zarathustra,' although my work may appear like a pitiable contradiction to this statement and my life add an exclamation point to this contradiction, has influenced me more than any other book I've ever read. I tan into it, through the bookshop of Benjamin Tucker, the old philosophical anarchist, when I was eighteen and I've always possessed a copy since then and every year or so I reread it and am never disappointed, which is more than I can say of almost any other book. A copious note-taker, O'Neill eventually copied passages from some fifty of the book's eighty chapters; at Harvard in 1914 he even, struggled through a copy in the original German with the help of a German grammar and a dictionary. O'Neill's acknowledgement of Nietzsche's influence continued throughout his life. In his 1936 Nobel Prize acceptance speech he paid homage to Nietzsche as his mentor, acknowledging the importance of his influence as well as that of Sweden's own son, Strindberg: "For me, he remains, as Nietzsche remains, in his sphere, the master, still to this day more modern than any of us, still our leader.”
Timeless Relevance: Max Frisch's The Chinese Wall
Authors: Wagner Marie
Published: April 2013

IT IS FASCINATING AND DEPRESSING at the same time to discover that a play arising from the political atmosphere of 1946, and pointing back into history, can be so in line with the concerns of our time. The threat of the bomb still makes us cower, and we feel chagrined by our inability to overcome human nature: the ambitions of selfish rulers, the indifference and vanity of the ruled, and their uncanny knack of repeating past mistakes time and again. The Chinese Wall is a mirror to history and an appeal to break out of its invariant cycle. For the mistakes of the past that lead to local disasters will now lead to total destruction: "A single mood by him who now sits on the throne ... and everything is lost." But can society be transformed, and is the individual willing to adjust? That is the question posed by the play. The Chinese Wall does not offer a clear-cut solution, nor should it. Frisch states in his Tagebuch: "The solution is always our business, my business, your business." Rut a direction is indicated, one that is antipodal to lust for power, profiteering, vanity, cowardness, opportunism, the easy solution.
The Absurd and the Hyper—Articulate in Shaw's Dramatic Language
Authors: Kennedy Andrew
Published: April 2013

SHAW'S THEATRICAL RHETORIC, with its great expressive strength, is, essentially, an old language in a new frame. Shaw played parodistic variations on this or that speech—style borrowed from an "imaginary museum." Despite its inner flexibility, this rhetoric, with its "euphemistic" syntax and vocabulary, was backward—looking, and it tended to inhibit the expression of new states of experience in new play—forms. Yet, certain experiences — particularly the despair and the sense of waste left behind by World War 1— are repeatedly given voice in the late plays; and the search for new forms is clear in Back to Methuselah and the political extravaganzas. There are signs of a corresponding impatience with the glib rationality that often went with the received language — signs of a desire to break it down, to let a new voice come through. Instead, Shaw tended, as I shall attempt to show, to use the old dramatic language to fend off the need for new expression.
Book Reviews
Authors: Findlay Robert , Sprinchorn Evert , Brown John , Fugei John , Leggatt Alexander , Riese Laure
Published: April 2013

Roy S. Waldau, Vintage Years Of The Theatre Guild, reviewed by Robert R. Findlay

Charles R. Lyons, Henrik Ibsen: The Divided Consciousness, reviewed by Evert Sprinchorn

James Hurt, Catiline's Dream. An Essay On Ibsen's Plays, reviewed by Evert Sprinchorn

John Northam, Ibsen: A Critical Study, reviewed by Evert Sprinchorn

Arthur Ganz, Pinter: A Collection Of Critical Essays, reviewed by John Russell Brown

C. D. Innes, Erwin Piscator's Political Theatre: The Development Of Modern German Drama, reviewed by John Fuegi

William H. New, Dramatists In Canada: Selected Essays, reviewed by Alexander Leggatt

Jean-Louis Barrault, Le Bourgeois Or The Poetry Of Laughter, reviewed by Laure Riese
Book Reviews
Authors: Mielziner Jo , Edwards  , Carpenter Charles , Davies Robertson
Published: April 2013

Roderick Ham ed., Theatre Planning, reviewed by Jo Mielziner

Simon Trussler, John Arden, reviewed by A. C. Edwards

Raymond J. Porter, Brendan Behan, reviewed by A. C. Edwards

Harold Ferrar, John Osborne, reviewed by A. C. Edwards

Myron Matlaw, Modern World Drama: An Encyclopedia, reviewed by Charles A. Carpenter

Michael Anderson, Jacques Guicharnaud, Kristin Morrison, Jack D. Zipes, and others, Crowell's Handbook Of Contemporary Drama, reviewed by Charles A. Carpenter

John Gassner and Edward Quinn, The Reader's Encyclopedia Of World Drama, reviewed by Charles A. Carpenter

Margery M. Morgan, The Shavian Playground, reviewed by Robertson Davies
John Synge and the Drama of His Time
Authors: Leech Clifford
Published: April 2013

IN A PLAY WRITTEN RECENTLY for performance in the United Kingdom the dramatist at one point in his text indicates that the actress taking the part of the chief woman-character should utter, repeatedly and with great force, the most indecent exclamation that the Lord Chamberlain of the time would permit an actress to use in a public place. Although the play was written only some eight years ago, it has thus become, in its small way, an historical document. The Lord Chamberlain has abandoned his privilege of keeping playwrights and actors and theatre-managers in order, and any word, any sound, though not yet any action, is available for you on the stages of London and New York if you are indiscriminate in your play-going. But my immediate concern in referring to this mildly obnoxious play is only incidental in relation to its status as an historical document: much more it interests me because of the playwright's attitude to dramatic language and his effectual abdication as a chooser of words, as a maker whose making, whose "thing" in every sense, depends largely on the putting of words together.
The Importance of Being Earnest: The Texture of Wilde's Irony
Authors: Poague
Published: April 2013

THE LIMITED SCHOLARLY DEBATE OVER The Importance of Being Earnest has been a particularly sane one, critics now generally agreeing that the play is indeed comedy (as opposed to farce) and serious in its triviality (rather than trivial altogether ). One important yet frequently slighted aspect of the play, an understanding of which goes far towards explaining previous critical misconceptions, is the dense texture of its irony. Of course, Wilde's famous wit is generally acknowledged as the outstanding feature of his work, but it has been for the most part simply acknowledged and not seriously studied. While previous writers have certainly not ignored Wilde's use of irony (see Bentley, Reinert, Foster, and Gregor), the close study of his style has generally been given the back seat in favor of structural or character analysis. I propose to give style the front seat, and to offer here a brief survey of Wilde's ironic devices, with the hope that the reader will expand or modify as needs be the basic structure I have set forth.
Two Early Absurd Plays in England
Authors: Wearing
Published: April 2013

PINERO IS USUALLY REMEMBERED as the writer of a few Victorian farces and so-called "problem plays." Moreover, it is often thought that he wrote little, if anything, after 1910 or so, the notable exception being The Enchanted Cottage (1922) which was later filmed. And it is certainly true that Pinero's major work and contribution to English drama was made by 1910, but the remaining twenty-four years of his life were by no means inactive. He wrote a further sixteen plays, a large proportion showing varying degrees of experimentation by the aging playwright. Two of these works are remarkable for the traits they exhibit of what is now widely called the Theatre of the Absurd. They are Playgoers and A Seat in the Park, one-act plays written in 1913 and 1922 respectively.
The Projector, The Mock Mason,and Miss Littlewood
Authors: Dorris George
Published: April 2013

ON 1 DECEMBER 1970, Theatre Workshop presented Joan Littlewood's production of a play, The Projector, at the Theatre Royal in Stratford East, London. This was announced as the first performance since the eighteenth century of a play by William Rufus Chetwood, formerly called The Mock Mason, which had been given for only one performance at Goodman's Fields on Friday, 13 April 1733. According to the program note, this ballad opera "seems to have been the only one to have been closed as a result of political pressure." A riot was said to have been caused by ruffians hired by a "Dutch builder, Cornelius Van Dort, who had been attacked in contemporary pamphlets as 'Tumbledown Dick' on account of the shoddiness of his tenement buildings." Then an account of a theatre riot is quoted from The Flying Post for 14 April 1733.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: Theater of Criticism
Authors: Berlin Normand
Published: April 2013

TOM STOPPARD'S ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD entered the theater world of 1966-67 with much fanfare, and in the ensuing years it has acquired a surprisingly high reputation as a modern classic. It is an important play, but its importance is of a very special kind up to now not acknowledged. The play has fed the modern critics' and audiences' hunger for "philosophical" significances, and as absurdist drama it has been compared favorably and often misleadingly with Beckett's Waiting for Godot.However, its peculiar value as theater of criticism has received no attention. To help recognize this value I offer the following discussion.
The Ironic Anger of David Storey
Authors: Free William
Published: April 2013

DAVID STOREY CAME TO THE THEATRE in his middle thirties after careers as a painter, professional Rugby player, teacher, and successful novelist. His four published plays to date display a remarkable consistency of craftsmanship, and, in spite of occasional lapses of structure and a few weak moments, all manage to achieve a degree of dramatic excitement and intensity which establishes him as one of the more talented playwrights of the contemporary British theatre.
Romain Weingarten's Stage Play Akara and the A-Temporal Reahn
Authors: Knapp Bettina
Published: April 2013

AKARA, ROMAIN WEINGARTEN'S FIRST PLAY, 1 is a hugely dramatic, profound and humorous theatrical allegory. When it was first performed by the Jeunes Compagnies in Paris (1948), Eugene Ionesco came away fascinated. He spoke of Weingarten's new stage language based on a series of concrete images woven in exciting patterns on stage. "Weingarten's truth," he further declared, "is the truth of the nightmare ... a profound and living truth;" his universe is "authentic, it is the universe of that rare ... lucid being, the poet." So intrigued was Samuel Beckett by Akara that he translated the entire card game sequence in Act III into English.
The Integrity of Juno and the Paycock
Authors: Armstrong William
Published: April 2013

THE WRITING OF A GENUINE TRAGEDY is a rare literary achievement. Sean O'Casey offers Juno and the Paycock to us as a tragedy and one of the main aims of this short essay is to justify its claim to this high distinction. All tragedies reveal universal truths through their treatment of particular conflicts. Just as some of the finest Greek tragedies, like Aeschylus's Oresteia, move us more deeply if we know how their characters and events have been conditioned by the ten years' war between Greek and Trojan, so the tragic quality of Juno and the Paycock can be experienced in its fulness only if we know and appreciate the military and political background of this highly topical drama, which is set in the last year of a violent and revolutionary period of Irish history, extending from 1912 to 1922. The Irish refer to the most disastrous events of these years as 'the Troubles,' and 'troubles' is a keyword in Juno and the Paycock.
Book Reviews
Authors: Hultberg Helge , Mason Michael
Published: April 2013

John Fuegi, The Essential Brecht, reviewed by Helge Hultberg

James Reaney, Listen To The Wind , reviewed by Michael Mason

James Reaney, Colours In The Dark, reviewed by Michael Mason

George Ryga, The Ecstasy Of Rita Joe, reviewed by Michael Mason

George Ryga, Captives Of The Faceless Drummer, reviewed by Michael Mason

Jackie Crossland and Rudy LaValle, Rinse Cycle, reviewed by Michael Mason

Beverly Simons, Crabdance, reviewed by Michael Mason

David Watmough, Ashes For Easter And Other Monodramas, reviewed by Michael Mason
Synge's The Shadow of the Glen: Repetition and Allusion
Authors: Grene Nicholas
Published: April 2013

IT WOULD BE INACCURATE TO CLAIM that Synge's one-act play The Shadow of the Glen has been neglected. Certainly by comparison with Riders to the Sea and The Playboy of the Western World, all of his other work has been relatively neglected; yet The Shadow has had its share of attention — a chapter or half a chapter in every full-length study of Synge, a reference in most essays and articles. Unfortunately, accounts of the play have almost always included extensive discussion of the background to its first production. Was The Shadow based upon the story of the Widow of Ephesus? or was it an attack on Irish loveless marriages, as J. B. Yeats suggested? The audience reaction to The Shadow is an integral part of the story of Synge's relation with the Irish nationalists, a story which has been re-told ad nauseam. It should be possible to set aside these familiar controversial issues, and to look at the dramatic effect of the play in itself. As a means to that end I want to consider particularly Synge's use of the linked features of repetition and allusion, and to show the complex structure which he thus achieves.
Modem Drama Studies: An Annual Bibliography
Authors: Carpenter Charles
Published: April 2013

Every year from 1960 to 19"69, this journal included Robert G. Shedd's "Modern Drama: A Selective Bibliography of Works Published in English in [1959-1968]." It was much used and greatly appreciated. Despite its restriction to English-language materials and its severely limited coverage of journals, Shedd's list was sorely lamented when it stopped appearing. The only passable alternative, the annual "MLA International Bibliography" in PMLA, then made its transition from a relatively up-to-date issue of a journal to an expanded, computerized project two years behind - with its modern drama references sprinkled over two volumes - and the need for a regeneration became compelling. "Modern Drama Studies: An Annual Bibliography" is intended as anew, improved version of the old ingroup checklist. The present installment covers material published in 1972 and 1973; the next one will pick up missed 1973 items and focus on 1974. Such overlapping will continue to be standard practice.
Misalliance: Sex, Socialism and the Collectivist Poet
Authors: Sindell Michael
Published: April 2013

IN DRAMATIC COMEDY WE OFTEN HEAR the voices of the playwright and his character simultaneously and distinctly. In the most obvious cases the title itself is uttered in character and as the playwright's final aesthetic flourish, a kind of verbal curtain: "I've now realized for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest." At the end of The Elder Statesman, Eliot slips us a very broad theological wink with Angela's "Now take me to my father." In The Tempest, Miranda's sweetly hopeful note has its own contribution to make to the general reconciliation, but the ironical voice of the playwright has been brought to attention so sharply that it is difficult to register the character's own tones. In the case of Shaw's mannered comedy a veritable principle of construction is to bring character and action onto such terms with the authorial debate that the audience's attention is throughout teasingly balanced between dramatis personae and playwright. All the lines tend to carry the two voices. In Misalliance one such line and one that overtops all the others by its climactic placing and its succinctness is Hypatia's "Papa: buy the brute for me" (IV, 194). The line is in character for Hypatia, the climax of the plot and a superb epitome of present things, as presented in the play.
The Natural History of Major Barbara
Authors: Rosador Kurt Tetzeli
Published: April 2013

WHEN IN 1949 FRANCIS FERGUSSON DESCRIBED the content of Shavian drama as "unresolved paradox," using Major Barbara and Heartbreak House as an illustration, he not only echoed countless early critics, but also furthered the label-sticking method of interpretation which has vitiated so much of Shaw criticism. "The play," says Fergusson, "is a parlor-game based upon the freedom of the mind to name and then to rationalize anything, without ever deviating from the concept to the thing." It is, therefore, not grounded in reality, but merely "a string of jokes which touch nothing.” This thesis certainly does run counter to Shaw's professed dramatic aims, and its influence seems due both to Fergusson's persuasive style and to concepts of realism which shortcircuit the subtle relation of the dramatic signs with their extradramatic referents. This difficulty in relating the play's ideas to some consistent Weltanschauung, some formative reality, has apparently led a recent study, in spite of criticizing Fergusson and brilliantly enlarging our understanding of Major Barbara by describing the play's mythical pattern and analogies, to conclude that "as a total structure of ideas the play remains a paradox in which antitheses retain their full value and cannot be resolved away.”