bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
On The Supersession Of The Modern Classic Style
Authors: Kaufmann R.
Published: April 2013

We passionate followers of the "Modern Drama" may be less contemporary than we think. Our chosen subject matter may well be thoroughly Aristotelean in this sense at least-it has a beginning, a middle and an end. One of the assumptions of this essay will be that we may have seen the end of "Modern Drama" and one of my aims will be to indicate some reasons for so believing. We seem to be entering a new period of dramatic activity as different from what we can call the Modern Classic era as the Restoration is from the Elizabethan. We can take a suggestive initial text from that striking, experimental play of 1956, Nigel Dennis's Cards of Identity—brilliant attack on the various modern cults of personality which Dennis satirically exposes as so many frenetic attempts to deny the clear evidence of the nature of modern life. "What makes the world in which we live today?" he has his President (a modern counterpart of Ben Jonson's Subtle, the Alchemist) ask. 'Well, we hear much of something called 'the individual’ We hear much of a body vaguely named 'society.’ But what are these, ladies and gentlemen, but ghosts-verbal vestiges, mere wisps of fantasy in the brains of deluded librarians? The world today is a world of groups." And so, of course, it is. And so, too, contemporary drama will be setting about elegizing, embalming, discrediting whoever supposes he can be an individual save in a pleasingly eccentric way. But with this assertion, I turn to my argument.
The Career Of Maxwell Anderson: A Check List Of Books And Articles
Authors: Gilbert Vedder
Published: April 2013

ON OCTOBER 18, 1958, not long before his death, Maxwell Anderson celebrated thirty-five years in the professional theater, a career that began in 1923 with the short-lived production of White Desert at the Princess Theatre, New York. He ended his years of service to the American theater with two plays: The Day the Money Stopped (in collaboration with Brendan Gill) and The Golden Six.

This bibliography of items by and about Mr. Anderson, though not complete, is comprehensive enough to demonstrate that he merits the respect his friends have paid him.
The Fusion Of Poetry And Drama In Blood Wedding
Authors: Barnes Robert
Published: April 2013

As T. S. ELIOT HAS suggested, the use of poetry in drama "must justify itself dramatically, and not merely be fine poetry shaped into dramatic form."l This problem of drama-poetry fusion immediately confronts any would-be creator of modern poetic drama and, ultimately, the critic of poetic drama as well. When poetic drama is unsuccessful, the failure is ascribed to the dominance of one mode of expression over the other. Thus, Maeterlinck is often said to have sacrificed dramatic action and characterization to poetic symbolism; conversely, Maxwell Anderson is said to be an excellent dramatist who utilizes a pedestrian poetry. Though Christopher Fry is sometimes said to have made the best of the two possible worlds, nevertheless, the common critical complaint is that Fry's poetry is so sparkling and allusive that one reads his plays only for the poetry.
Book Reviews
Authors: Valency Maurice , Orel Harold , Kern Edith
Published: April 2013

Robert J. Nelson, Play Within a Play: The Dramatist's Conception Of His Art: Shakespeare To Anouilh, reviewed by Maurice Valency

Richard Cordell and Lowell Matson, eds., The Off-Broadway Theatre, reviewed by Harold Orel

John Willet, The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht; A Study From Eight Aspects, reviewed by Edith Kern
Temporality in Pinter's The Dwarfs
Authors: Powlick Leonard
Published: April 2013

FIRST PRODUCED as a radio play by the B.B.C. in 1960, The Dwarfs is a distillation of Pinter's first attempt at a major piece of prose, a semi-autobiographical novel of the same title. The dramatic version of The Dwarfs is widely acknowledged as being one of the most inscrutable of Pinter's works, even though the large movement of the play is fairly straightforward. It concerns the disintegration of a friendship between the central character, Len, and two other characters, Pete and Mark. The reasons for that disintegration, however, are not clear, being buried in an apparent incomprehensibility of language. Len speaks in long, seemingly rambling, and certainly obscure passages — passages which, while showing us much about the workings of Len's mind, do not tell us much about the relationship of the three characters.
The Dance of Death in Modern Drama: Auden, Durrenmatt and Ionesco
Authors: Sharp SR.
Published: April 2013

THE DANCE OF DEATH and the Triumph of Death are themes that appeared across late medieval and Renaissance Europe in the visual arts, poetry and drama. Death snatching people away became a favourite subject of didacticism. In Germany, France and Switzerland, particularly, the lasting impressions made by extant murals, verses and plays have continued into our time. Quantity of scholarship alone shows the growing interest in the subject. In modern drama, there are two distinct manifestations of the influence of the Dance of Death: first, the imitative Dance of Death plays, like Emil Wachter's, produced at the Berne Festival, 1962-64; and second, the more original adaptations of the theme such as Auden's The Dance of Death, Durrenmatt's The Meteor and Ionesco's Massacre Games. Auden's familiarity with Germany perhaps included the Dances of Death on view before World War II. Durrenmatt grew up near Berne and Basel, locations of Totentanze, and Ionesco learned his first lessons in staging death from puppet shows in the Luxembourg Gardens.
The Poetry of Theatre: L'Ete of Romain Weingarten
Authors: Tonelli Franco
Published: April 2013

GENERALLY, CRITICS CHARACTERIZE Weingarten's dramaturgy as "poetic" on the basis of the disorienting effect his "ecriture" produces on the reader. Thus, Jacques Guicharnaud speaks of "'new chills'" the theatre of Weingarten has sent "down the spine of French poetic theatre," and Denise Bourdet, of a theatrical space where poetry breathes. From the same point of view, although slightly more thematic, Genevieve Serreau sees its poetic quality in its powerful feast of words, and she adds, "ce que retient Weingarten de la lercon d'Artaud, longuement meditee, c'est 'un effort unique, jamais dementi, contre louie bassesse' et c'est, reduit a l'essentiel, un 'esprit d'aventure' qui est l'autre nom de la poesie. These approaches, however, by-pass an essential question raised by the very nature and originality of Weingarten's ecriture, the dynamic of which resides in its fusion of poetry into drama. 4 By what process can two ontologically different structures-lyric and dramatic-merge into one?' In his essay I propose a reading of L'Ele-the play to which the author owes a great deal of his fame-as a possible method of identifying the ontology of Weingarten's poetry of theatre.'
The Playboy of the Western World as Antidrama
Authors: Bigley Bruce
Published: April 2013

LET ME BEGIN with a few observations on John Millington Synge's The Playboy of the Western World and its critical acceptance. It seems safe to assert that The Playboy is Synge's best play; although some prefer Riders to the Sea, they will agree that The Playboy is more characteristic and that it is the best full-length play. The Playboy is also one of the classics of modern British theater, probably the most anthologized modern full-length play written in English. More arguably, it is the finest play written in English in a couple of centuries. Hence we may say that it is highly regarded, it has worn well, it is worth study and rereading, and it has as unanimous a critical acclaim as one is likely to find in a twentieth century author.
The Metaphysical Dimension and Pirandello's Theatre
Authors: Sinicropi Giovanni
Published: April 2013

IN 1955 LUCIEN GOLDMANN devoted a vast work to the analysis of the tragic "vision du monde" (a notion which he distinguishes from that of "Weltanschauung" of the lansenist movement in seventeenth century France. After exploring the religious, institutional and cultural situation of the period from approximately 1636 to 1677, the author dwelt on the crucial importance of the presence of the Deus absconditus in the semantic universes of Pascal's Pensees and Racine's tragedies, two personalities deeply involved, as we know, with the "solitaires" of PortRoyal. Conceiving that presence as the basic structure of the Pensees, Goldmann's interpretation of Pascal's universe becomes fascinating and often enlightening. In the works of Racine, and particularly in Phedre viewed (few would argue) as the culminating point of his art-he conceived the presence of the Deus absconditus as the foundation of their tragic essence: the tragic conflict of Phedre would consist of the "solitary dialogue" entertained by the heroine with "les dieux cache" whose mute and uninterfering presence dominates the unfolding of the dramatic process.
Pirandello, Stanislavsky, Brecht, and the "Opposition Principle"
Authors: Vicentini Claudio
Published: April 2013

IN PIRANDELLO'S OPINION, theatre is not true art. In his 1908 essay, "Illustratori, attori e traduttori," he wrote: The everyday, material reality of life limits things, men and their actions, it thwarts and deforms them. In real life. the actions that bring character into relief stand out against a background of insignificant contingencies and meaningless details. A thousand unforeseen obstacles divert the actions and disfigure character; trivial miseries often debase them. But art frees the things. men and their actions from these insignificant contingencies. meaningless details and trivial obstacles . .. it rejects everything that contradicts what the artist has conceived ... . In this way art creates a work that-unlike nature-is nOl orderless and full of contradictions. but almost a little world in which all elements are coherent and consistent.'
The Functions of Humor and Paradox in Pirandello's L'Esclusa: A Context for the Plays
Authors: Dombroski Robert
Published: April 2013

Consalvo's remark comically underlines the meeting of opposite concepts necessary to the comprehension of the historical reality in which the characters take part. As a paradox, his remark -like all paradoxes functions as an epistemological surrogate before the possibilities of total synthesis or absolute contradiction. No doubt Consalvo's words express De Roberto's bitter irony as regards an unchanging history, but from the reader's point of view, they serve to release the tension caused by the extreme polarity of contrasting factors. In other words, De Roberto concludes his novel by overcoming the dialectical alternation of opposites: history as progress juxtaposed with history as monotonous repetition gives rise to the equation that progress and monotonous repetition are one and the same. Such a paradoxical ending allows the reader a temporary cessation of the historical dialectic, turning his attention instead to the problem of concrete existence in which a similar mental operation (i.e., the construction of paradox) is based.
Pirandello's "Last" Play: Some Notes on The Mountain Giants
Authors: Rey John
Published: April 2013

SINCE LUIGI PIRANDELLO left The Mountain Giants unfinished at his death on December 10, 1936, many people believe that it is his last play. He began to write it sometime in 1929/ early 1930, which was a period of great creative productivity for him; he produced Lazarus, Tonight We Improvise, and As You Desire Me, among others, and all were completed. Pirandello was busy with the composition of the Giants for some six years, up to the penultimate night of his life, according to his son, Stefano. What were the difficulties which prevented him from finishing this play?
Derrida and Pirandello: A Post-Structuralist Analysis of Six Characters in Search of an Author
Authors: McDonald David
Published: April 2013

DIFFERANCE IS the master term, from a Derridean perspective, for Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. Derrida defines his differance as a new term that joins the notion of an "interval" with the notions of division and delay.' His use of the word differance approximates Foucault's use of the word "discontinuity" -a word that conveys the combined sense of interval, division, and delay. Used as a screen to interpret or describe the play, differance accents the qualities of discontinuity throughout: the empty theatre; the strange entrance and otherness of the Six Characters; their separation from their author; the disparity between the Actors and the Characters; the elliptical relationships among the Characters themselves-their past displacements and sudden, unexpected crossings together; and such incidents as the accidental fall of the curtain at the end of act two, the magical entrance of Madame Pace, and the mad rush off-stage at the end of the play, leaving the play "unfinished" -frozen in tableau, continuous in its discontinuity.
John Arden: The Promise Unfulfilled
Authors: Clinton Craig
Published: April 2013

IT WOULD BE EUPHEMISTIC to state that the public is not wild about the plays of John Arden. Despite this situation, his achievements have not been overlooked by the critics. From the beginning of his career, a number of partisans actively championed Arden's cause. He was lauded for returning a freshness and vigor to the theatre that had long been absent; indeed, certain critics grew breathless in their rapture over the playwright's virtues. In 1967 the reviewer for The Nation described the author's gifts as "the vigor and wealth of his language, the poetic nature of his vision, the high seriousness of his concerns, and the variety of his imagination -qualities which are informed by his profound education and moral largess." This ebullient praise was by no means isolated; Arden has never lacked admirers, and in the mid-sixties Simon Trussler wrote in Encore: "Arden remains the most consistently impressive of our contemporary dramatists, and the one whose work seems most likely to be sustained and fruitful."
Who Are the Dadas of Travesties?
Authors: Gold Margaret
Published: April 2013

>TOM STOPPARD'S LATEST full-length play, Travesties, produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company first in London (June 1974) and then in New York (October 1975), is a theatre-piece that meditates upon its own dramatic origins and at the same time dramatizes questions concerning the proper relation of politics to art. The stylistic and thematic ventures proceed in tandem, as Stoppard harks back to the plays of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. He defines his most serious concerns against theirs and raids their arsenal of techniques and characters. Glittering in borrowed finery, he creates a distorted likeness of their plays called travesty. And in so doing he writes a new chapter in the history of the comedy of ideas.
Oscar Wilde's Game of Being Earnest
Authors: BOSE TIRTHANKAR
Published: April 2013

WRITING TO A FRIEND in 1895, Wilde dismissed The Importance of Being Earnest as a play "written by a butterfly for butterflies," and for many years this has been the usual response of playgoers and critics alike. Wilde's linguistic virtuosity is so complete and so consciously flaunted that the play exists for most people as a dazzling, if insubstantial tissue of pun and paradox. In producing the play, the director usually makes it his chief purpose to project the wit, creating primarily a verbal style that highlights the flashing repartee and plays down the intellectual content (a notable example of the style being the Olivier-Thorndike recording of the play). However successful this kind of production may be as entertainment, it stops short of revealing other, broader dimensions of meaning in the play, such as the sociological concern noted by Eric Bentley, or the ethical framework explored by Nassaar. But even these sensitive studies tend not to approach these levels of meaning through the design of the play's theatrical presence. Earnest offers a powerful view of society precisely because it is a subtly planned formal structure, and more thought needs to be given to the elements of design in the play to understand it as a stage-event.
Eugene O'Neill's Aesthetic of the Drama*
Authors: Voelker Paul
Published: April 2013

IT IS PROBABLY GOING TOO FAR to say, as James Milton Highsmith did several years ago, that Eugene O'Neill "never allowed himself to formulate theories of drama." As a matter of fact, throughout most of his active play-writing career, O'Neill was continually formulating such theories and expressing them, but his expressions seldom found their way into print in a rigorous form such as the expository essay. O'Neill himself believed that it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, for him to express himself clearly and correctly "in such a manner. As he told Kenneth Macgowan on one occasion, "I've never written a review or article of any kind in my life. . .. My mind can't seem to concentrate along those lines...." Similarly, O'Neill told his friend Benjamin De Casseres that "when it comes to anything like articles, introductions, etc. I simply don't function right." About the closest he ever came to such a formalized presentation was the series of three pieces he produced in 1932 for George Jean Nathan's The American Spectator; but as the title in the first of the series, "Memoranda on Masks" suggests, none of these items constitutes a coherent essay. Characteristically, it took O'Neill at least four drafts to complete what he called "the damned article."
Endgame and the Dialogue of King and Fool in the Monarchical Metadrama
Authors: Merivale P.
Published: April 2013

BECKETT'S ENDGAME (1958), inheriting the dark stage "Spain" of Ghelderode's Escurial (1927), and bequeathing an absurdist variant on King and Fool to Pinget's Architruc (1961) and Arrabal's The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria (1967), is the central example of a dramatic tradition perhaps as important as Godot's "vaudeville" to the modern stage.
The Artifice of "Reality" in Chekhov and Pinter
Authors: Beckerman Bernard
Published: April 2013

"REALITY" IS ONE of those elusive words that we can not do without. It can mean virtually anything, and so it often comes to mean nothing. And yet, it does suggest notions of concreteness, actuality, and relevance that are central to drama. Whether we like it or not, we are bound to use this word, though, at best perhaps, we can only acknowledge its import without being able to define its limits.
Modern Drama Studies: An Annual Bibliography
Authors: Carpenter Charles
Published: April 2013

THE PRESENT ANNUAL BIBLIOGRAPHY follows the basic principles and limitations described in the first installment of March 1974. The main objective is to record current scholarship. criticism, and commentary that may prove valuable to students of modern dramatic literature. The bibliography embraces all the expected areas and topics of modern world drama, including playwrights who lived past 1900 (plus Buchner and Becque) and influential men and women of the theatre other than performers. This year's list covers 1977 and further 1976 items, plus a number of missed 1975 items.
Book Reivews
Authors: Riese Laure , Savona Jeannette Laillou , Harris Peter , Martin Robert , Leggatt Alexander
Published: April 2013

Ralf Breuer, DIE KUNST DER PARADOXIE KRITISCHE INFORMATION. reviewed by Laure Riese

Betty Rojlman, FORME ET SIGNIFICATION DANS lE THEATRE DE BECKETT, reviewed by Jeannette Laillou Savona

Claude Hill, BERTOLT BRECHT, reviewed by Peter Harris

George H. Jensen, ARTHUR MILLER: A BIBLIOGRAPHICAL CHECKLIST, reviewed by Robert A. Martin

CANADIAN THEATRE REVIEW, reviewed by Alexander Leggatt
Logic and Religion in Major Barbara: The Syllogism of St. Andrew Undershaft
Authors: Baker Stuart
Published: April 2013

SENSITIVE TO CHARGES that his plays were all logic and no feeling, that his characters were intellects without hearts, or that they were abstract personifications of the author's pet ideas, Shaw often had to defend the humanity of his creations and the realism of their situations, and he drew much less attention to the purely intellectual side of his work. But Shaw has long since won his point, and it should now be possible to discuss the structure of abstract logic which underlies a play like Major Barbara without prejudice to its poignant drama of spiritual crisis. For despite Shaw's justly vehement denial that his plays were "simply" logical demonstrations, just such an illustration of formal logic is at the foundation of the very human story of Major Barbara.
Heartbreak House: Shaw's Ship of Fools
Authors: Vogt Sally Peters
Published: April 2013

IT IS EASIER to accept Shaw's judgment that Heartbreak House is his greatest play than to make critical sense of it, for the play can present obstacles even to the sympathetic critic. Throughout, the plot line is interrupted, expectations for further actions are undercut, and wildly improbable events occur. These irregularities are most glaring in the burglar's intrusion (Act II), the often contradictory responses of the characters, and the unpredictable denouement. Since such devices abound in farce and "absurdist" drama, critics have noted resem blances between Heartbreak House and, say, nineteenth century Dublin farce, as wel1 as plays of Beckett and Pinter. In contrast to these works, however, Heartbreak House is didactical1y ordered: Shaw bodies forth a simple statement on the future of England in two metaphors -the ship of state and the ship of fools. Uncovering the dramatic relation between these venerable tropes and the further relation of the tropes to the surface action lays bare the play's principle of coherence.
The Lady from the Sea: Ibsen's Positive World-View in a Topographic Figure
Authors: Fjelde Rolf
Published: April 2013

ARE IBSEN'S PRINCIPAL WORKS to be interpreted primarily as a sum of destructions aimed at scourging the lies and idolatries of an errant civilization, or do they in fact embody a positive philosophy at their core? The question has frequently been raised in various guises; and whenever it is, at the least, two dramas should inevitably come to mind. The first of these is Emperor and Galilean, whereof Ibsen stated with confident authority: "This work will be my masterpiece .... The positive Weltanschauung which the critics have long demanded of me will be found here." Contrary to the playwright's directive, however, critical attention in this regard has tended to focus elsewhere-on, for example, the comedic Pillars of Society or An Enemy of the People, but most problematically on The Lady From the Sea. The fact that the action of the latter play concludes on a strongly positive note expressed in a festive tableau has opened it to charges of artistic deficiency, of being somehow not echt Ibsen, revealing either a transient fatigue with rigor of conception, or, in certain counterarguments, a network of hidden ironies in the text that partially redeem it for serious consideration.
The Lady From The Sea: Ibsen In Transition
Authors: Barranger M.
Published: April 2013

IN HIS MEMOIR Run-Through, John Houseman records with some reluctance his direction of a 1934 Broadway production of Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea. Houseman's embarrassment over the production is indicative of a general attitude toward the play reflected in theatrical and critical circles. Because of the magnitude and technical difficulties of the leading role, among other reasons, The Lady from the Sea has not been as popular a vehicle in the theatre as A Doll's House, Ghosts, and Hedda Gabler. Nor has it inspired scholarly interest, except for perfunctory chapters in studies dealing largely with Ibsen's dramas of prose realism. The exceptions to this prevailing attitude are to be found in Francis Fergusson's seminal essay on The Lady from the Sea and in more recent studies of the last Ibsen plays.
Book Reviews
Authors: Saari Sandra , Echevarria Evelio
Published: April 2013

James Walter McFarlane, THE OXFORD IBSEN, VOLUME VIII: LITTLE EYOLF, JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN, WHEN WE DEAD AWAKEN, reviewed by SANDRA E. SAARI

Martin Esslin, ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WORLD THEATRE, reviewed by EVELIO ECHEVARRIA
The Significance of the Trial Scenes in Ondine and The Madwoman of Chaillot
Authors: Pilkinton Mark
Published: April 2013

IN TWO OF HIS MOST FAMOUS PLAYS, On dine and The Madwoman of Chaillot, Jean Giraudoux makes use of a trial scene before he effects resolution, Playwrights often resort to a discussion or debate to make a point, but rarely do they put an actual trial scene into a play unless that trial scene is the overriding issue, e,g Inherit the Wind. But in Giraudoux's two plays, trials materialize from nowhere. In Ondine, The Old One (disguised as The Second Fisherman) announces after capturing Ondine, "Prepare yourself. The judges are coming." In The Madwoman of Chaillot, Aurelia has not considered trying the evil men of the world until Josephine mentions it:
The Function of Repetition in the Plays of Chekhov
Authors: Hubbs Clayton
Published: April 2013

IN THREE SISTERS, Vershinin considers what it would be like to start life all over again: "If that happened, I think the thing you'd want most of all would be not to repeat yourself." Repetition is a central thematic and structural element in Chekhov's major plays, each of which repeats the other in general conception and in numerous detailsl His frustrated protagonists want to break out of the pattern of repetition and realize their desire for freedom in a new life. Time passes, they undergo "the suffering of change," and they are len to begin their old lives over again. Such is the familiar nature of Chekhov's "actionless" plays. Although Chekhov was a masterful storyteller with an abundant supply of new situations and plots, each time we again encounter one of his plays we are reminded that we, like the characters, have experienced this before. All literature relies on repetition as a generator of meaning and deals with contradictions-in modern works often unresolved-between what is and what is desired; but repetition usually means "repetition with a difference": elements recur with important changes as the narrative advances. Chekhov's later plays are unique, before Beckett, in the extent to which it is the lack of change that is significant and in the extent to which the contradiction between what is and what is desired remains unresolved. In the context of the history of modern drama, Chekhov's departures from classical naturalism now appear inevitable and lead, in the postnaturalist plays of Pinter and Beckett, to an emphasis on the limitations of naturalistic dialogue-the formal and human limitations of dramatic speech. My purpose here is neither to show a continuity in modem drama nor to assert the permanence of a Chekhovian tradition, but rather to show how, despite its apparent disjointedness, its "series of erratic stabs at the spectator," a play by Chekhov produces a sense of order and wholeness which remains. The antagonist is the form itself, and the form is an interlocked series of unincremental repetitions.
Book Reviews
Authors: Moss Leonard , Clark Juidth Hersch , Carpenter Charles
Published: April 2013

Robert A. Martin, THE THEATER ESSAYS OF ARTHUR MILLER, reviewed by Leonard Moss

Jac Tharpe, TENNESSEE WILLiAMS: A TRIBUTE, reviewed by Juidth Hersch Clark

Stephen S. Stan, TENNESSEE WILLIAMS: A COLLECTION OF CRlTICAL ESSAYS, reviewed by Juidth Hersch Clark

E. H. Mikhail, ENGLISH DRAMA. 1900-1950, A GUIDE TO INFORMATION SOURCES, reviewed by Charles A. Carpenter

E. H. Mikhail, CONTEMPORARY BRITISH DRAMA, 1950-1976: AN ANNOTATED CRITICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY, reviewed by Charles A. Carpenter
Half a Kingdom for a Horse: Ibsenite Tragicomedy
Authors: Dukore Bernard
Published: April 2013

IN THE LATE SIXTEENTH CENTURY, Sir Philip Sidney deprecatingly called tragicomedy mongrel. In the early twentieth century, F.H. Ristine noted the "critical opprobrium that would stamp it as a bastard form beneath serious consideration." At fust glance, the difference between mongrel and bastard does not seem much, but in a way it is, since illegitimacy may be legitimized more easily than impurity purified. If the gods are not yet ready to stand up for bastards, at least contemporary critics, half a century after Ristine, have stood up for the bastard genre, tragicomedy, and-recognizing it as perhaps the dominant genre of modern drama-have given it de facto legitimacy.
Beckett's Endgame, I or What Talk Can Do
Authors: Sherzer Dina
Published: April 2013

"RATHER DIFFICULT, ELLIPTIC, mostly depending on the power of the text to claw, more inhuman than Godot" commented Beckett about Endgame. The play presents four characters locked up in a room; two of them, Nagg and Nell, are in trash-cans; Hamm, their blind and paralyzed son, sits in a wheelchair and is taken care of by Clov, a servant. These characters are not doing anything in particular: they are not waiting for somebody to come or for something to happen. They are just there, living in solitude, old age, and sickness. Like all Beckett's characters, Nagg, Nell, Hamm, and Clov talk to each other; and talking is their main activity.
Book Reviews
Authors: Cohn Ruby , Imhof Rudiger , Chamberlain John
Published: April 2013

Deirdre Bair, SAMUEL BECKETT. A BIOGRAPHY, reviewed by Ruby Cohn

Paul Goetsch, BAUFORMEN DES MODERNEN ENGLISCHEN UND AMERIKANISCHEN DRAMAS, reviewed by Rudiger Imhof

Ronald Gray, IBSEN -A DISSENTING VIEW, reviewed by John S. Chamberlain
Annotated Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Cuban Theatre after 1959
Authors: Palls Terry
Published: April 2013

THE SOCIOPOLITICAL SITUATION IN CUBA since 1959 has attracted the attention of numerous scholars interested in examining the effects of a radical ideological shift-from capitalism to Marxist-Leninism-on a given society. Included among these scholars are humanists wishing to investigate the effects of this phenomenon on artistic development. There is no doubt that the Cuban Revolution has been a determining factor in the pattern and nature of cultural activity in Cuba, and that this in turn has influenced the development of the arts in Latin America.
A Biographical Note on Vaclav Havel
Authors: Schonberg Michael
Published: April 2013

Living with the elements of the absurd comes naturally to the Czechs. A succession of powerful bureaucratic systems of various political and ideological hues, but all sharing a rigidity ofattitude and a pathological self-centredness, has created conditions in which absurd situations and circumstances flourish. Indeed, so ubiquitous and all-pervasive have these conditions become, that they are ever-increasingly confused with the traditionally acceptable and usual norms of behaviour. The absurd has its champions and practitioners everywhere; nothing and nobody is immune to it. It is found in all the public and private places and situations where sanity has reached its outer limits, where the fear bred by hopelessness comes into conflict with the people's powerful will to survive.
"Goats and Monkeys" and the "Idiocy ofLanguage": Handke's Kaspar and Shakespeare's Othello
Authors: Schlueter June
Published: April 2013

The Austrian-born playwright Peter Handke has said repeatedly that his conception of theatre is one in which the objects and actions of the theatrical production bear minimal if any relationship to the objects and actions of the real world. For example, in a 1969 essay, "Theatre and Film: The Misery of Comparison," he refers to the theatrical experience as one in which actions and words "become incidents which show nothing else, but present themselves as theatrical events;" in an interview the same year, he defines the "basic idea" of his plays as "Making people aware of the world of the theatre-not of the outside world"; and in the preface to Kaspar, he reinforces his idea by insisting that the audience "should recognize at once that they will witness an event that plays only on stage and not in some other reality."
Ulrich Plenzdorf' s Die neuen Leiden des jungen w.: The Death of a Fool
Authors: John D.
Published: April 2013

Since its immensely successful premiere engagement at the Landestheater Halle on 18 May 1972, Ulrich Plenzdorf's Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. (The New Sorrows of Young w.) has provoked more interest than any German play within recent memory. Its protagonist, Edgar Wibeau, is a young citizen of the German Democratic Republic who has dropped out of society, apparently rejecting the fundamental socialist principles of collective work and communal responsibility. Despite the fact that Edgar refers to himself repeatedly as "Ich, Idiot," he has been taken seriously by audiences both in his native land and in the West as a critic of contemporary society. Naturally the most energetic discussions about Edgar's social and political views have come from within the GDR. Indeed , in a state where the author's pen is guided by the censor, it is difficult to understand how a play that caused such furore ever came into the spotlight. The debate touched off by this irreverent teenager is one that was bound to deal with some basic tenets of GDR socialism; moreover, if Edgar's attitudes and opinions are correctly taken to be representative of GDR youth, then he must be seen as an indicator of widespread dissatisfaction with present conditions and perhaps a herald of significant social change.
The Tragicomic Don Juan: Valle-IncIan's Esperpento de las galas del difunto (The Dead Man's Duds)
Authors: Dougherty Dru
Published: April 2013

The general reaction against realism, which affected tum-of-the-century theater throughout Europe, was led in Spain by Ram6n del Valle-Inchln (1866-1936). With two Maeterlinckian sketches published in 1903, the Galician playwright initiated an experimental dramaturgy that led, in the eady 1920's, to the esperpenro, an avant-garde form whose association with the ideas of Gordon Craig and other twentieth-century theorists is finally coming to light. Central to this mature dramaturgy was the technique of contrasting heroic figures with their own "degenerated" reflections in modem bourgeois art. Thus Max Estrella defined the esperpento in Luces de bohemia (1920) as a conjunction of classic and grotesque forms: "The classic heroes have taken a walk down the camivalesque Callejon del Gato .... Even the most beautiful images, repeated in a concave mirror, become absurd ." Faced with our era's distortion of classic beauty, Valle-Inclan suggests, the artist must protest, not by seeking nostalgically to redeem the forms of Homer and Shakespeare, but by fashioning a new art from the very grotesqueness of modem life: "The tragic sense of Spanish life can be given expression only with an esthetic ofsystematic deformation . ... My current esthetic is to transform classic nonns with the precision of a concave mirror" (Scene xii).
On Dialectical Metaphysics
Authors: Havel Vaclav
Published: April 2013

When we read the polemics in our press, listen to discussions, follow articles being written, over and over we come up against an interesting phenomenon: on the one hand we find opinions and attitudes which from beginning to end impress as "correct", "indisputable," politically, ideologically, and otherwise altogether irreproachable, but which at the same time evoke an irrepressible sense of indifference , banality, boredom , and emptiness. On the other hand , now and then we might come across statements which are not all that evidently pure, which may even be described as "problematic," "disputable," "onesided," "flattening," etc., etc., but which, surprisingly, at the same time somehow interest. excite and provoke us by revealing some fresh, original, and unhackneyed thought. We are introduced to new problems, unknown connections, unexpected and attractive formulations.
J.M. Barrie's Islands of Fantasy
Authors: Hunter Lynette
Published: April 2013

James Barrie's plays offer a consistency of approach to ideas about artistic communication that has been seriously neglected. The neglect partly results from a separation between the criticism of his novels and that of his plays, which obscures the development of theme, structure and imagery from the one medium to the other. The criticism of the drama itself has suffered from an avoidance of the published scripts. There has been little if any attention paid to the commentary of the plays which provides a function similar to that of the narrator in the novels, and is invaluable in understanding the author's ironic perspective. The product of the dramatic criticism has been an enormously diversified assessment of Barrie, leaving an impression of a man of dilettante interests rather than complexity. But if we examine the plays as generated from the novels, we find in their author not only a more thoughtful and mature literary figure, but also one who is placed finnly among early twentieth century concerns about communication and art.
Granville Barker's Sexual Comedy
Authors: Kennedy Dennis
Published: April 2013

Harley Granville Barker's reputation suffered heavily when he left active theatre work after the Great War, hyphenated his name, and became a "mere professor." His admirers, who acknowledged him as the leader of the cause for a new theatre, felt abandoned in favor of a comfortable second marriage and a leisurely life, and his plays, already looked upon with suspicion, endured an added decline. Other external factors, such as the subsequent dominance of Shaw and the general reaction against naturalism, have obscured them further. It is an unfortunate state of affairs for English drama (though in the last few years there have been signs of change), for Granville Barker wrote four of the most significant plays of the Edwardian period, marked by their unusual sensitivity to language and originality of form. The Marrying of Ann Leete, The Voysey Inheritance, Waste ("our greatest modem tragedy," according to William Archer), and The Madras House are distinguished also by an even rarer characteristic for their time: while they deal outwardly with public subjects like politics and business, inwardly they are all centered on the sexual relationships of the main characters. Archer thought the last three plays "the biggest things our modem movement has produced," and in one sense they all are, for they are unique among English plays of the early century in the use of sexual relationships to define the worth of human action and to signify larger, moral, concerns. In the comedies this symbolic use of the urge to couple is especially apparent. Most comedies are "sexual" in some sense, of course, but Granville Barker's three major ones are less interested in the standard bawdry and mating we associate with the form, and more interested in using sexual relationships as an index of human sensibility.
Reviews
Authors: Lynch Dennis , Welch Lilliane , Elliot Susan
Published: April 2013

John lahr, Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton, reviewed by Dennis Lynch

`

Kenneth Steele White, Man's New Shapes: French Avant-Garde Drama's Metamorphoses, reviewed by Lilliane Welch

Steven H. Gale, Harold Pinter: An Annotated Bibliography, reviewed by Susan M. Elliot
Making Yourself All Up Again": The Composition of Samuel Beckett's That Time
Authors: Gontarski
Published: April 2013

Like much of the later Beckett, That Time' appears to be an assemblage of reordered fragments from earlier work. Beckett is fond of echoing and alluding to Beckett, and in the earliest, holograph version of That Time he selfmockingly describes a character as "something out of Beckett." To those familiar with the Beckett world, That Time offers few surprises. It features a head, which listens to three memories, some ten feet above stage level, hair flaring "as if seen from above . ..." Both stage image and narrative motifs echo a number of earlier works: Krapp's Last Tape, the funerary Play, especially Not 1 (finished just two years before Beckett began That Time), and ultimately The Unnamable (which very well may be the center of Beckett's work since it is the culmination of much which precedes it and the anticipation of almost all that follows). The play's narrative fragments, labelled, A, B, C, are memories which belong to the visible head (and probably to Beckett as well), and the head listens to these internalized voices which suggest three related stages of the protagonist's life and offer variations on the titular themes of time and memory; "voice once without quaqua on all sides then in me" is the way the internalization is phrased in How it is (p. 7). The image on stage is yet a fourth phase of the protagonist's life, perhaps the body very near-or just after-death, as in Fin de partie. The fragmentation of the narratives suggests both Play and Not I, the latter especially as the voice which recounts memory A, like Mouth, is given to prolonged silences, "not another word to the living as long as you lived ..."(p. (3). The retrospective review of major crises further suggests Krapp' s Last Tape, except for the synecdoche and the fact that the head is apparently not free to select among its recollections. The memories appear to the involuntary, yet so symmetrical that they are neither surreal nor chaotic but conspicuously artful, in the reading if not the viewing.
Pirandellian Theatre Games: Spectator as Victim
Authors: Styan
Published: April 2013

Pirandello has a good deal in common with Moliere: his results are so thought provoking that he is discussed first as a philosopher when he is very much of a farceur. I have chosen the word carefully, and use it in the sense of "practical joker." And his methods seem to encourage directors to take liberties of their own. Those interested in the story of his success on the stage point to the sensational production of Six Characters in Search of an Author when it was directed by Georges Pitoeff at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in 1923. By that time the Paris audience was moderately accustomed to the shocks and surprises of a symbolist and surrealist drama. 1917 had seen Apollinaire's The Breasts of Tiresias, in which the rebellious feminist wore red and blue balloons for bosoms, and let them fly on strings before exploding them. 1921 saw Cocteau's The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower, also at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees, a play flaunting two music-hall comperes dressed as gramophones and a set like a camera: on the command, "Watch the birdie!", an ostrich stepped out.
Harold Pinter's Betrayal:The Patterns of Banality
Authors: Ben-Zvi Linda
Published: April 2013

Harold Pinter's latest play, Betrayal, first produced in the fall of 1978 at the National Theatre in London under the direction of Peter Hall, bears many of the marks that one has been led to expect in a Pinter work . There are the familiar, long pauses between statements, the questions offered in response to questions, the limited dialogue - seventy-five questions and 1500 words in the thirty-one pages ofScene One. Yet the play is a definite departure for Pinter. Gone are the carefully formed innuendoes, the sinister ambiguities, the impending disasters those elements which led critics to label Pinter plays "comedies of menace." No Riley appears in the last scene to dislodge characters from their rooms, no McCann and Goldberg to interrogate, no Mick to threaten. Instead, presented in reverse chronological order, the play concentrates on nine rather prosaic scenes depicting marital infidelity: Emma, married to Robert, has an affair with Jerry, Robert's best friend.
Violence and the Comic in the Plays of Edward Bond
Authors: Rademacher Frances
Published: April 2013

Edward Bond's name is often taken as a synonym for violence -the baby's murder in Saved, the cannibalism in Early Morning, or the torture in Lear. However, it is Bond's style, not his subject, that produces a shock effect. According to Tony Coult, Bond shocks an audience by evoking "the vulnerability and the dignity of the human body with a painter's skill." Richard Scharine suggests another cause, Bond's use of violence "to attack both existing institutions and revered traditions. ..." Both critics regard the shock effect of violence as extrinsic to Bond's plays, and they overlook the context of his violence -variations of the comic as analyzed by Freud. The affinity between Bond's violence and the comic is central to the meaning of his early plays.
Beyond Politics in Bond's Lear
Authors: Nodelman Perry
Published: April 2013

There are two easy assumptions to make about Edward Bond's Lear. The first is that the play parodies Shakespeare's King Lear. The second, encouraged by Bond's preface to the play, is that it makes a political statement. In fact, most readings of Lear assume that Bond makes the political statement by means of the Shakespearean parody.
Liturgy and Time in Counterpoint: A View of T.S Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral
Authors: Pike Lionel
Published: April 2013

T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral is in some senses enigmatic: the criticism has often been made that it is static in feeling, and has little real action or characterization. It is, indeed, not at all "theatrical" - but to look for the conventionally theatrical in the play is to misunderstand its basic dramatic structure. Certainly it is nearer to medieval liturgical drama than to modem theatre: in liturgical drama no less than in Eliot's play, a modern sense of the dramatic is absent, for, in both, events of great dramatic possibility (whose impact is upon men of all times) are performed in a ritualistic language which, by its very nature, lacks immediacy. Moreover. since this type of language belongs to no particular era, it creates an impression of timelessness. Eliot's play, however. owes an even greater debt to medieval liturgies, a facet of the author's work that has perhaps not been sufficiently explored.
Voices in the Cathedral: The Chorus in Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral
Authors: McGill William
Published: April 2013

In staging T.S. Eliot's poetic drama Murder in the Cathedral, one of the principal technical and artistic-interpretive problems involves the presentation of the choral speeches. Textually they appear as odes with no specific instructions to indicate differentiation of voices. But the first staging of the play set the precedent for assigning parts within the choral odes to individual voices or varying ensembles. The decision is in part a musical one, involving an assessment of the voices available and an orchestration of those voices to produce a pattern of sound that enhances the aural effect of the language. Obviously, however, the arrangement of voices must also relate to the thematic development of the odes as well. We cannot separate sound and meaning. Thus, while the individual director has some freedom in designating parts of the choral speeches, the poetry itself places strictures on that freedom. What I seek to do here is to provide a reading of the choral odes which identifies the principal thematic and dramatic voices in them.
Lascelles Abercrombie - Playwright
Authors: Fisher Esther Safer
Published: April 2013

Best known as a critic and poet, Lascelles Abercrombie (1881-1938) was also a playwright deeply concemed with the state of the English theatre in the first three decades of this century. For the most part, he was adversely critical of the commercial theatre of his day, opposed to the twin evils of sentimentality and the factual treatment of contemporary social issues, what he termed "naturalism." He wanted to create and promote plays which conveyed the type of "symbolic realism" he found in the work of two feIlow Georgians, John Drinkwater and Gordon Bottomley. In Drinkwater's Cophetua, he saw "a bold attempt to break through the accretions of dramatic convention ... and to achieve a broader, simpler, more frankly symbolic method of drama"; and in Bottomley's The Riding 10 Lithend, he appreciated a play shaped not "according to nature, but according to the curves of beauty, into a symbol of life infinitely more powerful than any actuality could do."