A critic of modern dramaturgy with a bent for Brecht and O'Casey, the TNP and the Berliner Ensemble, Morgan and Frazer, Marx and Bloch, has one outstanding difficulty to come to terms with, if he is to be sincere to his trade and himself: Samuel Beckett. If the chief measure of a major dramatist is a happy union of relevance and consistency of dramatic vision, there is little doubt that in our cultural circle—middle and western Europe, based on the Mediterranean, with the massive wings of the Soviet Union and North America—the two major dramatists since World War II are Brecht and Beckett. Yet it is rare for a critic devoted to Beckett seriously and knowledgeably to face Brecht. I can think of only one such comprehensive effort—Martin Esslin's—and that one, to my mind, is finally unconvincing. Conversely, however, I can think of no critic of the Brechtian bent who has attempted a comprehensive study of Beckett.

The Bread and Puppet Theatre was established in New York in 1962 by Peter Schumann, with the idea that “the theatre should be as basic as bread.” Using masks and a variety of puppets as their basic theatrical tools, the group has created its own distinctly innovative performing style. Their presentations often combine religious themes with a political message, with the war in Vietnam a particularly persistent topic. The troupe has done a large amount of traveling outside of New York, performing at GI coffeehouses and at various political demonstrations in the United States and Europe. Their desire to reach a popular audience that does not usually go to the theatre has led them to perform in the streets, parks and ghettos of cities. Bread and Puppet has always been a poor theatre, with unpaid actors and little or no admission charge.

Edward Albee’s theatre continues to be controversial. The discussion centers around two questions: one has to do with truth, and the other with dramatic structure. The first runs as follows: is the image of human relations in America which Albee presents justifiable because it is in some sense realistic, or is his an essentially flawed and perverted point of view? The second is: are there valid grounds for the invented child in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and the confused events which lead to Julian’s death in Tiny Alice, or is Albee artistically callow and unable to structure a play properly?

There are certain characters of Shakespeare that assert their right to exist from the moment they come into view. They rear up and walk; they talk with unmistakable rhythm and inflection; they look you in the eye with the assurance of freedom, dignity, even defiance; they measure your worth against their own. They thrust and elbow and insinuate their way through the action, which they conduct in their own time; they are sometimes jeeringly aware of this characteristic tempo of theirs, as when crook-back Richard Gloster declares: “… and leave the world for me to bustle in.” The verb is precise in describing Richard's political energy, his impatience, his restless and gleeful egotism! You might even say, come Bosworth Field, that he has bustled himself to death. Or Juliet's nurse; it's not enough to say she lives, she gasps and heaves through the action; she sputters, rails, purrs and betrays.

The actors of the Theatre Laboratory in Opole, all of them under thirty, meet every morning at ten. The day begins with three hours of “basic” exercises: gymnastics, acrobatics, breathing exercises, rhythmic dance, plastic motion, concentration, mask composition, and pantomime. When this is finished, they start rehearsing the play which is currently in preparation and keep at it until show time in the evening. The acting technique they have perfected in five years is resolutely “theatrical,” meaning that it is anti-naturalist. We shall start with an analysis of this technique, which is supposed to increase substantially the actor's means of expression.

The play XX takes place entirely within a two-story house of twenty rooms. These rooms—ten on each floor—have been constructed around a large hall with stairs. They are connected to each other by doors, which lead into corridors and also from room-to-room. On the second floor, the rooms have windows and through these, as well as through the corridors, the spectator can see theatre seats, in this case those of the Odéon in Paris, dimly outlined in the shadows. Looking upward, one can see the decorative ceiling of the famous Paris theatre. Even before the performance begins, it is simply and clearly established that the spectator [for the purpose of this article, the author] is at the theatre, within theatrical space/time.

The play, however, does not begin at the same time for everyone. The relationship between actor and spectator is established on new ground.

Robert Wilson's The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin was presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on December 14, 15, 21, and 22. This performance was an unusual event. It consisted of seven acts and lasted for twelve hours. Since Stalin began at seven in the evening and ran until seven the following morning, it became a singular event in the life of the spectator, who had to change his habits in order to attend it. Even before it began, the performance had imposed itself on the spectator by the expectation of its unusual length. At least in part, the duration of the piece was an attempt to physiologically modify the perception of the spectator. During the twelve hours, the spectator had to accommodate himself to the slow tempo of the performance; as he became physically tired (sometimes on the verge of sleep), his mode of perception altered.

My trip to Moscow in 1934 was a present from Sidney Kingsley, whose play, Men in White, I directed. He wanted to give me something because the play was such a success, and he asked my wife of that time, Paula Miller, what would be the best thing to give me. She said a trip to Russia.

For me, it was an unusual opportunity. I had seen the Moscow Art Theatre in New York in 1923 and 1924. This was the beginning of my engagement with the practical problem of creative acting. I'd read a great deal, but until I met the people from the Moscow Art Theatre, some of whom remained in New York to open a laboratory theatre, I had little actual awareness of the training methods used at the Moscow Art Theatre.

It is safe to assume that Mr. Willett knows as much about the work of Brecht as anyone else ever has, including Brecht himself, who hadn't a very good memory. The amount of research that has gone into The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht is prodigious, and happily the facts come to us filtered through a mind, not heaped-up by a research staff. If I say that the result is an illustrated catalogue, I should add that I like illustrated catalogues, and that this may well be the best such catalogue on the book market. The illustrations (to begin with) are mostly good in themselves and invariably relevant to the subject; the job of tracking them down must have been a formidable one, as Brecht left his traces in all manner of by-ways but seldom on the main highway. Brecht also cultivated his own brand of esotericism, so that, through the years, just finding his writings took more energy than reading them.

Theatre of Fact, like a fast sock in the jaw from, the thirties, has forced its way onto the American stage again. But unlike its noisy brawling predecessor, the Living Newspaper, which was fathered by the Federal Theatre out of the fertile discontent of the depression, this present brand of Theatre of Fact has lowered its voice and grown more decorous. It has entered the courtroom.

Two German playwrights have had a prime influence in the use of court records as dramatic material. Heinar Kipphardt's In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Peter Weiss’ The Investigation, produced first in Germany and then here in the United States in the mid-sixties, effected radical departures in dramatic form insofar as they relied almost entirely on the sheer weight of fact and the dialectic of courtroom argument to provide the movement and emotion expected of an evening in the theatre.