It was clear from the start that Bernard Shaw was a man of ideas. Later it turned out that he was a fabulous entertainer. But few have granted that the two Shaws were one. The old tendency was to allow that he was a publicist, a critic, an essayist, even a philosopher but to add: “not of course a dramatist.” The later tendency was to concede that he was a great showman but to discount his thoughtful side. As Egon Friedell said, you could suck the theatrical sugar from the pill of propaganda, and put the pill itself back on the plate.

Neither in the old days, then, nor in the later ones was Shaw considered a dramatist, for even the later generations have only thought him a master of the theatrical occasion, a man with a theatrical line of talk and a theatrical bag of tricks, a highly histrionic jokester—a comedian, certainly, but hardly a writer of serious comedy.

The parable of Eugène Ionesco's new play, Le Rhinocéros, is simple and obvious. The inhabitants of a small provincial town are transformed into rhinoceroses. At first this process is gradual, and then more and more precipitous. The protagonist, whose name is Bérenger, like that of the protagonist in Tueur sans gages, sees in the first scene one or two of the inhabitants of his town metamorphosed. In the second scene, a colleague in the office where he works becomes a rhinoceros. In the third, his best friend, Jean, is transformed before his very eyes. In the last scene, his mistress rushes off to join the herd. He remains alone, the last soul in the town to resist the epidemic. He refuses to comply with the collective mania, the standardization or nazification of his world. The parable is on the sacred individuality of man. Alone the protagonist Bérenger remains faithful to his vocation of man.

When Samuel Beckett had his En Attendant Godot produced at the Théâtre de Babylone in Paris, he really started something. I saw the play there in 1953, and again in London (1955) and in New York (1956) as Waiting for Godot. Meanwhile it had toured France and Germany and been translated into several other languages. It was a far greater success than any of Beckett's previous works had been—and his first attempt to write for the stage.

The most immediately striking thing about the play was its originality. Obviously avant-garde, it nevertheless retained all the seediness of a down-at-the-heel realism. On the surface it seemed simple almost to the point of idiocy, yet it implied all the complications that human intelligence has been able to create for itself. And it created an image of man's longing for ideal relationships with himself, with other men, with God, only to defile the image by suggesting doubts.

The current popularity of the Japanese arts in this country has extended only in a very limited way to what is perhaps the most beautiful of those arts: the Noh drama. The reasons for this are simple. One is the inaccessibility of the Noh. Unlike the Kabuki, it has never been performed in this country and probably never will be, at least in its pure form. Only once in its history, in fact, has the Noh been performed outside of Japan, at an Italian drama festival in 1954. Another reason for this relative neglect is the esoteric quality of the Noh. A Noh play is about as difficult for a Westerner unversed in Japanese culture to understand as, say, a medieval mystery play or Jacobean court masque would be for a Japanese who knew no English.

In a reference to Pascal, Ernst Cassirer wrote in his book An Essay on Man that:

During his years in Ireland Sean O'Casey's development progressed by a series of rejections. He was born into an ugly, often hostile world, and was precluded from an ordinary education and normal social contacts by weak eyes. He therefore drew into himself, finding in books both a solace and a weapon. Armed with knowledge, he later turned angrily to face the society which had forced the misery and humiliation of poverty upon him, violently rejecting and rebelling against it. At first he identified his grievances with the woes of “poor oul’ Ireland”; but his experience as a laborer and unionist convinced him that the Nationalists, to whom he had given himself, wanted only to redeem Ireland for the middle class. Widened sympathies then led him to reject in turn the cause of “Irish Ireland,” and to embrace the ideals of socialism. But when compromise and mediocrity threatened these ideals, he scorned the Irish labor movement, denouncing its leaders as philistines, and cast his whole hope on the day when the workers, triumphant, would realize a richer life.

In 1623 John Heminge and Henry Condell attempted to end the controversy about what Shakespeare really wrote by issuing the First Folio, “Published according to the True Originall Copies.” But what they settled with one hand they stirred up with the other. They dropped a casual remark about the author's unblotted papers, in reference to the ease of his writing, that proved to be a potent dose of intellectual catnip. The image of those immaculate papers received direct from the hand of the greatest writer we know floats before a scholar's eye like a vision of the Grail, intoxicating his mind with the tantalizing suggestion that a literary work of matchless perfection once existed, embodying the pure intention of the author before it was corrupted by performance in the theatre and by the lamentable shortcomings of printers.

The theatre of Georges Feydeau, neglected for over a generation, has known in recent years a rebirth of popularity to which numerous revivals of his comedies (both in France and elsewhere) can attest, as well as increased study by theatrical commentators and critics. No doubt there is in this vogue an element of the snobbery and aesthetic affectation that always accompanies such a “rediscovery.” In Feydeau's case this is paradoxical. Of all writers he would have been the first to ridicule any such pretensions of a would-be intellectual elite to espouse a fashionable cause. Yet there is certainly more to the Feydeau-vogue than mere affectation; and if the popularity of this genial playwright during our own generation is to rival his uncontested success of fifty years ago, it will, for the most part, be motivated by a serious appreciation of his production.