The plays of Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, and Eugène Ionesco have been performed with astonishing success in France, Germany, Scandinavia, and the English-speaking countries. This reception is all the more puzzling when one considers that the audiences concerned were amused by and applauded these plays fully aware that they could not understand what they meant or what their authors were driving at.

At first sight these plays do, indeed, confront their public with a bewildering experience, a veritable barrage of wildly irrational, often nonsensical goings-on that seem to go counter to all accepted standards of stage convention. In these plays, some of which are labeled “anti-plays,” neither the time nor the place of the action are ever clearly stated. (At the beginning of Ionesco's The Bald Soprano the clock strikes seventeen.) The characters hardly have any individuality and often even lack a name; moreover, halfway through the action they tend to change their nature completely.

William Gibson's The Seesaw Log is a book about the theatre in, as it were, its very essence, and it seems to me that it is as interesting as such a book could possibly be.

Now that I have set down that statement, I see that it may sound ambiguous, and that it may suggest ambivalence on my part, but I let it stand as representing the division of my feelings, not about the book but about the theatre. I was the boy who refused to wave his handkerchief to keep Tinker Bell from dying, even though it was Maude Adams who pleaded, and I despised the children who did wave, and also envied them, and was glad they could help make so moving an event by their silliness.

Some part of me is repelled by the theatre. The histrionic personality bores me (after the first half-hour, in which it is usually charming).

Professor Else explains in his preface that this book is not intended as a complete new edition of the Poetics, for he omits five and a half chapters, and does not deal with all of the textual problems. On the other hand, it is not a coherent account of Aristotle's theory; Professor Else promises to provide that in a later work. It is, in his words, “a close line-by-line analysis of Aristotle's argument,” to clear the way for a new and more accurate interpretation of the Poetics.

His method is to present a short segment of the Greek text, as emended by himself, and then his own translation into English. His translation incorporates his own interpretations of key phrases, sometimes departing very far from the literal meaning of the Greek—if one can speak of a literal meaning when translating from one language to another. He then defends both his textual emendations and his interpretations, taking on a frightening array of grammarians, editors and commentators who have been disputing over the Poetics in many languages for the last twenty centuries.

Coleridge's celebrated theory of dramatic illusion was doubtless formulated to deal with the problem of Shakespeare and “the three unities.” The unities of time, place, and action so dear to the hearts of the French were, he felt, based on a doctrine of literal delusion, mistakenly supposing that the audience is deceived into taking the play as a real happening. In his Preface to his edition of Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson, on the other hand, had maintained that a theatrical audience was never deceived for a moment. The spectator understood that he was viewing a presentation of fictional events, and judged it according to its adherence to sound morality, logical probability, and general human nature. For Coleridge the truth was a reconciliation of these two extreme views: the audience of a play is neither deceived nor wholly undeceived about its reality. It is in a state of illusion, a complex attitude in part self-willed, in part created by the skill of the playwright and the actors.

Arthur Miller's introduction to his Collected Plays (New York, 1957) is one of the major documents of American theatre. It reveals an eminent playwright having struggled to understand and perfect his craft. It shows him eager to use the theatre to express his evolving ideas. It shows his strengths, and also his weaknesses.

The foremost asset Arthur Miller possesses as a playwright is his knowledge that the theatre must dedicate itself to public matters. He has an acute sense of his audience as persons to be addressed, never merely spectators to be tolerated. “A play,” he writes, “ought to make sense to common-sense people … the only challenge worth the effort is the widest one and the tallest one, which is the people themselves.”

His writing, although it usually has an axe to grind, does not attempt to startle society with new ideas. Indeed, he does not believe that the theatre can promulgate entirely new ideas, because it must gather the assent of its audience as it moves along, and this is impossible with the radically new.

Both in the United States and in the United Kingdom, the keen discussion about the degree to which the theatre should be socially committed has been confused by the vague, ambiguous, and tendentious use of focal words like “society,” “politics,” “realism,” “humanity.” In England the bid by one group to impose politics on the theatre in a narrow and a party sense under the guise of solicitude for social principles has been made evident on at least two occasions. The first was the shouting in the theatre when The Tenth Chance, an immature first play by a young writer named Stuart Holroyd, was tried out at the Royal Court for a single Sunday night performance. The play dealt with the reactions to persecution in a totalitarian state of three imprisoned men: a rationalist, a religious mystic, and a moronic tough. It shows the tough, lacking in mental resources, breaking first and the mystic, buoyed up by faith in some extra-personal force, outlasting the rationalist who relies unsuccessfully on his vulnerable brain. What Holroyd was getting at was similar to Shaw's aim in Saint Joan and other plays.

From its origins in the comos and mimos to the complicated gyrations of the Paris avant garde, the term comedy has come to mean different things to different people. Taking a glance at its development in modern literature, we discover that the very basis of comedy is tragic; indeed, the modern playwright no longer cares to separate his worlds into tragedy and comedy but prefers to use the term tragicomedy or, like Brecht, omit any designation altogether. However, we need not be too surprised if we remember the tragic background of The Birds or Lysistrata, The Merchant of Venice or The Tempest, The Misanthrope or Georges Dandin. The reason for calling a play a comedy or a tragedy frequently is historical or personal. Were Wozzeck to be written today it certainly would have been called something like a tragicomedy. After all, Eliot's The Cocktail Party is a comedy, Beckett's Waiting for Godot is a tragicomedy and Ionesco's The Chairs a tragic farce.

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.

Bertolt Brecht's Baden play for learning—Das Badener Lehrstück vom Einverständnis—is so named for having been first performed at the Baden-Baden music festival in 1929, and because it falls among his early Marxist plays with an explicitly didactic function. Einverständnis means agreement or acceptance. The piece was given at Baden-Baden accompanied by a score written by Hindemith, and in a shorter form than the version published in Brecht's Stücke. Hermann Scherchen conducted. The premier created a great scandal, marked especially by the exit of Gerhart Hauptmann in the middle of the Clown Scene.

I believe that of Brecht's plays this is the most unclear in conception and yet the most revelatory of the author's personal conflicts in relation to his thought and politics. It also happens to contain one of the most viciously funny scenes ever written. I want to set forth in this essay some tentative ideas regarding the play.