When I am asked: “Why do you write plays?” I always feel very embarrassed, and am at a loss for an answer. It seems to me sometimes that I started to write for the theatre because I hated it. I read literary works and essays, or went to the movies with pleasure. From time to time I listened to music, or visited art galleries; but for all practical purposes I never went to the theatre.

When, quite by chance, I saw a play, it was in order to accompany someone, or because I had not been able to refuse an invitation, because I had been obliged to go.

I derived no pleasure from it, and did not participate in it. The playing of the actors disturbed me: I was embarrassed for them. The situations seemed arbitrary to me. There was something false in it all, I thought.

Perhaps the most immediately striking quality of the plays of Michel de Ghelderode is their size—not their physical length, but their dramatic dimension. Like Strindberg, this author has written very short plays and extremely long ones. The lengths may vary, but the theme is constant, and this theme is Man, essential Man, who is revealed as both fascinating and terrifying in all his potentialities. Ghelderode represents’ men in a fashion that derives from the painters he loves so much, especially Bosch and Breughel, and from the expressionist theatre. Fundamentally, he is a romantic, and at best he creates works of powerful feeling and remarkable organic form. At worst he becomes possessed, and his work is then the prey of mounting hysteria. The authenticity of feeling in all that he writes is unquestionable. It is when this feeling so grips him that he loses aesthetic perspective that his work deteriorates.

For some time now I have been trying to shrug off the hunch that contemporary audiences and dramatic critics have lost the art of seeing plays. Now this is a disturbing thought to anyone engaged in the practice of theatre. It is hard to work without some faith in the intelligence and appreciation of either critics or audiences. When you don't succeed in maintaining that faith to some degree, you feel anxious and guilty, and begin to get paranoic.

But “paranoia” occurs when imaginary dangers are identified as real; and although I am perfectly willing to regard my feelings as neurotic, I have also found that they seem to be widely shared in the profession. Something has happened to audiences and critics that fills the theatre with irritation. The mere mention of a critic's name in professional circles causes hackles to rise.

By the “approach” to the drama of the Golden Age I mean a guide to its understanding. I have thought that some remarks on this subject might be useful because the drama has not yet been satisfactorily handled in any histories of Spanish literature. This is mainly due, I believe, to the fact that our conceptions of what a play is and how it should be approached are derived from our inherited notions of the classical and Shakespearian dramas, and from the realistic theatre of more modern times, whereas Spanish literature offers us a form of drama that is in many respects different from any of these.

The Spanish drama of this period is not, of course, uniform in technique; there are very great differences between the last plays of Calderón and the first of Lope.

The most surprising fact about the Phoenix Theatre in New York City is that it has survived. Between opening night on December, 1953, and the end of the third season in the spring of 1957, the managing directors, T. Edward Hambleton and Norris Houghton, compiled a cheerful deficit of some $500,000. By the 1960-61 season, if conditions do not change, there is no reason why the deficit should not touch seven figures. Yet there are some citizens, most of them Broadway backers, who continue to pour into the Phoenix money that cannot possibly be recouped, let alone multiplied.

This may sound like an indelicate or misplaced emphasis; it is actually no more than a reminder that money is the prime mover in New York theatre. It takes, we are told, $400,000 to throw a Broadway musical together.

By this time many of us have heard of the controversial doctrines of Epic Theatre. Some of us have been intrigued by Epic theory; others have lost no time expressing their annoyance. In his lifetime Bertolt Brecht, Epic's chief architect, encountered a full measure of both reactions. He accepted enthusiasms calmly and took rejections in the same spirit. In spite of all box-office accountants he insisted that the validity of a theatrical credo was not to be determined by a counting of heads. “Einstein's theory was understood at first by half a dozen people,” he once told me. “Whether I am accepted by six people or six million is beside the point. The point is whether I am justified.“

It must be admitted that the meaning of Epic Theatre is not quickly grasped.

Ibsen's The Wild Duck has been universally recognized as a masterpiece of modern dramatic art. Two generations of critics, starting with George Brandes and George Bernard Shaw, have admired its powerful ironies and brilliant dramaturgy. Finally, it has been made the subject of a detailed and extremely perceptive analysis by Hermann Weigand, Ibsen's leading twentieth-century exponent, in his study The Modern Ibsen. All have seen it as a curious drama of mixed genre in which elements of satire, comedy, and tragedy exist together in a state of high tension. Beyond this, the critics have gone on to explore some particular vein in the rich texture of the play: its exposure of the dangers of jejune “idealism,” the elaborate comic irony surrounding the figure of Hialmar Ekdal, the teasing symbolism.

TDR has never believed the reviewing of New York productions to be one of its functions. It does not now. But in the case of Arthur Adamov's PING-PONG an exception must be made. Adamov is an important and imaginative dramatist. Together with Duerrenmatt, Beckett, Ionesco, and Ghelderode, he is opening up new territories for the theatre zuhich other playwrights (and audiences) must also explore if our theatre is ever to go beyond the narrow and mechanical limits of naturalism. We regret that the New York critics rejected this play and believe they have done our theatre a disservice. What follows is our dissenting opinion. The Grove Press, which has done more than any other publisher to make good translations of the work of the new dramatists of Europe available to American readers, has recently published PING-PONG in both cloth and paper bound editions.

“Mystery in the Russian Theatre” is the title given by Benois to one of his “Letters on Art.” One might think that in this article he is discussing a production of one of Aleksei Remizov's plays written in the style of a medieval mystery play. Or, perhaps, Scriabin has already realized one of his dreams, and Benois is hastening to announce to the public the greatest event on the Russian stage—the appearance of a new theatrical form reviewing the mystic rites of ancient Greek culture.

It seems that neither Remizov nor Scriabin has written a mystery; according to Benois the Moscow Art Theatre has produced a mystery with its performance of The Brothers Karamasov. But just what characteristics of the medieval mystery plays could be found in the performance of The Brothers Karamasov? Perhaps here the purified ancient Greek mysteries were combined with the visual edification of the medieval mystery play?