Nowadays, what is more often than not meant by theatre is the theatrical realization of plays, yet any view of theatre that excludes opera and ballet is obviously incomplete. A careful examination of the natures of these three theatrical forms ought to reveal clearly the limitations and potentialities of each, and to indicate the desirability, or even possibility, of mixing the forms in order to make available new theatrical experiences. Naturally, such an examination cannot be accomplished within the space of a short article, and in any case a thorough examination will have to await the attention of some theatrical Leonardo da Vinci with vast knowledge, sensitivity, and experience. Yet the rushing of the fool into an unknown region has its value. If it results in disaster, wiser men are warned of things they would have had to establish by cautious experiment; but it is not unknown for an uncalculated risk to make clear to the angels that in fearing to tread they are being unnecessarily hesitant. Thus, the present expedition may hope to serve some useful purpose. Like many expeditions, its goal is a land long dreamed of, and its departure has been made under an immediate stimulus—in this case, the chance reading of three pieces in The Tulane Drama Review (September, 1959) immediately after looking through Mary Caroline Richards’ translations from Artaud.

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

I'm glad that the name and purpose of these conferences define my function here along lines that happen to be congenial to myself. The Factor of Acting in the Working Theatre—the subject is organic in my life to an overwhelming degree. I think I've gone beyond the point where it would be possible for anyone to ask me, as a woman put it to me bluntly years ago, “What's uppermost in you, the actor or the man?” The answer, I hope, is now, “Both.” For I've learned that if you endeavor to express your life without some form to receive it, you're apt to produce a chaotic mess—and on the other hand, if you play-act at life, well, there you'll certainly come a cropper.

After the first dozen Twelfth Night's there are still surprises, new guises for the old masterpiece. Directors color it golden, russet, silver or white; blue for dreams, and sometimes pink; or they allow red and even purple to dominate. They can make it sound noisy as a carnival, or eager, simple or melodious, or quarrelsome like children; it can also be strained and nervous. In 1958, Peter Hall at Stratford-upon-Avon hung the stage with gauzes and contrived what The Times called a “Watteauesque light.” And critics report that a year previously, at Stratford, Ontario, Tyrone Guthrie contrasted Feste and Malvolio in “psychological terms,” allowing the final song of the “wind and the rain” to be “as plaintive and wonderful as a Jewish lament.” Two years before that, at the English Stratford, Sir John Gielgud brought “a faint chill to the air” of his production: the comics were on their best behavior in deference to a pervasive “charm”; The Observer said that the polite word for this would be “formal,” and the exact word “mechanical”; it seemed as if, during rehearsals of the last scene, Sir John had stopped the actors and commanded, “Be beautiful; be beautiful.”

When one rides out to do battle with the ogre of Realism it is at first dismaying to see how many noble shields and lances already litter the field. Rostand, Maeterlinck, Hofmannsthal, Yeats, Lorca, Claudel, Auden, Eliot, Fry … one had not thought there were so many. Not that they were all dishonorably unhorsed, but—the ogre still rules. And there are the critics too, like captured squires, bending to serve the one in power, always wistful and alert for liberation, it is true, but not actively encouraging to further challengers. And they have good reason for their hesitation since some who came to set them free are now among their persecutors.

When we were putting on Arthur Miller's All My Sons in New Haven and I was talking with Arthur about the function of scene design, he said, “Don't talk to me about stage form, scene design and all that. What matters in the theatre is character and situation.” I was about to say something in answer when a friend of Arthur's who was present warned me, “Arthur is tense about the show.” So of course I dropped the subject. Afterwards I went to Europe, where I spent three years doing research for the Rockefeller Foundation. When I came back I saw Miller at his home. In the meantime I had read the introduction which he wrote for Death of a Salesman, in which he stated how much he owed to Jo Mielziner, who had designed that play: if it wasn't for Jo's contribution scenically the play wouldn't have taken die form that it did, and so on, very laudatory.

In his presentation of the twentieth-century world and Everyman, Duerrenmatt uses a form as old as Greek tragedy and a staging method as modern as surrealism; he uses characters as old as the Sphinx in combination with our contemporaries, Eisenhower and Nehru; and in his stage business, he uses motifs as old as Oedipal inspired fears of castration, dark, mysterious, and frighteningly uncontrollable, and motifs as new, as light, as explicable as the operation of The-Place-in-the-Sun Foundry and the economics of a simple local grocery store. This total presentation he makes with an artistry before which the imagination, even of an imaginative critic, boggles; for with a gorgeously simple style and technique, Duerrenmatt's dramatic lines achieve the stylization of poetry, and move from poetry to myth, where the complex of thought, passion, and affect become infinitely expansible, indefinitely relevant, and meaningful without apparent limit.

Nowhere but in France, it seems, do men of letters whose greatest talent clearly lies in other genres devote so much of their creative energy to the theatre. The Golden Age of Corneille and Racine, kept alive by an ever-growing number of French repertory companies, stands constantly before the writer, challenging him to try to rival its inaccessible perfection. An amazing number, from Balzac and Stendhal to Mauriac and Gide, have taken up the challenge. Even such transients in Paris as Turgenev and Henry James were affected by France's worship of the theatre as the supreme art and tried vainly to convince the public, and posterity, that they had mastered the dramatic form. Albert Camus’ passion for the theatre was lifelong, from his participation in the Algerian Workers’ Theatre in 1936 to his tragically short reign as director of a government sponsored avant-garde company in 1959.

In an article in the Hudson Review (Autumn, 1956) entitled “Problems for the Modern Critic of Literature” Mr. Yvor Winters makes some rather startling statements about the drama. He makes some rather startling statements about a good number of other things as well, but his remarks about the dramatic form in general and Macbeth in particular ask, I think, for some kind of comment. Mr. Winters is a good critic; the issues he raises here are important issues, issues that should be considered by anyone seriously interested in the dramatic form. And though I think he is wrong, he is wrong in an important way.

The art of Theatre is an art of change. It is changing continuously. It changes in matters pertaining to substance and to form. It changes in structure. For example, take that element of theatrical art which is the work of the “director.”

Today when we hear that a new Tennessee Williams play will be staged by Elia Kazan, a Shakespearean work produced by Tyrone Guthrie, or a musical extravaganza “put on” by Joshua Logan, we are not surprised by the news at all. It seems to us to be quite natural that a dramatic enterprise should be guided by a man who is trained for its preparation. The fact is, however, that the emergence of the director as a separate and distinct craftsman in the theatre is a comparatively recent event. There have always been general administrators, of course. In the early years they were priests or lay members of the community assigned to the actors as producers.

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.

At the heart of Euripides’ masterpiece, The Bacchae, is a communal sacrifice. The city of Thebes is sacrificed to Dionysus to satisfy his capricious ego. In supporting this thesis I will contest several widely held theories about the play: (1) that Dionysus represents Fate or any of its equivalents; (2) that the god is a life force or some other pantheistic “god of ecstacy in religion”; or (3) that the play gathers its primary force from the encounter between Dionysus and Pentheus.

My reading of The Bacchae is an internal one: I want to see what the play will yield on only its own terms. I realize, of course, that political and social ideas both press in on the play and, if we seek them, emanate from it. These ideas are, I believe, extra-dramatic: they radiate from the script, enriching it and partially explaining its genesis, but they are not present as a dramatic immediacy.

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.

To get at the nature of farce we go back to beginnings, in either time or structure. Russian folk drama from the seventeenth into the twentieth century, for example, recapitulates much of what we know or infer about rude origins. Here, as Berkov remarks, necessity creates and fixes a manner. Out-of-door performance calls for exaggerated tones, sweeping gestures, loud singing and furious dancing, features which persist when public square and puppet stage, but not groundlings, are left behind. An impudent tone, imposed by the turbulent crowd, provokes performers into the picaresque asides, the jibes and the cheeky stepping out of role which, all the way down from remote beginnings in Attica to Hellzapoppin in New York, have raised their roars of laughter. Brutally enlarged, this is the way of folk game and folk tale, and should remind us, once for all, of the indissoluble bond by which farce is tied to folklore in general; and of what it owes to the point of view and the aesthetics of the folk.

When we consider John Webster's achievement as a dramatist we are struck by a general mediocrity, suddenly relieved in the middle of his career by two plays, written in quick succession, of a brilliance and power virtually unequalled in his age. The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi were composed in 1612 and 1613, following a period of uninspired collaboration with Dekker, Heywood and others; they were followed by some further independent work and by renewed collaboration with Middleton, Heywood and Rowley, but never again, working either alone or with others, did Webster approach the aesthetic range of his two Italian tragedies. They seem to represent the artist's concentrated attempt to express a tragic vision which he imperfectly perceived in The White Devil, but realized fully in The Duchess of Malfi, after which his career could only culminate in anti-climax. He had nothing more to say.

If Strindberg is right that much of the labor of life is devoted to sweeping its dirt under the table, then the theatre's business is to sweep it out again. In the process we may discover some of the dirt wasn't dirt at all, but stray coins, curls, and paper clips, not golddust necessarily but a usable straight pin or two and maybe a piece of string, ravelled around the past. Art is an act of salvage, more so in a universe conscious, as ours is, of running down; not muckraking but recovery, and especially the kind of recovery that comes after crisis. In the Europe of the twentieth century, crisis has obviously not been of dustpan proportions. The salvage job has been immense. But one may yet walk amidst the recovery, as I did recently, brooding on broken wall and tower, and Agamemnon dead.

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.

Ingmar Bear-ih-mahn—not quite seven syllables, and somewhat less musically mellifluous on the tongue than Federico Fellini—but then whose memory is so faithful as to recall the enthusiasms of four years past? Which is not to suggest that Ingmar Bergman is merely the Federico Fellini of 1960 (and even less that Fellini was merely the Bergman of 1956); only to reaffirm a few platitudinous sentiments on the transience of our earthly affections: my old flame, I can't remember her name; yesterday's kisses are just memories; it's a long, long time from May to December; etc., etc. Bergman seems durable enough to survive what James Baldwin has dubbed his “precarious vogue,” but are we?