Behold the drive for purity in art as art is practised these days. Behold this writer striving for the purely poetic, another for the purely lyrical, the purely epic, the purely dramatic. The painter ardently seeks to create the pure painting, the musician pure music, and someone even told me, pure radio represents the synthesis between Dionysos and Logos. Even more remarkable for our time, not otherwise renowned for its purity, is that each and everyone believes he has found his unique and the only true purity. Each vestal of the arts has, if you think of it, her own kind of chastity. Likewise, too numerous to count, are all the theories of the theatre, of what is pure theatre, pure tragedy, pure comedy.

The following notes concern only a particular technique of theatrical art, that of transposing a written work from the imaginary realm of reading to the concrete realm of the stage. To look for anything more than “means of interpretation” in these often deliberately cryptic lines would be vain.

When so many theories, ars poetica and metaphysics have been made up about this art, it is perhaps necessary that one advance, as a preliminary, a few artisan's considerations.

One can never read the play often enough. Actors never read it often enough. They think they understand the play when they follow the plot more or less clearly—a fundamental error.

Fortunate are those young men who have had masters!

Fortunate are the nervous youngsters who went and rang doorbells and received with flushed faces the encouraging word from the man whom they admired!

I grew up without any masters; in the years around 1928, I had a warm place in my heart for Claudel and I carried dog-eared copies of Shaw and Pirandello in my pockets, and yet, I was all alone. Alone with the anguish of one soon to be twenty years old, with a love for the theatre, and all the awkwardness of youth. Who would divulge to me the secret in those days in which only wellmade plays were performed? Musset, Marivaux reread a thousand times? They were too far off. They were from an era already fabulous in which spoken French still had periods and commas, from an era in which the very sentences danced.

The returns are in. A Swiss playwright has been “discovered.” A year ago the name of Friedrich Duerrenmatt suddenly studded the hopeful theatrical gossip of the alert drinkers in the Salisbury, Cranbourne, and Arts Theatre. No director worthy of the name “Peter” was without curiosity. To acquire the production rights for The Visit of the Old Lady would be considered a virtual coup d'état for any ambitious directorial career. Travelers from the continent regaled us with stories: one had seen the play in Munich with Therese Giehse, a famous Mother Courage seen here in Benedek's film Kinder, Mutter, und Ein General; another had seen the great Kathe Dorsch as the Old Lady; yet another the Paris production (not a notable success) with that delicate, withered little bundle remembered from many French films, Mme. Sylvie.

In his own style, in his own creation, Jean Giraudoux is an accomplished playwright. If the reader of his plays or the theatregoer is an addict of the Giraudoux manner of writing, he will be enchanted and stimulated as long as the reading or as long as the play lasts. But the opposite reaction is equally possible for the reader or the theatre-goer who finds such a style antipathetic.

Ever since his first book appeared in 1909, a collection of stories and sketches called Provinciales, Giraudoux has been explained by almost every critic who has referred to him, by the term “preciosity.” He has been called a précieux with the same monotonous regularity that Gide has been called a “sincere” writer and Cocteau a “tight-rope walker.” The word is applicable, without much doubt, and yet literary styles are not easily classifiable.

Death has not lessened Eugene O’Neill’s dominance over the serious American theatre. He towers over other American dramatists with a gigantism almost equal to that with which his characters tower over ordinary mortals. He died in 1953 at the age of 65, having had only one Broadway production in nineteen years, and none thoroughly successful in twenty years. Yet anyone who would evaluate the American theatre since the second World War is obliged to reckon with Eugene O’Neill, and that hardly at all because of the 1946 production of The Iceman Cometh but rather because of the amazing concentration of his works which began to be produced in 1956. In May of that year, the off-Broadway group at The Circle-in-the-Square gave The Iceman Cometh its first successful performance in New York.

Musical comedy seemed for so long to be nothing but noisily sexy entertainment for an off evening that it is difficult even yet to get anyone to give it a really serious thought. Sophisticated theatergoers who have a taste for it seem to feel they must apologize for that taste as a kind of secret unsophisticated vice—like catsup on French fries—which they somehow never have managed to outgrow. They note by way of justification that in the past fifteen years the orchestras are less brassy, the plots less farcical, the ballets more adult and integral parts of the story, that the lyrics are cleverly sophisticated, that the scores have some catchy tunes. But in so doing, they miss the outstanding development of the musical in the past fifteen years or so—the development of a twentieth century dramatic poetry, a lyricism which appeals to sophisticated and unsophisticated alike, a lyricism which seemed impossible to combine with the realism developed by the 1920’s.

My purpose here is to do a little superstitious rapping in the hope of persuading into existence something a little different in the kind of criticism we normally bring to bear upon Greek tragedy. If this seems pretentious, blame the subject in part: Greek tragedy requires, I think, a formidable apparition by way of an adequate criticism and certainly a larger one than I can summon up, though also a larger one than presently attends the scene. What I want to do is to outline the nature of the job to be done, as I see it, and to discuss what seems to me inadequate in both the traditional and contemporary ways of writing about Greek tragedy.

Flaubert once said that a theme imposes itself upon the writer, that it demands to be treated. And Curtius remarked that the choice of a theme reflects an author’s basic attitude toward the world, that it indicates his typical reactions to given situations. But he also pointed out that he who has only a theme will not necessarily create great literature. No doubt, the theme alone cannot assure literary value to any work; nor does the particular orientation, the point of view from which the theme is treated, endow the work with stature. Broadly considered, war is the theme of La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu, and a despondent pacifism is its orientation. At first glance, the play appears to say either that war is in the hearts of men or that it is a pastime of gods indifferent to human will or human prayers.

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.

Judith, written by Jean Giraudoux in 1931, and predecessor of Elèctre (1937), Sodome et Gomorrhe (1943), and Pour Lucrèce (1944), is the only one of his plays which Giraudoux himself labeled a tragedy. Critics of the work have not denied him this label, although views of what constitutes the tragedy differ widely. One of Judith’s translators rather frivolously calls it “a fable of sex and God.” A German writer terms it a tragedy of Nature wronged, with God the Worm, destroyer of all things, as the ultimate villain. It has been called “a magnificent tragedy of spoliation,” as well as “the most profound and the most ambiguous of all of Giraudoux’ plays.“ And finally, Mr. Bert M-P. Leefmans regards Judith as the 20th century’s cry of despair from a sink of iniquity, or, as he puts it: “In Judith … the Fall is total, the beasts take over from mankind, and Judith … chooses, or is forced, merely to survive.“

The “society” I have tried to depict in The Bald Prima Donna is a society which is perfect, I mean where all social problems have been resolved. Unfortunately this has no effect upon life as it is lived. The play deals with a world where economic worries are a thing of the past, a universe without mystery, in which everything runs smoothly, for one section of humanity at least. I have no doubt that this is the world of tomorrow. In America, Russia, China, Africa, and so on, the march of science and industrialization must finally arrive at stability and social contentment.

In The Bald Prima Donna, which is a completely unserious play where I was most concerned with solving purely theatrical problems, some people have seen a satire on bourgeois society, a criticism of life in England, and heaven knows what.

Francis Fergusson suggests that the drama since Shakespeare and until the 1940’s, when The Idea of a Theater was written, is partial in its “perspectives”, each play a “fragment” of Shakespeare’s “great mirror”. Kenneth Burke suggests that there is a close relationship between the nature of a play’s setting and its sense of action (A Grammar of Motives). Taken together, these statements indicate a relationship between the partial perspective of modern drama and the naturalist settings which prevailed in that drama from the Restoration to the Second War. They also indicate a relationship between the multiple set that has become popular in the American theatre since the war and the perspectives which the dramatists are trying to achieve.

It has become common to view drama in the post-Ibsen period as falling into two broad categories. On the one hand there was a strong and persistent tradition of the A Doll's House type of play, called for convenience “social problem plays,” and on the other a number of diverse styles of drama that represent counter-realism; plays in verse, expressionism, formalistic styles as in Yeats’ plays, revivals of myths, fantastic drama, surrealism, plays of Freudian psychology, Cocteau-ish poésie de théâtre, and so on, all of which, however different from each other, have in common that they turn away both from social problems and from the dramatic style associated with them. They do not necessarily, however, renounce realism for “romance,” or for something “poetic” in the escapist sense. Neither are the themes they treat always without relevance to the social situation.

It is only since the war that Eugène Ionesco has become known in Paris, where his name is linked with those of Samuel Beckett, Jean Genêt, Jean Vauthier and others. All these writers have come to be classed as avant-garde, because they are all in reaction against some aspects of our conventional drama. But their approach in each case is highly individual.

Ionesco is certainly one of the most original, stimulating and personal among them.

He tells us that he came to write for the theatre because he had grown to detest it, and he started writing mainly for his own enjoyment. He was tired of the mean little intrigues, the superficial values and the barren preoccupation with the problems of everyday life that he found in naturalistic drama. And he was disturbed at the sight of actors struggling to create the illusion that they were the counterparts of the members of the audience.

Small ironies are the particular delight of those newspaper columns that deal in news and gossip about Broadway and its theatrical ventures; so it was natural that the most piquant tidbit of the 1955-56 season should have been the fact that Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk Garden, a play which managed at least the success of a five-month run in New York, had been turned down by every major London management before Irene Mayer Selznick decided to produce it here. The real surprise, however, was that Miss Bagnold’s lovely play should have been a success at all, even in a season unusual enough to list Giraudoux and Anouilh among its hit playwrights. The Chalk Garden is too many things that a Broadway hit is not. It is, first of all, primarily verbal, using language with a delight and a delicacy that is foreign to even our most serious playwrights.

The hallmark of Yeats’ dramatic writing is a pattern of profound complexity within a Spartan simplicity and brevity. Brevity is easily enough established: most of the plays are quite short. Even the few exceptions indicate that the full-length play was not a form Yeats found sympathetic. Of the two longest plays in the current Collected volume, one is The Countess Cathleen, Yeats's first stage-piece. This work straight forwardly dramatizes the efforts of Satan's agents to buy the souls of Irish peasants and their defeat at the hands of the great lady of the district, who sacrifices her own soul to save the peasants. The conflict is mainly external. Here is none of that spiritual and intellectual subtlety that marks the later plays; every thought and every emotion seem no more than reflections of stock peasant and Christian attitudes. Lady Cathleen gives up her soul; the sacrifice is great but conventional.

I “discovered” Giraudoux in the late nineteen-twenties when his Siegfried impressed me as an intelligent contrivance. His comment on the evils of nationalism did not exactly startle me with originality or stir me with passion, but he had an engaging way of projecting a point of view. He was suave, aloof, and ironic while other European pacifist playwrights of the period usually sputtered with anguish and worked themselves up to expressionistic frenzies of protest. He was as articulate as they were inarticulate, and as urbane as they were hysterical. The Giraudoux of my first encounter was an exquisitely civilized writer. And in contriving a tale of amnesia and mistaken identities in consequence of which a French soldier became a German after World War I, Giraudoux was plainly a “fabulist.” His favorite strategy, that of inventing or adapting a fable or myth, was also already in evidence, although Siegfried had originally been a novel by Giraudoux.