That future historians of English drama will describe the period since 1956 as an era of Brechtian influence is quite possible. If so, the phenomenon will be an illustration of the quirks and ironies of cultural diffusion between nations: for that Brechtian era had a great deal of talk and discussion about Brecht and what he was thought to stand for, but few valid productions of Brecht, little genuine knowledge about Brecht, and hence little evidence of any influence of Brecht's actual work and thought. The “Brechtian” era in England stood under the aegis not of Brecht himself but of various second-hand ideas and concepts about Brecht, an image of Brecht created from misunderstandings and misconceptions.

A critic of modern dramaturgy with a bent for Brecht and O'Casey, the TNP and the Berliner Ensemble, Morgan and Frazer, Marx and Bloch, has one outstanding difficulty to come to terms with, if he is to be sincere to his trade and himself: Samuel Beckett. If the chief measure of a major dramatist is a happy union of relevance and consistency of dramatic vision, there is little doubt that in our cultural circle—middle and western Europe, based on the Mediterranean, with the massive wings of the Soviet Union and North America—the two major dramatists since World War II are Brecht and Beckett. Yet it is rare for a critic devoted to Beckett seriously and knowledgeably to face Brecht. I can think of only one such comprehensive effort—Martin Esslin's—and that one, to my mind, is finally unconvincing. Conversely, however, I can think of no critic of the Brechtian bent who has attempted a comprehensive study of Beckett.

The film experience is not necessarily a single rectangle of light and shadow that flickers at one end of a darkened room. Call this “movies” or “cinema”—that archetypal dream world in which the spectator, seated in a near-foetal position, attempts to ignore the physical space, the other spectators, the projector's shifting beam, to concentrate on the images and the sounds that accompany them. Of course, the movies are a film experience—and a theatre experience—but the use of motion pictures is not so limited, and theatre is just beginning to realize the possibilities inherent in film.

For many years, motion pictures have been used as elements in staged drama—epic and “total” theatre, the “living newspaper,” etc. In 1941, Robert Edmund Jones foresaw “in the simultaneous use of the living actor and the talking picture…a wholly new theatrical art, whose possibilities are as infinite as those of speech itself.”

On the southern coast of India, the three-hundred-year-old Kathakali ritual theatre still flourishes, a mixture of dance and pantomime, religious inspiration and mythological tradition. This essay is neither an aesthetic analysis of Kathakali nor a study of its origins or its relationship to other forms of Indian theatre, for my main purpose in studying Kathakali was to acquaint myself with a specific technique and assess the possibilities of adapting it for the training of European actors.

According to the Kali chronogram Grahya Stutirgathaih, the gods made important contributions to the Indian theatre. Krishna appeared in Kalikut in 1657. He met a high priest and gave him a peacock feather; to celebrate this extraordinary event, the Krishnattam was created. It was a religious dance drama which glorified Krishna's exploits and the prowess of his Gopies. The spectacle soon became famous all through the state of Malabar.

The hardest literary game to play is that of typicality, choosing the work that most represents a period. Asked to make such a choice, to put my finger on the 1930's play, I would reach into the repertory open-handed, my fingers spread wide so that I could come down on more than one play. On Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing! (1935) as the exemplary social play with its urban idiom and its amorphous Leftist solution. On Three Men on a Horse (1935), in which John Cecil Holm and George Abbott caught a tone of knowing innocence and a tempo of word and movement that marked much of the comedy of the decade. Perhaps on On Borrowed Time (1938), the play that Paul Osborn made from Lawrence Edward Watkin's novel, openly stuffed with the throat-lumping sentimentality that also lurks behind the seriousness of Awake and Sing! and the toughness of Three Men on a Horse.

Although the Soviet theatre is gigantic in extent and past achievements, its exact lineaments are often hard to discern from the West. Because of a distance which is linguistic, cultural, and political as well as geographical, balanced news does not filter through to us with any regularity; for many the Russian theatre is still summed up by one man—Stanislavski. Others are impressed by the Soviet system of permanent theatre companies but are unaware of their disadvantages and the pressures to which they are subject. Except on a few festival occasions, such as Edinburgh, London's “World Theatre Season,” or Aix-en-Provence, the theatre is not a very exportable commodity, and on the rare tours by Soviet theatre companies outside Eastern Europe, critical reaction has usually differed sharply.

Government-subsidized drama is not exactly new to Britain. The idea of a National Theatre dates back to the 1840's, and from the early days of the Second World War a steady trickle of Treasury money has gone to the theatre. The wartime organization that controlled these grants (the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts) and its present successor (the Arts Council) both gave their main attention to helping worthy companies in the provinces; their funds were meagre. What has happened in the past six years is that the claims of London have at last been recognized and there is now a good deal more money than there used to be. These two things have transfigured the theatrical landscape.

Late in Robert Lowell's Benito Cereno, Captain Amasa Delano interrupts a conversation with his bosun, Perkins, to say, “I seem to have been dreaming … I dreamed someone was trying to kill me.” Delano never leaves the stage, there is no time for him to actually fall asleep and dream, and yet the statement is certainly not descriptive of a daydream. During rehearsals of my production at Tulane we attempted to justify the moment as best we could. There was a long pause before the line while Perkins checked the approach of their own ship to the San Domingo. William Wolak, playing Delano, did the most he could with the moment, but was never really comfortable in it. I knew he was uncomfortable, but could not offer a satisfactory solution.

The facts are well enough known. On April 2, 1956, a new company began a term of management at the Royal Court Theatre, London. It called itself the English Stage Company, and announced its intentions of becoming a writer's theatre, playing new English plays and contemporary classics from abroad in repertory. This sounded brave and worthy, though enough similarly brave and worthy ventures had foundered in the years since the war for the few interested people to have no great confidence in the new company's survival. The first repertory season was to consist of five productions: first a play by the novelist Angus Wilson, The Mulberry Tree, which had already been tried out at Bristol, then the first British production of The Crucible, then Look Back in Anger, a new play by a young actor, then a double bill of poetic dramas about Don Juan by one of the company's directors, Ronald Duncan, and finally Nigel Dennis's adaptation of his novel Cards of Identity.

Artistic creation always manifested itself to me as hunger. I acknowledged it with a certain satisfaction, but during my conscious life I never asked myself what caused this craving. In the last few years the hunger has diminished and been transformed into something else; now I am anxious to find out what the reasons for it were. I have an early childhood memory of my desire to show off achievements: proficiency in drawing, playing ball, the first swimstrokes. I had a strong need to draw the grownups' attention to these signs of my presence in the external world. I never felt that people took enough interest in me. When reality was no longer sufficient, I started to invent things; I entertained my friends with tremendous stories of my secret exploits. They were embarrassing lies, which failed hopelessly when confronted with the level-headed scepticism of the world around me.