Just as 1956 saw the beginnings of the theatrical renaissance in London (however false a dawn that may have proved), so it was a significant year in the provinces. Not an annus mirabilis: countrywide revolutions take longer than capital revelations. But it marked the start of a change in receptivity, a change in policy, a change in the stratification of audiences, that may well have more far-reaching effects than Osborne's coup de théâtre at the Royal Court.

What was the magic of this particular year? Quite simply, it saw the construction of the first new playhouse to be built in Britain, outside London, since the Second World War: the first civic theatre. The Belgrade, Coventry, was conceived as part of the massive redevelopment scheme enforced by German bombing, which culminated in the new Cathedral and the functional, streamlined railway station.

In a Tunisian production of L'Ecole des Femmes, Arnolphe wore a red tarboosh with a green band around it. The green band meant he had made a pilgrimage to Mecca. Arnolphe was full of dignity and refinement, rarely flew into a rage, and only on one or two occasions leveled at his servants a long black stick with a bent silver handle. For the most part he was smiling, ironical, had an air of superiority, was certain of his absolute rights. He was a merchant—an honest and experienced merchant. Agnes was his property: he had bought her as a child, was maintaining her and bringing her up to be his wife. She should be obedient. She must not know too much.

Experience as it is represented on stage—“represent” understood as the simple action —can be divided into performance, productive work, statecraft, and personal relations; theoretically, any one of these can serve as a subject for theatrical representation. In practice, however, some kinds of experience appear on stage more frequently than others. Productive work is rarely represented in theatre. Even in plays like John Gabriel Borkman or The Cherry Orchard, where the productive mentality is an important theme, we rarely see the producer actually working. Performance is shown on stage more often than productive work, but still rather infrequently. When it does occur—in a play within a play, in a marriage or funeral scene, in a boxing match—it is usually an isolated scene, and is rarely the subject of an entire play. The most common subjects for theatrical representation are without doubt statecraft and personal relations.

Recently Richard Schechner has attacked critics of the drama for relying so heavily on the views of the Cambridge school of comparative anthropology, at a time when their evidence for the ritual origins of Greek drama is viewed skeptically by most classical scholars [Approaches to Theory/Criticism, T32]. Whether right or not, he states, “origin theories, I think, are irrelevant to studying theatre,” and in place of a fruitless search for the origins of drama, he puts forward a critical approach of his own. The subject is an important one. But it seems to me that Schechner's discussion of the ritual question rests on a narrow, possibly a too academic, approach and misses its significance, while his own system of analysis is likely to lead us further from a sensitive appreciation of the drama than the theories it is intended to supersede.

Only recently has the new drama begun to catch up with John Whiting, who if he were alive would now be almost fifty. He was out of sympathy with the social commitment of the early days. Whiting was not one of the cultural knight-errants who crusaded for working-class culture and against the bomb; rather, he belonged instinctively to the older tradition of the intellectual elite, writing difficult plays for a discriminating audience—an audience with which he never truly made contact, and which perhaps had long ceased to exist.

Yet his lifelong preoccupations with the nature of violence and of personal responsibility foreshadowed the concern of a younger generation of dramatists with issues more elemental than the kitchen sink.

Since we weren't casting any particular play and therefore weren't on the lookout for any types, and since our main concern was to find actors who were open, adaptable, and ready to rush in where rigid pros fear to tread, it was necessary to devise a completely new audition technique. I decided to do away with those murky soliloquies where a single actor pulsating with suppressed but crippling hysteria gets up and reels off the same speech he has been carting around since drama school.

The artistic failure of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Vietnam documentary US has been largely obscured by the controversies it has wittingly and unwittingly aroused. In London, at the present time, it is possible to convert almost any lukewarm entertainment into a box-office success by stirring it in the press. In the case of US, one had a subject which was already incendiary, and so it was relatively simple to work up the requisite hoopla. This is unfortunate whenever it happens, because it gives an audience the added difficulty of having to disentangle legitimate intentions and actual results from distortions perpetrated by the mass media. But in this case, Peter Brook’s production, devised collectively by the Company, is no innocent victim of circumstances. It seemed pre-disposed to vulgarization; almost intended for tabloid exploitation.