That's typical Pinter dialogue. The form is standard English, but the conversation doesn't get anywhere. Davies can see what Aston is doing, but Aston is careful not to tell Davies any more than what he can see. Sometimes, as in A Slight Ache or The Collection, the whole play is built around non-exchange of information. Pinter's goal in these plays is to mystify us. He does it through a special brand of dramatic irony in which both character and audience are unable to solve basic riddles. The game is called “put on,” and it is Pinter's favorite. Edward is put on by the Matchseller, James is put on by Stella and Bill. Davies is put on by Mick and Aston. Stanley is put on by McCann and Goldberg. None of these victims knows what the others intend for them; nor are they able to find out until it is too late.

Neglect alone would be sufficient excuse for writing about Firmin Gémier. Remembered hazily as the creator of the role of King Ubu and as the founder of France's Théâtre National Populaire, Gémier remains for most of us only a name. There are reasons for this. The history of French theatre in the twentieth century lends itself easily to schematic ideas of “progress,” and Gémier refuses to fall in line. Our “march-of-theatre” allows Antoine to pass a torch to Lugné-Poe, followed by Copeau, the Cartel de Quatre, Barrault, Vilar.

O'Neill was alive when The Emperor Jones was staged. And a good thing too. What if the director had been on his own? Perhaps he would have read the descriptions of Jones' visions and decided that these “thoughts” couldn't be staged. This did not happen to The Emperor Jones, but it is exactly what happened to Hughie, which was published and produced posthumously. O'Neill was not there to oversee the staging and the result was two weird productions, one in Stockholm and the other on Broadway.

Hughie is very much like Jones in structure, a monologue counterpointed by the visions of the title character. With Jones, O'Neill made sure that the visions were presented in pantomime, like the flowing images of silent film.

Eliot, speaking of Jonson, said that poetry dealing with the surface of life requires great deliberateness and simplicity of effect. Pinter is a poet of the surface. His manipulation of performance conventions suggests the “comedy of manners” in its dependence on standard theatrical devices and tightly constructed exploitation of speech and gesture patterns, disabused of conscious causality and motivation data. He differs radically from most comic theatre in two important respects: his plays do not aim (or pretend) to reflect or represent society in a typical, satiric, or parodic way; and he effectively eliminates plot as even a structural element (which is one of his similarities to Beckett).

Lowell the dramatist matches Lowell the poet, and his manner is unabashedly theatrical. The Old Glory, taut and laconic, the center of gravity less in words than in the action behind them, achieves in its three plays a classic fusion of style and substance, projecting an impersonal vision in tones of the gravest personal authority. Part of the spell is no doubt Lowell's gift, familiar from Imitations, of being past and present, self and other, here and there, all at once. He set out to dramatize a group of tales by Melville and Hawthorne and their voices sounded through him. For a moment Lowell made the old voices his own. Under the direction of Jonathan Miller at the American Place two years ago, it was immediately evident that the ground of this necromancy was a capacity for suffering the issues of the moral life at its most perplexing, for following them out to the end.

Ten years after Look Back in Anger, what has the English theatre got? In the order that it impinges upon my consciousness at the moment, I would make up the list as follows:

1. 1. The high esteem of America and the continent.

2. 2. Two well-honed, semi-permanent companies: the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare.

3. 3. Three major playwrights: John Osborne, Harold Pinter, and John Arden.

4. 4. A host of lesser lights ranging from the steady beams of Wesker and Bolt to the firefly-flickerings of Campton and Simpson.

5. 5. A chrestomathy of spot-on criticism by one drama critic: Tynan.

6. 6. Jennie Lee, recently-appointed Minister of Culture responsible for drumming the arts into the national consciousness, and directly responsible for a sizeable increase in the Arts Council appropriation.

7. 7. A few murmurings in the provinces; mostly audible at Nottingham and Stoke-on-Trent, but as yet nothing to write home about.