The plays of Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, and Eugène Ionesco have been performed with astonishing success in France, Germany, Scandinavia, and the English-speaking countries. This reception is all the more puzzling when one considers that the audiences concerned were amused by and applauded these plays fully aware that they could not understand what they meant or what their authors were driving at.

At first sight these plays do, indeed, confront their public with a bewildering experience, a veritable barrage of wildly irrational, often nonsensical goings-on that seem to go counter to all accepted standards of stage convention. In these plays, some of which are labeled “anti-plays,” neither the time nor the place of the action are ever clearly stated. (At the beginning of Ionesco's The Bald Soprano the clock strikes seventeen.) The characters hardly have any individuality and often even lack a name; moreover, halfway through the action they tend to change their nature completely.

There is a tendency nowadays to downgrade the thirties. The reason for this is that the prevailing mood of the thirties was what used to be called “left of center.” Beginning with the late forties— from the time the phrase about the “iron curtain” became part of the common vocabulary—our “intelligentsia” sounded the retreat. The Roosevelt administration, subjected to sharp criticism not infrequently close to slander, seemed to be in bad odor. “Left of center” might be construed as something worse than liberalism. To be “radical” implied that one might be tainted with some degree of “pink.“

A good many of the writers, artists and theatre folk in the thirties were inclined to radicalism. (Had not the Roosevelt administration sponsored the Projects for writers, artists and theatre?) In the early forties the fervor of the thirties was gradually absorbed by the pressures of the war.

Like most monuments of the past in an America obsessed with its present and future, the extant plays of the three Attic tragic dramatists are works for which everyone expresses reverence, but which few read without compulsion. It is a commonplace that fifth century Athens, along with seventeenth century Europe, produced the most sublime drama the world has ever known; yet, stage performances of Greek tragedy are extremely rare, casual reading of the plays is almost unheard of, and, even in the colleges—where the spirit of the past is kept fitfully alive—the Oresteia is sometimes taught primarly as an introduction to Mourning Becomes Electra. All things conspire to keep Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides at a respectful distance. Present-day scholarship, when it employs the (often valuable) archetypal critical techniques, tends to analyze the tragedies as mosaics of mythical patterns rather than immediate, sensual experiences; and, on Broadway, the techniques of Greek drama are exploited only to give dignity to dramatic enterprises which have little importance by themselves.

When I am asked: “Why do you write plays?” I always feel very embarrassed, and am at a loss for an answer. It seems to me sometimes that I started to write for the theatre because I hated it. I read literary works and essays, or went to the movies with pleasure. From time to time I listened to music, or visited art galleries; but for all practical purposes I never went to the theatre.

When, quite by chance, I saw a play, it was in order to accompany someone, or because I had not been able to refuse an invitation, because I had been obliged to go.

I derived no pleasure from it, and did not participate in it. The playing of the actors disturbed me: I was embarrassed for them. The situations seemed arbitrary to me. There was something false in it all, I thought.

In 1948, before writing my first play, The Bald Soprano, I had no idea of becoming a playwright. My only ambition, quite simply, was to learn English. The study of English does not necessarily lead to playwriting. On the contrary, it was because I had no luck with English that I turned to the stage. Nor did I write these plays to avenge my failure, although some have said that my Bald Soprano was a satire of the English bourgeoisie. If I had wanted to learn Italian, Russian or Turkish and not succeeded, they would have claimed, by the same token, that the play resulting from that futile effort was a satire of Italian, Russian or Turkish society. Perhaps I ought to explain. Here is what happened: nine or ten years ago, in order to learn English conversation, I bought a French-English Primer. I set to work. Conscientiously, I copied whole sentences from my Primer with the purpose of memorizing them.

Perhaps the most immediately striking quality of the plays of Michel de Ghelderode is their size—not their physical length, but their dramatic dimension. Like Strindberg, this author has written very short plays and extremely long ones. The lengths may vary, but the theme is constant, and this theme is Man, essential Man, who is revealed as both fascinating and terrifying in all his potentialities. Ghelderode represents’ men in a fashion that derives from the painters he loves so much, especially Bosch and Breughel, and from the expressionist theatre. Fundamentally, he is a romantic, and at best he creates works of powerful feeling and remarkable organic form. At worst he becomes possessed, and his work is then the prey of mounting hysteria. The authenticity of feeling in all that he writes is unquestionable. It is when this feeling so grips him that he loses aesthetic perspective that his work deteriorates.

William Gibson's The Seesaw Log is a book about the theatre in, as it were, its very essence, and it seems to me that it is as interesting as such a book could possibly be.

Now that I have set down that statement, I see that it may sound ambiguous, and that it may suggest ambivalence on my part, but I let it stand as representing the division of my feelings, not about the book but about the theatre. I was the boy who refused to wave his handkerchief to keep Tinker Bell from dying, even though it was Maude Adams who pleaded, and I despised the children who did wave, and also envied them, and was glad they could help make so moving an event by their silliness.

Some part of me is repelled by the theatre. The histrionic personality bores me (after the first half-hour, in which it is usually charming).

Professor Else explains in his preface that this book is not intended as a complete new edition of the Poetics, for he omits five and a half chapters, and does not deal with all of the textual problems. On the other hand, it is not a coherent account of Aristotle's theory; Professor Else promises to provide that in a later work. It is, in his words, “a close line-by-line analysis of Aristotle's argument,” to clear the way for a new and more accurate interpretation of the Poetics.

His method is to present a short segment of the Greek text, as emended by himself, and then his own translation into English. His translation incorporates his own interpretations of key phrases, sometimes departing very far from the literal meaning of the Greek—if one can speak of a literal meaning when translating from one language to another. He then defends both his textual emendations and his interpretations, taking on a frightening array of grammarians, editors and commentators who have been disputing over the Poetics in many languages for the last twenty centuries.

There are, as Bailly has said, no conversions in Molière. To the end, Arnolphe remains a bigot, Harpagon a miser, Jourdain a parvenu, Argan a hypochondriac. Thus Molière remains true to a rule of comedy far more important than the conventions of time, place, and unity considered the hallmarks of classical dramaturgy: the rule of the unity of character. For, conversion would take the spectator into affective and moral regions where the satiric purpose—laughter—might be compromised. A repentant Arnolphe, a disabused Jourdain, an enlightened Argan might satisfy our sense of the pathetic or the propitious, but only at the expense of our pleasure. In fact, to make us feel sorry for such characters at the end of the play or to make them share our superior view of their previous conduct would come dangerously close to identifying us with them in that previous conduct as well. In leaving these characters “unreconstructed” Molière earns our gratitude as well as our applause.

For some time now I have been trying to shrug off the hunch that contemporary audiences and dramatic critics have lost the art of seeing plays. Now this is a disturbing thought to anyone engaged in the practice of theatre. It is hard to work without some faith in the intelligence and appreciation of either critics or audiences. When you don't succeed in maintaining that faith to some degree, you feel anxious and guilty, and begin to get paranoic.

But “paranoia” occurs when imaginary dangers are identified as real; and although I am perfectly willing to regard my feelings as neurotic, I have also found that they seem to be widely shared in the profession. Something has happened to audiences and critics that fills the theatre with irritation. The mere mention of a critic's name in professional circles causes hackles to rise.

The Riddles Of Oedipus.

The central intuition of Greek tragedy, as of psychoanalysis, is that there is one, unique fact which each individual anxiously struggles to conceal from himself, and this is the very fact that is the root of his identity. Kierkegaard describes a type of despair in which the self “wills desperately to be itself—with the exception, however, of one particular, with respect to which it wills despairingly not to be itself.” Action is heroic when, in addition to displaying courage, fidelity, etc., it involves an overcoming of this automatic will to ignorance, when it reverses the process that repels the one particular and forces the actor to embrace it.

Tragedy is the willful movement toward the hidden fact by which the hero is identified. The hero does not know what his action will disclose but he is impelled to the disclosure.

Coleridge's celebrated theory of dramatic illusion was doubtless formulated to deal with the problem of Shakespeare and “the three unities.” The unities of time, place, and action so dear to the hearts of the French were, he felt, based on a doctrine of literal delusion, mistakenly supposing that the audience is deceived into taking the play as a real happening. In his Preface to his edition of Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson, on the other hand, had maintained that a theatrical audience was never deceived for a moment. The spectator understood that he was viewing a presentation of fictional events, and judged it according to its adherence to sound morality, logical probability, and general human nature. For Coleridge the truth was a reconciliation of these two extreme views: the audience of a play is neither deceived nor wholly undeceived about its reality. It is in a state of illusion, a complex attitude in part self-willed, in part created by the skill of the playwright and the actors.

By the “approach” to the drama of the Golden Age I mean a guide to its understanding. I have thought that some remarks on this subject might be useful because the drama has not yet been satisfactorily handled in any histories of Spanish literature. This is mainly due, I believe, to the fact that our conceptions of what a play is and how it should be approached are derived from our inherited notions of the classical and Shakespearian dramas, and from the realistic theatre of more modern times, whereas Spanish literature offers us a form of drama that is in many respects different from any of these.

The Spanish drama of this period is not, of course, uniform in technique; there are very great differences between the last plays of Calderón and the first of Lope.

It is a strange fact that although Hamlet has spoken with unique force to the most diverse audiences for over three centuries, and has been so incorporated into our lives that it is, as the joke goes, a patchwork of quotations, yet the majority of contemporary critics agree with T. S. Eliot in finding it essentially incoherent. Mr. Eliot, says, “Here Shakespeare tackled a problem that was too much for him… Nothing that [he] can do with the plot can express Hamlet for him.” Another critic concurs: “The spirit of the tragedy is … imperfect in its clarity of conception“; and another: “The dramatist never succeeded in finding a dramatic form that could completely express his idea“; another: “What is seen is a series of pictures, vivid, brief, isolated“; another: “No play, doubtless, is so ill constructed … and all efforts to reduce it to unity fail.”

In the theatre this is the time of prizes and awards. The less theatre we have, the more prizes are awarded. Perhaps that is our way of compensating through honor and esteem what we cannot supply in substance. It is certain that among devoted playgoers, the prizes for acting—even more than those for plays—create jubilation, discussion, even dispute. In any case, a good deal of genuine sentiment is expended on the occasion of the various awards.

The most awarded actress of the past season is unquestionably Shirley Booth. Miss Booth (Motion Picture Academy Award for her performance in Come Back, Little Sheba; Antoinette Perry Award for The Time of the Cuckoo) didn't steal it, as the French say, when they mean that someone got what was deserved.

The most surprising fact about the Phoenix Theatre in New York City is that it has survived. Between opening night on December, 1953, and the end of the third season in the spring of 1957, the managing directors, T. Edward Hambleton and Norris Houghton, compiled a cheerful deficit of some $500,000. By the 1960-61 season, if conditions do not change, there is no reason why the deficit should not touch seven figures. Yet there are some citizens, most of them Broadway backers, who continue to pour into the Phoenix money that cannot possibly be recouped, let alone multiplied.

This may sound like an indelicate or misplaced emphasis; it is actually no more than a reminder that money is the prime mover in New York theatre. It takes, we are told, $400,000 to throw a Broadway musical together.

In the plays of Tennessee Williams, as in the works of other able and prolific American dramatists, a pattern emerges that continues to appear, with minor variations, over and over again. Williams is remarkably loyal to his favorite archetypal pattern, and, for that reason, it seems to provide an indispensable key to the nature and meaning of his plays. The typical event is the meeting of a healthy, handsome man and a nervous older woman who is losing her looks. I call this couple Adonis and the Gargoyle—Adonis after the classical ideal of male beauty and the Gargoyle after the grotesque by-products of medieval architecture. The contrast between them is alone enough to enforce one major point: it is better to be a carefree man dian to be a worried, married woman. A second diought occurs: freedom is better than dependence, but, first, any examination of these plays must begin with close scrutiny of their protagonists.

Arthur Miller's introduction to his Collected Plays (New York, 1957) is one of the major documents of American theatre. It reveals an eminent playwright having struggled to understand and perfect his craft. It shows him eager to use the theatre to express his evolving ideas. It shows his strengths, and also his weaknesses.

The foremost asset Arthur Miller possesses as a playwright is his knowledge that the theatre must dedicate itself to public matters. He has an acute sense of his audience as persons to be addressed, never merely spectators to be tolerated. “A play,” he writes, “ought to make sense to common-sense people … the only challenge worth the effort is the widest one and the tallest one, which is the people themselves.”

His writing, although it usually has an axe to grind, does not attempt to startle society with new ideas. Indeed, he does not believe that the theatre can promulgate entirely new ideas, because it must gather the assent of its audience as it moves along, and this is impossible with the radically new.