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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.