Category Archives: On criticism

From the archives: Jonathan Kalb’s advice to the young critic

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As I hitch up my pants and swing into the critical saddle again, I’m musing about what kind of value my own reviews and essays might offer (aside from my own prejudices, that is) that may not be found anywhere else. At present, the theatrical blogosphere appears to be in a period of transition, and as an old-schooler of the first generation who sees the blog as an independent individual voice in the critical arena, I’m seeking justification for my continued efforts. I do find it here and there.

In 2011 I found a little of it in Jonathan Kalb’s 2002/2003 essay “Advice to the Young Critic,” which first appeared in Yale’s Theater magazine and was subsequently collected in Play by Play. I described this finding in the below post.

In May 2011 Elizabeth Hunter Spreen was awarded a master’s degree at San Jose State University for “The New Playgoer’s Club: The Emergent Theater Weblog Culture and the Practice of Theater Criticism.” Ms. Spreen, who herself runs the Ghost Light Web log, focused specifically on the “Bloggers’ Nights” of a few years ago which now seem to have been suspended, but in analyzing his period of theatrosphere history she makes several compelling points, referencing old friends both foreign and domestic. I participated only briefly and rather controversially in these events and am glad to let Ms. Spreen tell you about this. She offers considerable food for thought about the “crisis” in contemporary dramatic criticism in the United States, which is also suggested by the 2008 publication of Bert Cardullo’s American Drama/Critics: Writings and Readings. According to the publisher, “The thesis of Americam Drama/Critics is also that the decline of American drama in the late twentieth to early twenty-first century is paralleled by, and even attributable to, the decline or disappearance of American dramatic criticism” — a thesis that some will find arguable, others compelling.

I haven’t read Mr. Cardullo’s book so can’t judge whether his thesis is well-founded. But I have been reading over the past couple of days “The Death (and Life) of American Theater Criticism: Advice to the Young Critic,” a speech that Jonathan Kalb gave to students at Barnard College and New York University in Fall 2002 and was subsequently published in the Winter 2003 issue of Yale’s Theater magazine; it also appears in his book Play by Play. As it happens, Mr. Kalb delivered his lecture just a year before I launched this blog and just shortly before he launched his own online journal, Hot Review. It is an inspiring and informative speech and I do recommend it (and if anyone can track down Stanley Kauffmann’s 1967 “Drama on the Times” essay, which Mr. Kalb calls “the most important piece written about theater criticism in America” and was published in the New American Review #1, let me know: it’s a tough one to find).

Now, in 2011, are things much different than they were in 2003? Before taking up the blogosphere, one can answer for the print media: yes, they are, and they are worse. When Mr. Kalb delivered his speech in 2002, he noted that there were still a “handful” of “real critics” working in the daily and weekly print media: Michael Feingold at the Village Voice, Robert Brustein at the New Republic, John Heilpern at the New York Observer — “more names could be added,” he admits, but “The point is … that no matter what names I added, this would be a small, embattled, and aging group.” Feingold is still at the Voice, but Heilpern left the Observer some years ago; Brustein writes only on rare occasions for the New Republic. Those critical voices who have taken their place have done so as the print medium itself has been evolving in a more consumerist, post-capitalist direction, and those voices reflect that direction too. Among Mr. Kalb’s nine items of advice for the young critic is “Ground Your Work in Knowledge, Not Style,” and it’s worth quoting at length here because it hits home:

Some of you are no doubt wondering at this point, “What about fun? Don’t delight, enjoyment, and entertainment come into the equation at all?” Absolutely. I, for one, get more pure enjoyment out of good theater than I do from most other pursuits, and I try to convey that in my writing. Recently, I had a medical condition that paralyzed half my face for months, and when I went to see Edward Albee’s The Goat I laughed so hard at one joke that a spasm developed in my deadened cheek and jump-started my healing. I tell you this not just to amuse you, however, but to illustrate where the majority of pseudocritics begin and end their ruminations: with stories about themselves and their deep feelings that are, at best, precritical. So far, I’ve told you nothing critical about Edward Albee; I’ve told you about my cheek, a subject hard to construe as momentous or urgent, no matter how amusing you may find it. The point is, the pleasure of deep feeling never needs defending in the United States; the pleasure of good thinking always does.

Here’s a practical test you might apply: pick up any newspaper or magazine review and read it with an eye to whether it could be transferred to the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times without jarring anyone’s sensibilities. If the answer is yes, then you have discovered a stylist in critic’s clothing. A stylist is someone who thinks the world is all attitude, and that any hip point of view and mode of expression ought to apply equally to clothing, jewelry, furniture, kitchenware, food, bands, clubs, and, oh yes, dramatic masterpieces. Reflexive feeling is all, reflection is nil, and most of the time the first-person pronoun is a sort of verbal shill, avoiding responsibility while seeming to accept it (“this is just my opinion”). To place masterpieces in such a person’s hands is like leaving a national forest in the care of a theme-park owner. A stylist is a caretaker of recycled culture, a blind monster that feeds on itself. A critic is an independent human being with open eyes, who knows what and where to eat.

At the moment the three print publications of most influence in New York theatre are The New York Times, Time Out New York, and the Village Voice, approximately in that order, and they have evolved over the past decade as well. The Voice, with Feingold, we can take as read; I’m not sure what The Village Voice is any more; I’m not sure that The Village Voice knows what The Village Voice is any more. And the Times?  The tone and quality of the Sunday Styles section of the Times that Mr. Kalb references have slowly spread to the rest of the paper, manifesting in lifestyle sections like “Home” and “Dining” that appear each day in the Times (and sometimes two of these a day), so that the Arts section and these new Style sections have become almost indistinguishable. In the public relations project to make the paper more a trendy consumer-interest guide (evidenced by those commercials a few years ago in which upper-middle-class readers described their favorite sections of the Sunday Times), the New York Times has become more of a “lifestyle” newspaper than … well, than a “news” newspaper. [1] One needn’t point to more than the puffy interviews with young playwrights and detailed diaries of drama critics’ junkets to London and Washington to demonstrate that the theatre pages remain in the hands of the “stylists” Kalb describes; and the regular assignment of downtown and fringe theatre reviews to freelancers and “theatre nerds” slumming from their regular beats doesn’t bode well for the future.

The same tone and style affects the arts coverage in Time Out New York as well. TONY still exists — as it has always existed — as a listings magazine, a glossy calendar-of-events, but the tone that crosses over all its coverage of the arts participates in the same trendy consumerism and sexual/materialistic titillation that sells products in ordinary advertising, leading to cover stories like “New York’s Top 10 Restaurants for Coprophiles!” (My readers will know what a dictionary is and can look it up.) Some New York drama reviewers and critics (like myself) have written for both, suggesting that far from being an alternative to Times coverage, Time Out New York theatre coverage is just a snarkier extension of it.

The theatre blogosphere in those early years had to potential to provide a genuine alternative. Has it done so? Again, the answer is no. As the “Bloggers’ Nights” that Ms. Spreen investigates suggest, early on bloggers were ghettoized and, in the worst cases, demonstrated the same concern with “style” as the print medium. And they ghettoized themselves: if anything, the producers who went along with these “Bloggers’ Nights” further eviscerated the blogosphere from the print world, inviting them to individual events rather than sending invitations to press openings, underscoring the amateur status of these writers; the bloggers themselves cooperated with this marginalization. When the nights themselves failed to produce the desired publicity stir for these productions, they were phased out.

Many bloggers now have moved to other social media like Twitter and Facebook, which in 140-character tweets and status updates are more amenable to the desire to become what Kalb describes in his speech as “blurb whores”:

Ours is the era of the “blurb whore,” the pseudoreviewer bribed with perks to say flattering things that can be quoted in ads. This movie-world creature is admittedly rare in the humbler environs of the theater, but its cynical spirit pervades the theater field as well. The corruption of the annual theater awards systems, the shameless journalistic fawning over productions with large budgets, the cozy relationships between high-profile critics and stars: opinions are all clearly for sale, so who can care deeply about anyone’s thoughts? “Whatever,” “Get over it,” “Not even” — all these generational catchphrases capture the essence of the leveling effect, which, curiously enough, was already apparent to Horkheimer and Adorno in the 1940s. “The cult of celebrities,” they wrote, “has a built-in social mechanism to level down everyone who stands out in any way. The stars are simply a pattern round which the world-embracing garment is cut — a pattern to be followed by the shears of legal and economic justice with which the last projecting ends of thread are cut away.”

Less apparent than this is the devastation this causes to the writing and dissemination of longer-form dramatic criticism, a lack which is bewailed by those who want to appear concerned about this criticism but which continues to go unmet, even by those who gnash their teeth over it. The blogosphere — which, as part of the World Wide Web, is open to all, instead of corporate entities Twitter and Facebook, to which you have to subscribe and give up considerable privacy in the process — has no 140-character limit, and blog posts do not disappear down the bottom of a long column of 14- and 15-word brainfarts. It’s just possible, I suppose, that somebody out there is Tweeting, 140 letters at a time, the next Theatre of Revolt. But as someone who doesn’t have the time to keep up with the rapid never-ending stream, I don’t know about it. In addition, the theatrical blogosphere is far more combative than the pages of print journalism as a matter of course, as Miriam Gillinson writes in the Guardian even today — an arena of incendiary rhetorical bombast that many, like myself, have little sympathy for, not least because it further undermines the validity of the medium for thoughtful discourse.

I noted a few weeks ago that the third generation of the theatrical blogosphere is an institutional affair, more self-justifying and self-rationalizing than even the most egocentric individual blogger, and will leave that sleeping dog where it lies. As I enter my ninth year of writing Superfluities Redux, I do so without the expectation that any one writer — or any one medium — will be able to revolutionize the genre of drama criticism. The faults are more endemic and systematic than that. As fragmented and disparate as these entries over the past eight years may appear, I believe that certain threads of thought become evident — and had I the time to draw these out even further, I would be able to weave them into a sturdier fabric. After many years of assiduous theatre going, I can’t be as indiscriminate as I used to be with my time (not that I’m missing much — as Mr. Kalb says, “95 percent of what is produced in New York … deserves the obscurity in which it wallows, or else enjoys a notoriety it hasn’t earned”: a cruel estimate but not, in my experience, inaccurate). As it is I can only suggest. “Theater criticism is an art (some might call it a vice) I have practiced for twenty-two years,” Mr. Kalb noted at the start of his lecture nearly ten years ago. For me, formally, it hasn’t even been a decade — eight years is a mere start. But for some of us it is a life indeed.

Footnotes
  1. About ten years ago, a joke circulated that a Times editor proposed another new section, one which would include stories about recent events around the world and the United States, politics and wars, reported objectively, accurately, without opinion and with context. This section, he wryly suggested, could be called “News.” [↩]

From the archives: The critic as thinker

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theatreTo round out this week’s essays and links on criticism, and at the risk of boring Cameron Woodhead further (at least when there’s a hoary, 50-year-old Sondheim musical comedy to review), I republish below a 2007 symposium, “The critic as thinker,” that I originally posted here on 10 June 2011. Introductory remarks and the video below the rule. In addition, Jana Perkovic continues her survey (with damned statistics) of the Australian critical landscape here; much of what she says rings true for the US scene as well.

Although there is no substitute for reading the plays themselves, you can learn just about all you need to know about twentieth-century drama from four books: Eric Bentley’s The Playwright as Thinker, Robert Brustein’s The Theatre of Revolt, Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd, and Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary. These are the books that, as I read them during my teen years, encouraged me as both dramatist and critic. Reading them, you will also become familiar with the best drama criticism of the century: lucid, engaged writing about theatre and drama as an art form rather than as mere commodity, vastly informed by a knowledge and understanding of culture and other artistic disciplines. It’s safe to say that if you do not know these books, you do not know the modern theatre, nor do you know the best of its criticism.

On the eve of the Tonys, it’s a pleasure to be able to offer “The Critic as Thinker,” a Philoctetes Center symposium from 27 October 2007, that features two of these fine critics, Eric Bentley and Robert Brustein, as well as Stanley Kauffmann, as they survey both their own careers and the changing landscape of theatre in the post-war era. Roger Copeland moderates the discussion, which traverses a wide variety of topics, including the original reception of The Playwright as Thinker, the newspaper review as consumer guide, the disappearance of the middle-brow play (this to my mind is alive and well, but let it pass), Marxist politics, and the alleged responsibility of Frank Rich for the decline of American theatre. The program also features a remarkable question-and-answer session with Jonathan Kalb, editor of Hot Review and author of The Theatre of Heiner Müller and Beckett in Performance, who argues passionately and persuasively for a reconstruction of a critical culture, as well as a possible home for it in the electronic media of the blogosphere (now that the 140-character Twitter feed and only slightly lengthier Facebook status line have all but displaced the blogosphere, however, I wonder what he’d say to this today); former Brustein student and Broadway producer (now chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts) Rocco Landesman, who valiantly and bravely attempts to defend the status quo; and critic Randy Gener. Those of you who care about money and entertainment will spend two hours this Sunday night watching the Tony Awards; those of you who care about theatre as an art will watch the below instead.

Other places

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Home page at Guerrilla Semiotics.

Home page at Guerrilla Semiotics.

It’s Old Home Week in the comments section of my post “Theatre blogosphere dead; no services planned” from Tuesday (which, curiously, garnered even more page views than Monday’s post, the previous champion). A few others have appropriately longer-form responses, the most thoughtful of these being Jana Perkovic’s essay at her blog Guerrilla Semiotics. She takes a long view of the ways that the critical blogosphere affected theatre in Melbourne; she writes:

As long as criticism is understood as a practice external to the the arts, critics will be subjected to the same precarious work conditions, same reliance (for both income and professional standards) on a completely extraneous industry, and the critical output of the country will remain of low volume, and abysmal quality. And, as long as writing criticism is seen as hurting one’s standing within the arts industry, the ability of criticism to attract the most educated, insightful, and articulate voices will be further compromised. Theatre criticism in a country cannot function entirely as a kamikaze operation.

The future of criticism is almost certainly not in full-time employment, and very definitely not in writing for newspapers and magazines. It is also not in microblogging, not on Twitter, not in “vox populi”-style surveys, and definitely not in different aggregators and miscellaneous arts portals that have sprung up in recent years, combining advertising revenue with no writers’ fees, and producing criticism no longer or better than the average newspaper. Criticism requires long form, a critical culture requires dialogue. …

The only credible future vision we have right now is of quality criticism as a sometimes-job or part-time job, done by people who receive the majority of their income somewhere else, people not writing criticism for the glory and influence (a la Kenneth Tynan), but out of a sense of responsibility towards the theatre sector, and out of writerly joy. If it exists, it will be funded by a patchwork of different sources, public and private — or it will continue to be funded by self-exploitation.

That’s from the conclusion of the essay, and it’s important to see how Ms. Perkovic gets there from its beginning. You can read the whole post here.

In the meantime, Aleks Sierz (The Theatre of Martin Crimp) recently interviewed the author of In the Republic of Happiness, Crimp’s new play at the Royal Court, in “Martin Crimp in the Republic of Satire” for the Arts Desk. Sierz’s review of the show, published just this morning, is here.

From the archives: B is for Billington

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Michael Billington.

Michael Billington.

When Michael Billington began his “A to Z of modern drama” series for the Guardian late last year, he began with a look at Absurdism. I responded shortly after it was posted; the below originally appeared here on 15 December 2011.

The Guardian recently launched a welcome series called “Michael Billington’s A to Z of modern drama” with Billington’s comments on Martin Esslin’s 1961 book The Theatre of the Absurd. “Absurdism” was perhaps the first great -ism of postwar theatre and drama after “Social Realism” (“Postmodernism” might be the next), and Esslin’s book is of course of more historical interest now than it was then — inevitable for a work a half-century old. But I think Mr. Billington goes too far when he says that “while absurdism was a fascinating historical phenomenon, it now looks increasingly irrelevant.” I perceive here something of a disconnect between form and content; the formal qualities of the absurd theatre were at any rate not new in 1961, but were borrowed primarily from the pre-war forms of Dada and surrealism as well as more varied historical antecedents, as the chapter “The Tradition of the Absurd” makes abundantly clear. It is this content — the umbrella concept of absurdist philosophy as identified by Esslin in a variety of writers — that Mr. Billington seems to find irrelevant.

In defining the concept, Mr. Billington cites Ionesco’s “succinct, brutal” formulation: “Cut off from his religious, metaphysical and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless.” With only a little stretching, M. Ionesco’s thematic statement takes in a far greater swathe of drama than post-war continental theatre and accommodates plays as old as Oedipus and King Lear, and I doubt that anyone, even Mr. Billington, would argue that either of these tragedies can be considered irrelevant even now. They’re certainly staged frequently enough, and they quite readily draw large audiences: there have been three productions of King Lear alone in the past two years here in New York, so the play must seem relevant to those spectators.

I’ll concede the Guardian critic’s point that capital-a Absurdism has its creakers if he’ll concede that capital-r Realism has its creakers too, even capital-s Social Realism — or, for that matter, State-of-the-Nation-ism. True, nobody has much interest today in Adamov and Mrozek, but social realist plays by Sidney Howard and John Galsworthy haven’t stood the test of time either, except perhaps as quaint curiosities of by-gone days. And it’s also true that Esslin “ropes in many writers who belong to a different tradition,” though in writing about Pinter and Albee Mr. Billington makes it clear that they really don’t belong to any tradition except their own (as do most of the other Absurdists, Vaclav Havel, the future president of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, especially). This would be damning, though just faintly, if Esslin hadn’t already acknowledged and responded to Mr. Billington’s criticism in his 2001 foreword to the third edition of his book (a later edition than Mr. Billington’s dog-eared copy) — a pre-emptive strike, in a way, from beyond the grave:

In fact, anyone who actually has read it [Esslin's being a bit unfair; Mr. Billington has read it several times I'm sure] will know that the book tries to avoid rigid definitions and interpretations. … The category suggested by the book’s title had merely been intended to draw attention to certain features the works discussed had in common, different and diverse as they were; certain techniques in the handling of exposition, delineation of character, use of dream and hallucination, etc.: in fact, elements that arose from the zeitgeist, the atmosphere of the time, rather than from deliberate theoretical considerations. … [The book's main function in 2001] now becomes, I believe, to provide an example of how, in its time, an emergent new tendency was recognized, described, discussed, located within a tradition as an attempt to present it to … a largely uncomprehending public. It thus simply stands for itself, a milestone on the long road along which the art of drama travels through history … [1]

In declaring Absurdism moribund, though, Mr. Billington slips through his own conception of an instrumental and social dramatic practice. This is especially clear in the conclusion of his essay:

Absurdism was important in its day. But perhaps we now demand more from drama than a cry of anguish at the absurdity of the human condition. We live in a world confronted by economic recession, social unrest, international terrorism and climate change. And, while dramatists are perfectly free to react to those events in any way they choose, all the evidence suggests that audiences are hungry for information and enlightenment. … Don’t get me wrong. I’d be delighted to see our theatre explore some of the lesser-known absurdist works …  But I think we should see absurdism, a few acknowledged masterpieces aside, for what it is: a movement that has lost its momentum and one that is of little help in explaining to us the complexities of today’s world.

Audiences may be hungry for information and enlightenment, but Mr. Billington cites no authority for this statement — when haven’t audiences been that way, after all? And these days there are many more, better places to get this information about a world confronting all these evils. Theatre and drama need not offer the same information and enlightenment that can be found in the newspapers or non-fiction books (at a fraction of the cost, too), and it may be in fact one of the most inefficient and unreliable sources of that information.

I’m afraid I really don’t have much more of a response to this statement, because I myself have no idea what audiences are hungry for. But I do know that when I go to the theatre, I seek not information and enlightenment, but experience and new consciousness of the human condition — an experience and consciousness that newspapers, books, films, music, and even social realist drama can’t provide. After all, both Hamlet and Oedipus got all the information and enlightenment they were searching for, and look where that got them. Darkly, I consider that in this 21st century, after all the social and political progressiveness of the last 300 years, the status of “a world confronted by economic recession, social unrest, international terrorism and climate change” leads me to no other conclusion than that “Cut off from his religious, metaphysical and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless.” Far from irrelevant, the Absurdist vision may tell us more about our condition now than it did fifty years ago.

Footnotes
  1. Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, Third Edition. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2001, pp. 12-13. [↩]

The two traditions of modern drama

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Eric Bentley.

There appears to be something of a revival of good old Chekhovian Realism at the moment in New York, both in its original Russian and Clifford Odetsian forms. In that spirit, I repost below “The Two Traditions of Modern Drama,” first published here on 13 June 2011. (Because he is prominently mentioned in the post below, I take this opportunity to point to Eric Bentley’s acceptance speech for the 2006 Thalia Prize from the International Association of Theatre Critics, published at Hot Review. Even at 90, Bentley could bite: “Newspapers want their drama critics taken more seriously, as if they were experts to be envied their expertise, or even prophets to be revered. And so for this, as for other reasons, a certain falsity enters into newspaper criticism. It is hard for it to be on the level, and it usually isn’t. To make matters worse, it adapts itself, often, to the hit-and-flop mentality of commercial theater. To help a show succeed the poor critic feels he has to exaggerate his enthusiasm. To force it to close on Saturday night he has to think up the devastating one-liner. It is true that such a one-liner can be truly witty. More often, though, it sounds forced and affected and, produced year after year by the same critic, conveys only a sense of a critic’s dyspepsia, or even misanthropy.”)

Our conception of realism needs to be broad and political, free from aesthetic restrictions and independent of convention. Realist means: laying bare society’s causal network / showing up the dominant viewpoint as the viewpoint of the dominators / writing from the standpoint of the class which has prepared the broadest solutions for the most pressing problems afflicting human society / emphasizing the dynamics of development / concrete and so as to encourage abstraction. … One cannot decide if a work is realist or not by finding out whether it resembles existing, reputedly realist works which must be counted realist for their time. In each individual case the picture given of life must be compared, not with another picture, but with the actual life portrayed.
Bertolt Brecht
“The Popular and the Realistic” (1938)
Brecht on Theatre, pp.109, 112

Nothing is more real than nothing.
Samuel Beckett
Malone Dies (1951)

“I am going to suggest that the dominant mode of the nineteenth century — perhaps even of the twentieth — is naturalism, and that this is important for interpreting modern drama,” Eric Bentley wrote in the first chapter of The Playwright as Thinker, published in 1946.  [1] “What is not so obvious,” he goes on, “is that the triumph of naturalism is a positive achievement.” Bentley warns of the slipperiness of literary categories such as naturalism and realism before offering an operative definition of naturalism itself: “an increasing closeness to objective facts; special techniques for their reproduction; an empiricist outlook.” [2] If it is possible to say that, as Bentley also says, “To search out all the Naturalism in modern drama we would have to look almost everywhere,” then it may be best to shift the semantic ground somewhat from the literary to the philosophical and ask similarly, in the wake of the drama of the second half of the twentieth century, “What is real?”

Because Bentley is right, and he is right because it is the theatre which is the art form most predominantly concerned with the real, especially as a mode of aesthetic presentation: space, time and causality are the ground for its being, in all three dimensions for space, in the irreversible and unshatterable duration for time and in the function of narrative and character as modal engines for the dramatic and theatrical work itself. No other discipline concerns itself with all three simultaneously. Sculpture may be a three-dimensional mode, but it is frozen in the moment of its creation; film may stand as a work in time, but only in two-dimensions (even the recent revival of three-dimensional technologies cannot hide the fact that the projected image itself remains two-dimensional), and filmic time and location too are famously at the mercy of the editor; in the novel, narrative, character and language drive the work, but its reception in the mind of the reader is conceptual, not physical, at least not explicitly. Whether naturalistic or expressionistic, narrative or lyrical, all theatre, by this light, is real.

That use of the word “real,” in the aftermath of Baudrillard and Debord, may be more fraught with peril than even the words “realism” or “naturalism.” Dr. Johnson famously refuted the Idealism of Kant and Berkeley by kicking a rock, and today he’d no doubt save a few kicks for French philosophers as well. But even Schopenhauer said that it was folly to deny the reality of Dr. Johnson’s rock; it was not that with which he or metaphysics was concerned. Time, space and causality are of course the categories necessary to the experience of the world as representation; without these, experience is not possible. This is the gift of Kant to human understanding, a gift most fully recognized by Schopenhauer (along with the notion of a Thing-in-itself that lies behind or beyond the world conditioned by those categories). The German term Vorstellung, which has such a central place of importance in the title of Schopenhauer’s primary work, signifies not only “idea” or “representation” but, helpfully, “performance” as well, theatrical performance in particular. As the modern drama progressed in the twentieth century, these categories became not only the condition of the drama and the theatre, but also the subject and content of that drama and theatre.

Realism’s primary enemy in the twentieth century, Bentley argues, was Expressionism; but by the above lights both Expressionism and Naturalism (and expressionism and naturalism, or anti-naturalism and naturalism, as Bentley would more precisely have it) in the theatre are equally real. The challenge to dramatists in the late twentieth century was the exploration of this reality from both the Brechtian and Beckettian perspectives quoted above. The materialist Brecht might suggest that there is no Thing-in-itself beyond it, and the metaphysician Beckett might suggest that the Thing-in-itself is the only key to experience in the material world, but this is an oversimplification. Since Martin Esslin, critics have explored the more metaphysical speculations of the German dramatist Brecht, and the new generation of Beckett scholars, especially Mark Nixon and Andrew Gibson, are suggesting particular historical and material bases of the Irish Beckett’s seemingly more abstract dramas.

Critics are fond of drawing up lists of oppositions, and so is Bentley, who offers this list as a dichotomy between naturalistic and anti-naturalistic drama:

slice of life vs. convention
realism vs. fantasy
social vs. individual
political vs. religious
propagandist vs. aesthetic
prosaic vs. poetic
objective vs. subjective

“As useful as it is misleading,” Bentley admits, [3] and similarly both useful and misleading for limning the two traditions of modern drama as they’ve come down to us after Brecht and Beckett. But both oppositional columns are real in the space of the theatre, because they are bodied before us as three-dimensional, moving, speaking objects. I would suggest that Bentley’s categories of Naturalism and Expressionism can be extended beyond the historical past into the historical present: that these oppositions remain useful (and misleading) in looking at post-war theatre to define a New Naturalism and a New Expressionism, to “seek out the mind and art — the real identity — of our imaginative modern playwrights.” This New Naturalism may be the genre of Harold Pinter, Edward Bond, John Osborne and Arnold Wesker; the New Expressionism the domain of David Rudkin, Caryl Churchill, Howard Barker and Sarah Kane. As the listing of these names and my attempts to shove them into the procrustean beds of these revised generic categories — even though they’re my own — may attest, it is an imperfect fit. And each of these writers partakes of aesthetic elements of both Brecht and Beckett, rendering this study foolhardy. But still useful, to determine where theatre and drama has been in the past fifty years, and, as Bentley said, to put us “in a better position to confirm, reject, or qualify our impression that the theatre is dead.”

Footnotes
  1. Eric Bentley, The Playwright as Thinker. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987, p. 22. [↩]
  2. Bentley, ibid., p. 25. [↩]
  3. Bentley, ibid., p. 42 [↩]