If, as I suspect, we are pausing for prophecy, then we might as well admit that, where dreams for the theatre in America are concerned, we must be so many Cassandras. The timbre of our pessimism need not ring with the old lugubrious echo of the original tragic Greek; to be fair to our time, when we have to believe that we control our fate, the echo can be taken from the Giraudoux Cassandra, ironic, bemused and mad only to those who are madder than we are. The question should not be, “What's next in theatre?” but rather, “What ought to be in theatre (and when, if ever)?” “What's next” bears the misleading implication that we have truly been somewhere in theatre and that there are signs, people, and forces clearly leading us somewhere else.

To all appearances, August Strindberg would seem to be the most revolutionary spirit in the theatre of revolt. Actually, that distinction must go to Ibsen, but Strindberg is certainly the most restless and experimental. Perpetually dissatisfied, perpetually reaching after shifting truths, he seems like a latter-day Faust with the unconscious as his laboratory—seeking the miracle of transmutation in the crucible of his tormented intellect. The metaphor is precise, for transmutation—the conversion of existing material into something higher—is the goal of all his activity, whether he works in science, turning base metals into gold, or religious philosophy, turning matter into spirit, or in drama, turning literature into music. His entire career, in fact, is a search for the philosopher's stone of ultimate truth through the testing of varied commitments.

In Jean Genet's The Screens the revolt of the Algerian Arabs against their French colonizers is not characterized by the emancipation of human beings. Although the colonizers are described as oppressors inflated with their own power, the misery and the intolerable condition of the oppressed are not denounced in order to promote the liberation of the colonized people. On the contrary, these misfortunes are exalted so that the humiliated individual has the opportunity to make his misery the occasion for an inner experience based on the absolute contrast and conflict between his values and those of the Other—an unceasing contestation through which Saïd achieves a sovereignty which no action founded on the hope of a more just world could yield. For hope can take root only in this world, and the hope of claiming one's rights is lost in the desire to become the Other. The subjective, ascetic, and tragic experience of Saïd has indeed no political value.

If one looks closely at the crotchety, constipated, hypercritical figure of Martin Luther in John Osborne's newest play, one is forcibly reminded of that fuming British malcontent, Jimmy Porter; a protestant who bitched against the Welfare State as vehemently as the theologian wrangled with the Pope. The similarities do not end there.

Despite the jump in time, the clerical context and the change of venue, the play is not (as has been charged here) a departure for Osborne. There is a clear link-up between Luther's sixteenth-century Germany and our time. In both, the sense of cosmic imminence is very strong. “The Last Judgement isn't to come. It's here and now,” says Luther, and the doomsday-mountain-squatters and the nuclear-psychotics echo his words.

It is as easy to dismiss (too much) with “parenthetical insults” as with intellectual assaults. Both tactics smack of arrogance. The end result, when the veil is rent, is usually rhetorical catastrophe. Nevertheless, can we afford not to dismiss Genet?

Whether rhetorical or not, all theatre is catastrophic (katastrophe, to overturn); bad theatre is rhetorically so to boot. This is certainly the case in the theatre of language and logic of which we have had too much and against which only the genius of the poet can prevail. However, should the theatre of linguistics continue to prevail, we will be forced to rewrite our poetics again, calling production and performance accidental to the essence of the play.

“Here I am, all present and complete in this instant of ever-lasting time … “ declares Gide in one of his few attempts at dramatic composition—intending, thereby, to assault the universe anew, firmly holding himself precludedly victorious.

Great acclamation for realism in the theatre tends to be cyclical. While the form itself may always be with us, every so often it becomes fashionable again, especially in England, and is praised a little more than it deserves. Recently it has been the playwrights who work in the idiom of the Royal Court and Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop who have been given rather more critical notice than their achievements warrant. Both the Royal Court and Miss Littlewood have followed, in their preoccupation with working-class life, all similar fashions before them. Real life always seems to live in a particularly unfashionable district. This can be an occasional welcome change from too much costumed romanticism; but apparent verisimilitude in speech or setting does not insure a genuine and perceptive authenticity.

I have never succeeded in becoming completely used to existence, neither to that of the world, nor to that of others, nor above all to my own. I sometimes feel that forms are suddenly emptied of their content, reality is unreal, words are only noises stripped of all meaning. These houses, the sky, are only facades of nothingness; people seem to move automatically, without any reason; everything seems to evaporate, everything is threatened—including myself—by an imminent, silent sinking into I know not what abyss, beyond day and night. By what sorcery can all this still exist? And what does all this mean, this appearance of movement, this appearance of light, these kinds of things, this kind of world? And yet, I am here, surrounded by the halo of creation, unable to grasp the smoke, understanding nothing, disoriented, torn away from I know not what which makes me feel that I have nothing.

Ever since John Osborne dropped his dramatic H-bomb on the complacent British middle-class theatregoer in April 1956 in the shape of Look Back in Anger, critics and public alike have been looking to London for a steady flow of new plays of revolt, plays that would be leavened with the yeast of a new social criticism and rooted in the new post-war realism. This new realism is, to my mind, best described as a compound of two elements. The first represents an involuntary and instinctive resistance to the irksome class structure of British society and the other, in one form or another, the universal dilemma which has split the world down the middle in an age of threatening nuclear destruction and exacerbated the rivalries inherent in class, in nation, or in industrial or commercial power. The technological complexities of our new era are hardly touched on in the new drama.

In the opening scene of Jack Gelber's The Apple an action painter is flicking large globs of pigment at a piece of celluloid, commenting as he works, “No design is a grand design,” and, “Art is precision.” He takes a rolling pin and smears the paint over the celluloid, creating an arresting pastiche of brilliant colors, chaotic patterns, intriguing textures, and—if you look at it in just the right way—some sort of artistic expression. Then Julian Beck enters and asks, “Whose wet dream is that?” This jarring punch-line sets the tone of the Living Theatre's preoccupation with illusion and reality, a theatrical pair of dice that are constantly tumbled about and spilled into the audience. And the audience pays for it: the night I was there, the painting was auctioned off for $6.50.