We have now reached the difficult point and must turn to the unpleasant truths. I regret it, but there is no other way if we want to exhaust our subject. I shall do it as painlessly as possible—without anesthesia. In the preceding chapter we followed the development of several important points in the theory of acting and reviewed the theorists’ artistic demands upon the actor. Finally, we arrive at the actor himself as a type, as a person. The length and purpose of this book do not permit us to occupy ourselves with all the great names, the celebrities, the unforgettable enchanters from the past and the present, so notable and so different. There is only room to mention isolated, selected examples out of which one—as elsewhere in the book—must represent many. It is reassuring to know that certain fundamental traits are alike and common to the majority of the great, leading scenic artists.

In the eighteenth century a theory of acting is formulated for the first time. We have just traced the development of the art form from its obscure origin up to its new maturation in connection with the appearance of the geniuses Shakespeare and Molière. The art is liberated from dilettantism; new relationships are developed with society on the one hand, and with literature on the other! The person who play-acts is first of all an amateur—and can become a dilettante—then a professional actor, and finally becomes an artist. If we must set a date for the complete transformation it is the year 1750. About this time two books appear in Paris, epoch-making for the theatre and consequently for the new style of acting.

Generally regarded as the finest dramatist Sweden has produced since Strindberg, Hjalmar Bergman is a conspicuous example of the writer who is obsessed by a single motive. In his case the motive was the fear of father, and his entire dramatic production may be viewed as little more than variations on this theme. However, in tracing this theme through the plays of Bergman, I am less interested in showing the development of a personality than in revealing the struggles of an artist as he seeks a form in which he can not only express his personal feelings but get a wide audience to share those feelings openly with him.

Born in 1883, Bergman was a sickly, weak, fat, and extremely sensitive child, the butt of his playmates’ jokes. His father was a stern, successful, small-town businessman who completely dominated the thought and activities of young Hjalmar.

The theatre of today has been significantly changed because of Brecht's influential work as a playwright, producer, and theoretician. In fact, anyone working in the theatre of today must come to grips with the phenomenon that is Bertolt Brecht. True, such an undertaking will be difficult. Brecht's achievements—literary, theoretical, and practical—are all parts of a whole which is not understandable if one part of it is examined by itself. Furthermore, as he wrote in his poem “Behauptung,” Brecht by no means “always remained the same“; both the man and his views changed. For this reason an investigation of the development of Brecht's theatrical theories apart from the rest of his work is a questionable undertaking. There are, however, two justifications for it: 1) So far nothing coherent about Brecht's early ideas concerning the theatre has been written.

It is a commonplace truth that irresponsible artists dream up contexts for fictions set in the past, but it is harder to realize that only the best artist, gifted with the Shavian power to “imagine things as they really are” can conjure up an adequate vision of the context of our present lives. Moreover, imaginative concentration on context or situation in the new drama is, paradoxically, a result of a deep wish to restore reverence for human character. This essay will repeatedly address this paradox as we try to isolate our period style. In drama as in other things, not everything is possible in every period.

The last thing that I expected when I decided to direct a production of Endgame a few months ago was that I would become more and more impressed with it. I had seen Samuel Beckett's play when it was first acted in this country, at the Cherry Lane in New York, and I had come away with no desire to dance in the streets. The play seemed much less impressive than Waiting for Godot—too simple, too simple-minded even. I had been amused occasionally, moved not at all. The philosophical implications, implicit in the title, seemed neither startling nor particularly perceptive; the assumption that this is the worst of all possible worlds seems as silly as the bromide that it is the best, a point made sensibly by the creators of Candide a few years ago when they provided that Pangloss and the pessimistic Martin be played by the same actor.

Danton's Death is the first play of a twenty-one year old German revolutionary who died before he had lived another three years. Written in secrecy during five weeks of 1835, it may well be the most remarkable first play ever composed. It breaks through prevailing patterns of dramaturgy to a new form, creates the first passive hero in the history of tragedy, and strikingly foreshadows surrealism, expressionism and naturalism. Its author, a youth who short weeks previously had barely escaped arrest for his own revolutionary writings and organizational activities, proceeded to concentrate, in this study of the decline of the French Revolution during Danton's last days, on the antinomy of his passionate desire for social change and his calm knowledge that revolution could not succeed in Germany in his time.

Early in 1946, when I met Brecht, he was living in a spacious studio apartment in New York. I had to walk up several flights of stairs to reach the apartment which was on the top floor. Through the door, as I waited, I heard the squabble of pontifical radio voices. A short, wiry man in his shirtsleeves, with close-cropped hair, opened the door. Grinning broadly, he pointed to the radio and said: “That's the best theatre in America. Marvelous, the way they stutter around, go forward a little, go back then forward, then back some more.” Confused for a moment, I began slowly to make out that the radio voices were representatives of an UNRRA conference at the United Nations. Listening intensely, Brecht gesticulated and acted out with his body the invisible UNRRA delegates “stuttering” and “going forwards and backwards,” as he repeated with glee.

Yeats stands out among the poets of this century who have attempted poetic drama because of his life-long struggle to make the drama serve both his own and his country's purposes. From Vivien and Time (1884) to The Death of Cuchulain (1939) he labored at the often uncongenial task of giving voice (or mask) to conflicting attitudes within the scope of a dramatic action. The dramatic discipline he came to see as a necessity for his own development as a man and poet, and as a possible means of transforming the vulgar or sentimental patriotism he despised into a defense of the Irish heroic ideal which could arouse his countrymen and earn the respect of his literary friends and rivals too.

Strindberg's never-abandoned plans for having an “experimental theatre” at his disposal were at the point of fulfillment early in 1907 when, after a long pause, he again began to write plays. During the previous autumn he had become acquainted with the young director August Falck, and they had agreed to found a theatre. It was in anticipation of its opening that Strindberg, during the first half of 1907 wrote the four chamber plays which more than any other of his works have established his reputation as a revolutionary spirit in the art of the drama.

In the beginning this was not his purpose. The name chamber play had been taken from Reinhardt's Kammerspielhaus about which he had read articles in German periodicals, later found, with passages marked, in his library. His basic idea was to create an intimate theatre for which he imagined a repertoire in a subdued naturalistic style.

To compare two such different writers as Christopher Fry and Paul Claudel is, in a sense, an act of presumption; but then such comparisons are, by a paradox, inherent in the very nature of criticism, at once invidious and indispensable. I say by a paradox advisedly, for there can be no criticism without the ability of making comparisons, yet since each significant work of art is unique within its own terms of reference, no comparison can be altogether convincing. All the same, the very fact that Claudel and Fry are both Christian in a non-Christian age and a non-Christian or only nominally Christian society gives one a vantagepoint from which one may be able to assess at least some of the problems that confront the dramatist with a Christian vision of man and a Christian conception of the nature of reality.

The fashionable view of Tennessee Williams at the moment is to see through him, to be above his sort of thing. Miss Signi Falk strikes the note in a recent article in Modern Drama when she says of his characters, “Most of them according to discriminating critics have been more deeply affected by the theatre than by life.” This position is an easy one just at present for two reasons. It has a certain degree of truth, and it has the support of most contemporary critics, discriminating or otherwise. Its danger, the danger of most easy positions, is that it tends to simplify Williams and make of him not a serious writer at all but a sensation monger. Henry Popkin would go so far as to say that he discloses only “the monstrosities of the nightmare, embellished by the playful ingenuity of a Gothic temperament.”

The original idea of Crispin, Rival of his Master does not belong to Lesage, but to the Spaniard Hurtado de Mendoza. In Los Empeños del mentir Mendoza depicts the cunning of an adventurer who, after having saved a gentleman from the clutches of three brigands, tries to marry the gentlemen’s sister by passing himself off as her expected fiancé.

Similarly, in Lesage, Crispin will try to marry Angélique under the very beard, one might say, of her suitor Valére. But the resemblance remains superficial. Angélique and Valere are not the principal objects of the scheme the valet Crispin and his double, the valet La Branche, are concocting. The object is the sizable dowry of the young girl: 20,000 écus. And they very nearly make off with this dowry. Their knavery fails only because of a chance revelatory meeting. But this accident is not surprising; it is foreseen because the author has duly prepared it.