It was clear from the start that Bernard Shaw was a man of ideas. Later it turned out that he was a fabulous entertainer. But few have granted that the two Shaws were one. The old tendency was to allow that he was a publicist, a critic, an essayist, even a philosopher but to add: “not of course a dramatist.” The later tendency was to concede that he was a great showman but to discount his thoughtful side. As Egon Friedell said, you could suck the theatrical sugar from the pill of propaganda, and put the pill itself back on the plate.

Neither in the old days, then, nor in the later ones was Shaw considered a dramatist, for even the later generations have only thought him a master of the theatrical occasion, a man with a theatrical line of talk and a theatrical bag of tricks, a highly histrionic jokester—a comedian, certainly, but hardly a writer of serious comedy.

To approach a subject like this in a truly meaningful way, it seems to me that it is necessary first to force oneself to a humble objectivity and even to a certain detachment. This subject is too important and we are bound to it by too jealous a commitment to allow ourselves to dismiss it with pat solutions or lyrical effusions. It is necessary to examine it with a dispassionate eye instead of imagining what we would like it to be. The point is to understand to what extent the movement which is drawing the theatre towards religious, Christian themes is authentic.

The bourgeoisie has been in control of the theatre for about 150 years now First of all, it controls it by the price of land, which rose so sharply in the 19th century that, as you know, the workers left the city, resulting in buildings and entire quarters belonging to the bourgeois the theatres are almost all located in the center of the city. The bourgeoisie controls the theatre by the price of tickets which rose steadily in order to make the theatre a profit making enterprise. In France it also controls it by centralization, so that in just those cities where contact with a varied audience would be possible, plays do not come or come much later on tour. Finally, it controls it through the critics. It is an error to contrast the newspaper critic with the public. The critic is the mirror of his public. If he writes nonsense, it is because the public which reads the news paper will speak nonsense too therefore, it would be futile to oppose one to the other.

I obviously can have no special competence in the field of foreign policy. I only know what I read in the papers and the fact that I am a creative writer does not make my opinions either wiser or more persuasive than those of any other man. But it seems to me that there might be some good purpose in one of my profession expressing himself on this kind of problem. A certain awareness of attitudes outside our borders has been forced on me over the past ten years. My plays are regularly produced on the stages of Europe, Asia, Australia, and other areas. I have not traveled extensively abroad for some seven years now, but I do receive a steady mail from artists, producers, and audiences in foreign countries; there are visits and a steady correspondence with them and frequent newspaper reviews and articles concerning my work.

One of the most amazing recent phenomena in our theatre is the discovery and gradual acceptance by audiences and critics of the plays of Beckett, lonesco, Adamov, Genet, and Ghelderode. With a prudishness that is just about par for the course, we tend to reject these plays and label their authors opprobiously as avant-garde. But somehow—in spite of our rejection—these plays keep reasserting themselves; they have a mysterious hold on our sensibilities. We find ourselves going to them, being moved or amused by them, and applauding them fully aware that we don't always know what they mean or what their authors intend. For all their seeming unintelligibility and simplicity, these plays possess a vitality we have missed, and more important, in their boldly experimental nature they are symptomatic of the unrest which prevails in the contemporary theatre. These playwrights want to “fix” the theatre, and their plays suggest ways that have been taken to revitalize it.

A new play by Jean-Paul Sartre is always an important and controversial event. At fifty-five Sartre is for many, however prematurely, the “grand old man” of French letters. There are, however, others who see in Sartre the supreme nihilist who has failed of artistic achievement for lack of a unifying faith and there are even some who will go so far as to speak of charlatanism. Perhaps the kindest critical view is that held by many conscientious people who think of Sartre as essentially “negative,” a well-meaning but misled philosopher whose ideas have been swept away by the flux of history. They point out that the political world as it exists today is scarcely the place for the “engaged literature” of 1940-45 with its requirements of personal commitment and anonymous heroism. Young people in France are not reading Being and Nothingness.

The parable of Eugène Ionesco's new play, Le Rhinocéros, is simple and obvious. The inhabitants of a small provincial town are transformed into rhinoceroses. At first this process is gradual, and then more and more precipitous. The protagonist, whose name is Bérenger, like that of the protagonist in Tueur sans gages, sees in the first scene one or two of the inhabitants of his town metamorphosed. In the second scene, a colleague in the office where he works becomes a rhinoceros. In the third, his best friend, Jean, is transformed before his very eyes. In the last scene, his mistress rushes off to join the herd. He remains alone, the last soul in the town to resist the epidemic. He refuses to comply with the collective mania, the standardization or nazification of his world. The parable is on the sacred individuality of man. Alone the protagonist Bérenger remains faithful to his vocation of man.

The more influential (though not necessarily the more perceptive) of English and American dieatre reviewers have consistently withheld their approval to the work of Ugo Betti, a writer who in Italy is acknowledged by all save a handful of critics on the extreme left to be the only major Italian dramatist of the post-Pirandello period. Many regard him as the equal in stature of his more widely known predecessor. Yet the two Betti plays that reached Broadway (The Gambler and Island of Goats) survived for only a matter of days, whilst the English productions of The Queen and the Rebels, The Burnt Flower-Bed, and Summertime (original title: II paese delle vacanze), staged in the West End in 1955-56, each ran for a relatively short period. To a student and admirer of Betti's drama, this record is disappointing, and also a little bewildering.

On October 1, 1923, the Abbey Theatre produced a new one-act play by a Dublin laboring man, Sean O'Casey. The Abbey had created considerable interest in April, 1923, by giving the first production anywhere of an O'Casey play, The Shadow of a Gunman, a tragedy about the Black-and-Tan war. By the end of its three-day run, the Abbey was turning people away, despite the fact that the theatre was under armed guard because of the Civil War; Lady Gregory wrote in her journal after the final performance that The Shadow of a Gunman was “beautifully acted, all the political points taken up with delight.” O'Casey's new play, Kathleen Listens In, was received quite differently.

The Abbey management was theatre-wise enough to schedule Kathleen Listens In as a curtain-closer to a revival of Shaw's Arms and the Man: the soothing syrup of Shaw's “pleasant” exposé of “romantic convention” cannily preceded the bitter pill of O'Casey's “phantasy”—which turned out to be a no-holds-barred, deadly accurate satire of warring contemporary Ireland.

I walked in a desert.
And I cried,
“Ah, God, take me from this place!”
A voice said, “It is no desert.”
I cried, “Well, but—
The sand, the heat, the vacant horizon.”
A voice said, “It is no desert.”
Stephen Crane

One of die most interesting and provocative questions facing the student of the modern theatre is, to what extent the professional philosopher is capable of creating effective drama? Can a man steeped in the technical and systematic discipline of philosophical inquiry create a drama that is more than an abstract working out of a thesis? Can he create characters or situations that have the action and vitality necessary for dramatic presentation? The contemporary French philosopher, writer and essayist, Jean-Paul Sartre, provides the most rewarding study to those interested in the role of the philosopher as dramatist.

When Samuel Beckett had his En Attendant Godot produced at the Théâtre de Babylone in Paris, he really started something. I saw the play there in 1953, and again in London (1955) and in New York (1956) as Waiting for Godot. Meanwhile it had toured France and Germany and been translated into several other languages. It was a far greater success than any of Beckett's previous works had been—and his first attempt to write for the stage.

The most immediately striking thing about the play was its originality. Obviously avant-garde, it nevertheless retained all the seediness of a down-at-the-heel realism. On the surface it seemed simple almost to the point of idiocy, yet it implied all the complications that human intelligence has been able to create for itself. And it created an image of man's longing for ideal relationships with himself, with other men, with God, only to defile the image by suggesting doubts.

Once he has arrived on stage, he moves sparingly; his presence is enough to establish a vitality that other important actors strive for with nervous pacings and hand flurries and vocal hysterics and stares that hypnotize and exact tribute from the rest of the cast. It is not so much, I think, that Vilar scorns the habitual run of acting props as that he does not need them. He is of medium height, bony, black-haired and hollowcheeked, with hands that look large but are never obstructive. His voice is unusually deep and has a rasp; it is a long remove from the throatiness of Olivier and the calculated resonance of Lunt. When he speaks poetry it has the directness of prose. When he speaks prose it is punctuated with caesuras and emphases that give it the quality of verse. He is possibly the most ascetic and statuesque performer of our time.

The current popularity of the Japanese arts in this country has extended only in a very limited way to what is perhaps the most beautiful of those arts: the Noh drama. The reasons for this are simple. One is the inaccessibility of the Noh. Unlike the Kabuki, it has never been performed in this country and probably never will be, at least in its pure form. Only once in its history, in fact, has the Noh been performed outside of Japan, at an Italian drama festival in 1954. Another reason for this relative neglect is the esoteric quality of the Noh. A Noh play is about as difficult for a Westerner unversed in Japanese culture to understand as, say, a medieval mystery play or Jacobean court masque would be for a Japanese who knew no English.

In a famous speech about actors in 1928, Max Reinhardt called the art of theatre “the oldest, most powerful, most immediate of the arts, combining the many in one.” The statement may appear exaggerated, but it is only a weak echo of statements which great minds in the past have been inspired to make. Voltaire called the theatre “the noblest and most useful thing invented by the human mind,” and Victor Hugo designated the drama, in his well-known manifesto, the preface to Cromwell, as “complete poetry,” the “ocean” into which all the other streams of poetry flow. But I do not intend to speak of the theatre in general, only of the art of acting; partly because it seems to me that problems in the art of acting have had a profound effect upon the current as well as the eternal state of the art of theatre (does not the contemporary drama and film owe much to actors?), and partly because this distinctive art form has virtually never been the subject for scholarly analysis.