In an essay, written in 1924, Mr. T. S. Eliot pointed to the effects in the English drama of an unlimited aim at realism. He saw that without a form to arrest the flow of spirit, without unrealistic conventions, the drama was bound to end in an “exact likeness to the reality which is perceived by the most commonplace mind.” Perhaps in only one play, Everyman, he thought, we had a drama within the limitations of art. In fact, one may say that the unchecked attempt at realism, the attempt “to escape the conditions of art,” has paradoxically become a limitation for die artist. The realistic theatre itself developed in time such stringent conventions that modern playwrights, at least since Ibsen, have sought to escape them. And some serious dramatists have looked for more than purely formal solutions (like the techniques of expressionism) to liberate the stage. They wanted to enlarge the scene in order to regain the scope of the great theatres of the past.

Conceptions of Bertolt Brecht's own staging of his play The Caucasian Chalk Circle in the “Berliner Ensemble am Schiffbauerdamm” (premiere on 7 October 1954) differ from the performance in Frankfort-on-the-Main (directed by Harry Buckwitz, premiere on 27 April 1955) in this respect, among others, that in Berlin the Prologue was performed, whereas in Frankfort it was deleted before rehearsals began.

The Prologue is an integral part of The Caucasian Chalk Circle and the play has never been published without it. In it Brecht shows how two Grusinian Kolchoses settle an argument over the possession of a valley claimed by both villages. The valley is obtained by those who give promise of administering it best, i.e., those who will irrigate it in order to make it produce more fruit.

The goat-raising Kolchos “Galinsk” had been evacuated from the valley by a government order when Hitler's armies were advancing.

By this time many of us have heard of the controversial doctrines of Epic Theatre. Some of us have been intrigued by Epic theory; others have lost no time expressing their annoyance. In his lifetime Bertolt Brecht, Epic's chief architect, encountered a full measure of both reactions. He accepted enthusiasms calmly and took rejections in the same spirit. In spite of all box-office accountants he insisted that the validity of a theatrical credo was not to be determined by a counting of heads. “Einstein's theory was understood at first by half a dozen people,” he once told me. “Whether I am accepted by six people or six million is beside the point. The point is whether I am justified.“

It must be admitted that the meaning of Epic Theatre is not quickly grasped.

Both in the United States and in the United Kingdom, the keen discussion about the degree to which the theatre should be socially committed has been confused by the vague, ambiguous, and tendentious use of focal words like “society,” “politics,” “realism,” “humanity.” In England the bid by one group to impose politics on the theatre in a narrow and a party sense under the guise of solicitude for social principles has been made evident on at least two occasions. The first was the shouting in the theatre when The Tenth Chance, an immature first play by a young writer named Stuart Holroyd, was tried out at the Royal Court for a single Sunday night performance. The play dealt with the reactions to persecution in a totalitarian state of three imprisoned men: a rationalist, a religious mystic, and a moronic tough. It shows the tough, lacking in mental resources, breaking first and the mystic, buoyed up by faith in some extra-personal force, outlasting the rationalist who relies unsuccessfully on his vulnerable brain. What Holroyd was getting at was similar to Shaw's aim in Saint Joan and other plays.

From its origins in the comos and mimos to the complicated gyrations of the Paris avant garde, the term comedy has come to mean different things to different people. Taking a glance at its development in modern literature, we discover that the very basis of comedy is tragic; indeed, the modern playwright no longer cares to separate his worlds into tragedy and comedy but prefers to use the term tragicomedy or, like Brecht, omit any designation altogether. However, we need not be too surprised if we remember the tragic background of The Birds or Lysistrata, The Merchant of Venice or The Tempest, The Misanthrope or Georges Dandin. The reason for calling a play a comedy or a tragedy frequently is historical or personal. Were Wozzeck to be written today it certainly would have been called something like a tragicomedy. After all, Eliot's The Cocktail Party is a comedy, Beckett's Waiting for Godot is a tragicomedy and Ionesco's The Chairs a tragic farce.

Ibsen's The Wild Duck has been universally recognized as a masterpiece of modern dramatic art. Two generations of critics, starting with George Brandes and George Bernard Shaw, have admired its powerful ironies and brilliant dramaturgy. Finally, it has been made the subject of a detailed and extremely perceptive analysis by Hermann Weigand, Ibsen's leading twentieth-century exponent, in his study The Modern Ibsen. All have seen it as a curious drama of mixed genre in which elements of satire, comedy, and tragedy exist together in a state of high tension. Beyond this, the critics have gone on to explore some particular vein in the rich texture of the play: its exposure of the dangers of jejune “idealism,” the elaborate comic irony surrounding the figure of Hialmar Ekdal, the teasing symbolism.

A friend once told me that when he was under the influence of ether he dreamed he was turning over the pages of a great book, in which he knew he would find, on the last page, the meaning of life. The pages of the book were alternately tragic and comic, and he turned page after page, his excitement growing, not only because he was approaching the answer but because he couldn't know, until he arrived, on which side of the book the final page would be. At last it came: the universe opened up to him in a hundred words: and they were uproariously funny. He came back to consciousness crying with laughter, remembering everything. He opened his lips to speak. It was then that the great and comic answer plunged back out of his reach.

Yeats’ difficulty in becoming a successful playwright is not surprising or unexpected. His own views on the public theatre precluded success, and it would have surprised Yeats as much as anyone if at any time in his career he had achieved much widespread popularity. His growth as a playwright was always away from the “pit” and the appearance of Four Plays for Dancers, The Only Jealousy of Emer, At the Hawk's Well, The Dreaming of the Bones, and Calvary (the first of which was produced in 1916), is in many ways a predictable outcome of much of his opinion of what drama should be. In a note to At the Hawk's Well in 1916 he had written:

One of the leading Spanish scholars of the past hundred years, Menéndez y Pelayo, had this to say of Fuenteovejuna: “Peribáñez and El mejor alcalde, el rey . . . have to do with personal justice or private vengeance. In Fuente Ovejuna what we witness is the vengeance of a whole town; there is no individual protagonist; there is no hero but the demos, the town council of Fuente Ovejuna: when the Royal power intervenes, it is only to sanction and consolidate the revolutionary deed. There is no more democratic play in the whole Castilian theatre” (Vol. V, p. 198). “A drama which is reality itself, brutal and throbbing, but magnified and exalted by the historical genius of the poet… . In Fuente Ovejuna the soul of the people found expression without danger, thanks to the.happy state of political unconsciousness in which the poet and his public lived.

TDR has never believed the reviewing of New York productions to be one of its functions. It does not now. But in the case of Arthur Adamov's PING-PONG an exception must be made. Adamov is an important and imaginative dramatist. Together with Duerrenmatt, Beckett, Ionesco, and Ghelderode, he is opening up new territories for the theatre zuhich other playwrights (and audiences) must also explore if our theatre is ever to go beyond the narrow and mechanical limits of naturalism. We regret that the New York critics rejected this play and believe they have done our theatre a disservice. What follows is our dissenting opinion. The Grove Press, which has done more than any other publisher to make good translations of the work of the new dramatists of Europe available to American readers, has recently published PING-PONG in both cloth and paper bound editions.

It is safe to assume that Mr. Willett knows as much about the work of Brecht as anyone else ever has, including Brecht himself, who hadn't a very good memory. The amount of research that has gone into The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht is prodigious, and happily the facts come to us filtered through a mind, not heaped-up by a research staff. If I say that the result is an illustrated catalogue, I should add that I like illustrated catalogues, and that this may well be the best such catalogue on the book market. The illustrations (to begin with) are mostly good in themselves and invariably relevant to the subject; the job of tracking them down must have been a formidable one, as Brecht left his traces in all manner of by-ways but seldom on the main highway. Brecht also cultivated his own brand of esotericism, so that, through the years, just finding his writings took more energy than reading them.

“There is always something new under the sun,” Christopher Fry has said, “because a mystery never ages.” The remark, set apart like this, itself may seem mysterious, but, when added to Fry's plays, it usefully annotates them. It redirects attention to the presence there not just of mystery but of kinds of mystery which affect the dramatic value of the plays.

I do not wish to exaggerate the differences, but when Fry speaks of mystery, directly in his essays or indirectly in the plays, the word may have one of several meanings. (1) Sometimes he (or the speaker) is saying of a particular moment of experience that, like any other moment, it is unique. It has, besides the familiar qualities that language can codify, an indefinable quality of its own, for, literally, “There is always something new under the sun.” It is as if creation were an infinite series of special creations or “miracles.” No event, therefore, is fully explicable. In uniqueness, there is mystery.

The opposition of modern technique—or perhaps, more precisely, of modern technique's laziness—to the conception of art during classical periods is explosively evident if we compare Pirandello's Tonight We Improvise with Calderón's play as presented by Charles Dullin at the Théâtre de l'atelier. To say that the modern play is primarily psychological is ah inadequate formulation of the differences in genre. There is a deeply searching psychology in The Surgeon of his Own Honor, but where all the modern dramatist's virtuosity is used in interweaving ideas, and where the modern play's complexity tends increasingly to stay on the intellectual plane, its action so reduced as to be little more than linear, in the classical period—at least in the plays of the Elizabethan and Spanish theatres and in Corneille's early work—it is the action itself which is the object of the dramatist's entire concern.

Bertolt Brecht's Baden play for learning—Das Badener Lehrstück vom Einverständnis—is so named for having been first performed at the Baden-Baden music festival in 1929, and because it falls among his early Marxist plays with an explicitly didactic function. Einverständnis means agreement or acceptance. The piece was given at Baden-Baden accompanied by a score written by Hindemith, and in a shorter form than the version published in Brecht's Stücke. Hermann Scherchen conducted. The premier created a great scandal, marked especially by the exit of Gerhart Hauptmann in the middle of the Clown Scene.

I believe that of Brecht's plays this is the most unclear in conception and yet the most revelatory of the author's personal conflicts in relation to his thought and politics. It also happens to contain one of the most viciously funny scenes ever written. I want to set forth in this essay some tentative ideas regarding the play.

For some twenty years (1936-1956), Eugene O'Neill's expressionistic dramas with their symbolic distortion of objective facts to reveal inner experiences were more popular in South America and especially in the Scandinavian countries than they were at home. The dramatist who in the 1920s had been awarded three Pulitzer Prizes was regarded mainly as of historical importance when in 1936 he was the recipient of the Nobel Prize. To many critics, it seemed a recognition (belated or, perhaps, undeserved) of work that might once have been exciting but that no longer seemed vital or particularly relevant. In the main, we failed to see in his work what the Scandinavians found in it.

The prefatory note to the volume, Three Plays by Thornton Wilder, states that he is regarded by many as America's greatest living playwright. We may discount this considerably as a publisher's exaggeration, but there is no question that his name will appear on almost anyone's list of major contemporary American playwrights—and probably nearer the top than the bottom.

This is a little surprising when one stops to think that his reputation rests almost entirely on three plays, one of them an adaptation. True, he has written a number of one-act plays, one or two of which have become classics of the amateur theatre. He has translated André Obey's Lucrèce for Katharine Cornell and he has adapted A Doll's House for Ruth Gordon.

“Mystery in the Russian Theatre” is the title given by Benois to one of his “Letters on Art.” One might think that in this article he is discussing a production of one of Aleksei Remizov's plays written in the style of a medieval mystery play. Or, perhaps, Scriabin has already realized one of his dreams, and Benois is hastening to announce to the public the greatest event on the Russian stage—the appearance of a new theatrical form reviewing the mystic rites of ancient Greek culture.

It seems that neither Remizov nor Scriabin has written a mystery; according to Benois the Moscow Art Theatre has produced a mystery with its performance of The Brothers Karamasov. But just what characteristics of the medieval mystery plays could be found in the performance of The Brothers Karamasov? Perhaps here the purified ancient Greek mysteries were combined with the visual edification of the medieval mystery play?