In search of theater PDF
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ri ^ | ,y jg g H ERIC BENTLEY _ -Ja/TgT’: A V/mfcujc V^opk otigvnol^ ppUbltu) ínj ãifntJ KnipP, l*»c. In Search of Theater Eric Bentley In Search of Theater New York Vintage Books Published by vintage books, inc. Reprinted by arrangement with Alfred a. knopf, inc. First Edition, March 1953 Copyright 1947, 1948, 1949, 295°> 1951» 1952, 1953 by Eric Bentley. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper. Manufactured in the United States of America. Published simultaneously in Canada by McClelland & Stewart Limited. FIRST VINTAGE EDITION “Pirandello’s Joy and Torment” on page 279 is reprinted from naked masks: Five Plays by Luigi Pirandello edited by Eric Bentley, published and copyright 1952 by E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc. NY Everyman's Library. ,tIbscn, Pro and Con” on page 344 is reprinted from the plays of ibsen copyright 1950 by Random House, Inc. For Bill and Ted IF you know a thing theoretically but don't know it practically, then you don't really know its whole theory; and if you know it practically, but don't know it theoretically, then you don't really know its whole practice. c. e. Montague: A Writer's Notes on His Trade Foreword I have searched for theaters to see plays in. Searched in the literal, geographical sense. I have roamed along the Boulevard Clichy looking for the Atelier. I have ridden a bicycle to the School of Mines in Saint-Étienne, where Jean Dasté's actors were at work. I have sat in the unlit Berlin S-Bahn during the blockade, wondering how I should know where to get off for the Hebbel Thçater. I have prowled round North London in the rain, asking passers-by where was Unity Theatre. With the aid of a folk lorist, I have hunted down puppet theaters in the slums of Palermo. I have gone visiting campus theaters in the Middle West, have suffered in the Spartan-hard seats of theaters in Greenwich Village, have taken the Third Avenue el to find the Chinese theater under the Manhattan Bridge. . . . I reported briefly on the 1945-6 Broadway season in a couple of literary reviews, and on the following two seasons in Harper's Magazine. From 1948 to 1951 I was in Europe (save for a brief trip back to America in 1949) reporting regularly in Theatre Arts (less regularly in the Kenyon Re view) on what I saw. The first of my three seasons there I divided principally among Paris, London, and Berlin, ending with a quick tour of Germany, Austria, and Italy. Italy made a conquest of me, and I spent the bulk of the next two sea sons in Rome, though there was time for excursions, some times prolonged, to London, Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Salzburg, and Vienna. Before the end of 1951 I was back in New York. I have searched for theaters to direct plays in. I flew to Dublin to direct Bernarda Alba at the Abbey. I left Italy and drove to Salzburg to direct Cummings's him at Schloss Leopoldskron. I left Italy and again crossed the Alps to help direct Mother Courage in Munich. From there the road led to Zurich, where, with Kurt Hirschfeld, I was to direct The Iceman Cometh. Then Brecht's Exception and the Rule in Padua, Bologna, and on Radio Italiana. Then Dublin again, this time to direct seven Irish plays. Then, with the Irish actors, to the United States. This is neither a travel book nor an autobiography, but there is no keeping either the geographical or the personal Foreword viii elements out, for it is an account of a quest. These elements are most prominent in the first of my five sections, which gives my responses to theater in several countries, ending with a kind of inventory held in Salzburg. The second sec tion is also about performances, but here there is no attempt at a round-up. My intention is to appraise the work of indi vidual performers and discuss the staging of individual play wrights. The third section consists of tributes to three outstanding careers in the modern theater, careers in play writing, directing, and criticism respectively. I wanted to pay homage to my elders, and in Bernard Shaw I was frankly choosing a figure for whom I could avow filial admiration and love. If you are reared in Shaw's school, it is not im probable that you will like Shaw. It requires more effort to learn from the enemy, or rather to make the enemy your friend. Stark Young and Jacques Copeau belong to the other school; all the more reason, perhaps, not to pass them by. The fourth section is devoted to the subject of modern play writing. I start with one of the most gifted dramatists of the present and work back to the point where I began, some years ago: Henrik Ibsen. Section Five is more speculative. Being no treatise, this book needs no conclusion, but in the last section I beg the privilege of bandying generalizations and theories. There is a kind of search that is more than geographical. Or rather, the motive of travel, the impulse to discovery, has always come from a spiritual restlessness and discontent. Today more than ever we are challenged to break from the moorings, launch out, and sail in search of our personal Americas, small as, in the sum of things, they may be. In the reports and discussions of this book I believe that the prac ticalities of theater are fairly conspicuous, practicalities both of organization and of stagecraft. That is as it should be. But practicalities are means, not ends, and as I read these pages through, as if they had been written by someone else, it seems to me that their author was always peering through the fog of means in the hope of catching a glimpse of an end, a goal, a discovery, an America. Because he has not reached it, because it has never even appeared before him close and clear, he has provided no reliable or detailed description of the landscape. This does not matter. Time enough later to demand a particular kind of landscape, with trees and flowers of this genus or that. For the present it is enough to reject the familiar landscapes, Foreword ix the used-up pasturage, the gardens run to seed, of the old continents, and to go voyaging in search of virgin territory. In short, I have not been searching for any sort of theater, or even for any sort of talent and brilliance in theater. There is talent enough everywhere; when one sees the uses to which it is put, one is often tempted to think there is too much. A decadent age encourages talent, exploits it, and ruins it. A decadent style is characterized by a display (that is. conspicuous waste) of talent. No style lays under con tribution more intellect, more taste, more diligence, more fantasy, than an effete style. If we are looking for the genu ine, we are not, therefore, looking for talent, brilliance, in tellect, taste, diligence, or fantasy as such. Today we should not look for the many things theater can be, we are too far gone for that; we should look for the few things theater must be if it is to live. (To live as some thing more than a commodity, crude or sophisticated, low brow or highbrow.) It is by now a question of survival rather than one of excellence. It is too late to be interested in a perfect theater; we can only seek a quintessential one. When you look at a horse, you don't know whether it will win or not, but sometimes you see a horse stamp and shake its mane and you know the beast is mettlesome, you know it is the real thing. And in the theater today we are not looking for winners, we are looking for the real thing. We want to get down to the bedrock of dramatic art, and it may be helpful to remember that dramatic art is peculiarly concerned with the bedrock of human experience. Surely, all great art is built upon that bedrock, but drama is more in different than the other arts to whatever is not actually touching it. (Yeats said: “What attracts me to drama is that it is, in the most obvious way, what all the arts are upon a last analysis.") This is another reason for impatience with the clever superstructures of decadent drama. There is no need for drama to compete with fiction, in which so much more in the way of detail can be supplied. Much that in fiction can be gradual and multiple has in the drama to be sudden and single. In a sense this means that fiction is more subtle. To turn his medium to advantage the dramatic artist has certainly to exploit the possibilities of suddenness and singleness; and yet there can be subtleties in this too, as witness Shakespeare; the bedrock is not boring. If one did not shrink from dicta and definitions, one would say: drama is the art of the elemental. Such is the Foreword x discovery, or presupposition, of the various chapters in this book. Starting with Ibsen, and working one's way down to figures as diverse as Brecht and Barrault, one finds that the genius of the modern theater (as against its talent, bril liance, intellect, taste, diligence, and fantasy) has all gone into a search for the elemental, a return to the beginnings. I am not advising the reader to be a genius. Most of us have talent at best, our highest privilege being to choose our leaders. Our second-highest privilege is to organize and maintain '‘movements" that embody, however imperfectly, the ideas the leaders have put forward. The movement most frequently mentioned in this book is realism—often with considerable bias in its favor. I know that there is something to learn from the anti-realistic or “magical" school, and of itself it matters little whether, when you learn it, you turn against realism or simply broaden your definition to include the new lesson. If an anti-realist can be shown to be at grips with reality, and not to be lost in technical dexterity, rococo ornament, or intellectual blah, there is nothing to hold against him. On the contrary: I offer my chapters on Martha Graham, Stark Young, and Yeats. Other chapters, notably the one on Ibsen, point to the possibility of salvaging, and even combining, the best in both traditions. The antithesis bedrock/superstructure runs through the book, reappearing in such recognizable guises as struc- ture/decoration, nakedness/clothing. Conceivably some one writing in the anti-realistic tradition might also defend bedrock/nakedness/structure against superstructure/ clothing/decoration—the anti-realists have always con signed much in realistic staging to the latter categories. Yet when one looks around in the theater today, it is generally those closest to the realistic tradition who still show an interest in reality, while it is the protestants against realism who, both on the stage and in print, go in for the effeminate and chichi. “When an art becomes effete, it is realism that comes to the rescue." Bernard Shaw said this half a century ago, and I am afraid it is still one of the main things to say. E. B. New York, 1952
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