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 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.

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.

Nowadays, what is more often than not meant by theatre is the theatrical realization of plays, yet any view of theatre that excludes opera and ballet is obviously incomplete. A careful examination of the natures of these three theatrical forms ought to reveal clearly the limitations and potentialities of each, and to indicate the desirability, or even possibility, of mixing the forms in order to make available new theatrical experiences. Naturally, such an examination cannot be accomplished within the space of a short article, and in any case a thorough examination will have to await the attention of some theatrical Leonardo da Vinci with vast knowledge, sensitivity, and experience. Yet the rushing of the fool into an unknown region has its value. If it results in disaster, wiser men are warned of things they would have had to establish by cautious experiment; but it is not unknown for an uncalculated risk to make clear to the angels that in fearing to tread they are being unnecessarily hesitant. Thus, the present expedition may hope to serve some useful purpose. Like many expeditions, its goal is a land long dreamed of, and its departure has been made under an immediate stimulus—in this case, the chance reading of three pieces in The Tulane Drama Review (September, 1959) immediately after looking through Mary Caroline Richards’ translations from Artaud.

When one rides out to do battle with the ogre of Realism it is at first dismaying to see how many noble shields and lances already litter the field. Rostand, Maeterlinck, Hofmannsthal, Yeats, Lorca, Claudel, Auden, Eliot, Fry … one had not thought there were so many. Not that they were all dishonorably unhorsed, but—the ogre still rules. And there are the critics too, like captured squires, bending to serve the one in power, always wistful and alert for liberation, it is true, but not actively encouraging to further challengers. And they have good reason for their hesitation since some who came to set them free are now among their persecutors.

In an article in the Hudson Review (Autumn, 1956) entitled “Problems for the Modern Critic of Literature” Mr. Yvor Winters makes some rather startling statements about the drama. He makes some rather startling statements about a good number of other things as well, but his remarks about the dramatic form in general and Macbeth in particular ask, I think, for some kind of comment. Mr. Winters is a good critic; the issues he raises here are important issues, issues that should be considered by anyone seriously interested in the dramatic form. And though I think he is wrong, he is wrong in an important way.

To get at the nature of farce we go back to beginnings, in either time or structure. Russian folk drama from the seventeenth into the twentieth century, for example, recapitulates much of what we know or infer about rude origins. Here, as Berkov remarks, necessity creates and fixes a manner. Out-of-door performance calls for exaggerated tones, sweeping gestures, loud singing and furious dancing, features which persist when public square and puppet stage, but not groundlings, are left behind. An impudent tone, imposed by the turbulent crowd, provokes performers into the picaresque asides, the jibes and the cheeky stepping out of role which, all the way down from remote beginnings in Attica to Hellzapoppin in New York, have raised their roars of laughter. Brutally enlarged, this is the way of folk game and folk tale, and should remind us, once for all, of the indissoluble bond by which farce is tied to folklore in general; and of what it owes to the point of view and the aesthetics of the folk.

Ingmar Bear-ih-mahn—not quite seven syllables, and somewhat less musically mellifluous on the tongue than Federico Fellini—but then whose memory is so faithful as to recall the enthusiasms of four years past? Which is not to suggest that Ingmar Bergman is merely the Federico Fellini of 1960 (and even less that Fellini was merely the Bergman of 1956); only to reaffirm a few platitudinous sentiments on the transience of our earthly affections: my old flame, I can't remember her name; yesterday's kisses are just memories; it's a long, long time from May to December; etc., etc. Bergman seems durable enough to survive what James Baldwin has dubbed his “precarious vogue,” but are we?

It seems that tragedy is a kind of social sin. The average spectator considers the writer of tragedies, in the best cases, as a sort of sinister mar-joy worthy of criminal persecution, social ostracism and the most rigorous repression by the censors. It seems we are opposed to the voices of sorrow, death and catastrophe on the stage. Theatre managers illustrate this evident antipathy for the tragic genre by programming silly light comedies, and musical reviews whose artistic pretensions go no further than an exhibition of nude bodies, and saucy facility of situation, puns and jokes.

The capital discovery in the career of Alfonso Sastre was the fact that the theatre is a social act, and one which may have far-reaching consequences. The recognition of his role as a kind of social leaven places a heavy responsibility upon the dramatist, for he is capable of directing the thoughts and feelings of large sections of a population. Sastre, facing up squarely to this responsibility in a country where it is not always easy to do so, is producing what he calls a Theatre of Social Agitation whose fundamental theme is Revolution. It is not surprising to find that his plays have enjoyed few performances in Spain, where, however, Sastre is recognized as one of the outstanding young playwrights of today, and more than an author of promise. Of the ten full-length plays written before 1959, only five have been presented in Spain.

The Spanish theatre in the forties was in a far from promising condition. Garcia Lorca and Casona, who had revitalized the drama in the thirties, had disappeared from the scene. Benavente was still active, but his best work had been done before the Civil War, and his recent plays had little new to offer. The principal writers for the theatre were a group of playwrights who were already well established in the thirties, capable craftsmen such as Jardiel Poncela, Neville, Mihura, López Rubio, and Ruiz Iriarte, who wrote largely teatro de evasión—escapist literature. They sought to entertain the audience rather than to treat the anguishing problems of postwar Spain.