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.

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.

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.

After the first dozen Twelfth Night's there are still surprises, new guises for the old masterpiece. Directors color it golden, russet, silver or white; blue for dreams, and sometimes pink; or they allow red and even purple to dominate. They can make it sound noisy as a carnival, or eager, simple or melodious, or quarrelsome like children; it can also be strained and nervous. In 1958, Peter Hall at Stratford-upon-Avon hung the stage with gauzes and contrived what The Times called a “Watteauesque light.” And critics report that a year previously, at Stratford, Ontario, Tyrone Guthrie contrasted Feste and Malvolio in “psychological terms,” allowing the final song of the “wind and the rain” to be “as plaintive and wonderful as a Jewish lament.” Two years before that, at the English Stratford, Sir John Gielgud brought “a faint chill to the air” of his production: the comics were on their best behavior in deference to a pervasive “charm”; The Observer said that the polite word for this would be “formal,” and the exact word “mechanical”; it seemed as if, during rehearsals of the last scene, Sir John had stopped the actors and commanded, “Be beautiful; be beautiful.”

In his presentation of the twentieth-century world and Everyman, Duerrenmatt uses a form as old as Greek tragedy and a staging method as modern as surrealism; he uses characters as old as the Sphinx in combination with our contemporaries, Eisenhower and Nehru; and in his stage business, he uses motifs as old as Oedipal inspired fears of castration, dark, mysterious, and frighteningly uncontrollable, and motifs as new, as light, as explicable as the operation of The-Place-in-the-Sun Foundry and the economics of a simple local grocery store. This total presentation he makes with an artistry before which the imagination, even of an imaginative critic, boggles; for with a gorgeously simple style and technique, Duerrenmatt's dramatic lines achieve the stylization of poetry, and move from poetry to myth, where the complex of thought, passion, and affect become infinitely expansible, indefinitely relevant, and meaningful without apparent limit.

Nowhere but in France, it seems, do men of letters whose greatest talent clearly lies in other genres devote so much of their creative energy to the theatre. The Golden Age of Corneille and Racine, kept alive by an ever-growing number of French repertory companies, stands constantly before the writer, challenging him to try to rival its inaccessible perfection. An amazing number, from Balzac and Stendhal to Mauriac and Gide, have taken up the challenge. Even such transients in Paris as Turgenev and Henry James were affected by France's worship of the theatre as the supreme art and tried vainly to convince the public, and posterity, that they had mastered the dramatic form. Albert Camus’ passion for the theatre was lifelong, from his participation in the Algerian Workers’ Theatre in 1936 to his tragically short reign as director of a government sponsored avant-garde company in 1959.

At the heart of Euripides’ masterpiece, The Bacchae, is a communal sacrifice. The city of Thebes is sacrificed to Dionysus to satisfy his capricious ego. In supporting this thesis I will contest several widely held theories about the play: (1) that Dionysus represents Fate or any of its equivalents; (2) that the god is a life force or some other pantheistic “god of ecstacy in religion”; or (3) that the play gathers its primary force from the encounter between Dionysus and Pentheus.

My reading of The Bacchae is an internal one: I want to see what the play will yield on only its own terms. I realize, of course, that political and social ideas both press in on the play and, if we seek them, emanate from it. These ideas are, I believe, extra-dramatic: they radiate from the script, enriching it and partially explaining its genesis, but they are not present as a dramatic immediacy.