Granville Barker and the Dream of Theatre by Dennis Kennedy (review)

Reviews371 Dennis Kennedy. Granville Barker and the Dream of Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Pp. xiv + 231. $39.50. A welcome, reassuring, fastidious piece of old-fashioned historical scholarship, this work merits praise for the singularity of its purpose and the richness of its details. Peppered, littered, strewn (lavishly, fascinatingly , interestingly) with facts, dates, play titles, cast lists, rare and familiar illustrations and photographs, and rounded off with an exhaustive appendix cataloguing its subject's productions, here is theatre history at once revealing, informative, instructive, and documentative, or at least as much as theatre history can ever tell us about the elusive, enigmatic man known as Harley Granville Barker. What we have here also is the presentation of a dream, of what the theatre could and can be, a journey the end of which is now visible at the RSC and National Theatre of Great Britain. Here too is the sharply centered and psychologically sensitive picture of Barker and his artistic tenacity, professional commitment, aesthetic beliefs, and fierce drive for theatrical excellence, for something more than the dulling, mindless commercialism of a kind of theatre he began in and came to loathe. If this book is also a worthy tribute to its complex topic, it completes in its unique, indispensable way the "strange case" of Barker, a story begun three years ago with Eric Salmon's enthusiastic, overly speculative biography which supplanted irrevocably C. B. Purdom's sentimental journalism of 1955. Incidentally, to Salmon's restorative efforts must now happily be added his thoroughly edited collection of Barker's selected letters (Wayne State University Press, 1986) which provides many more sides to this peculiar man of many parts. To clarify, however: Professor Kennedy's book is not a biography, revisionist or otherwise; rather, it concentrates on Barker's ideas as presented in successive productions, fleshing out and finishing up with prescient particulars the course of Barker's practical stage work and his later magisterial writings. And the reader should also be aware that in a straightforward, plain, engaging style, the author leapfrogs through chronology in a most sophisticated fashion very much in control of his material. Thus the text has breaks in action, variety, flow, and pace while avoiding the narrow rigidity often common to more pedestrian narratives. In sum, then, Barker breathes, and we have not another show business story, but the many aspects of a man's career in the playhouse, an arena not for the faint of heart. If Salmon gave us hagiography, Kennedy offers instead the sight of a brilliant comet coursing through the heavens whose bursts of light and showers of sparks illuminate a myriad of astonishing activities from a multi-talented, multi-faceted personality, only to extinguish itself, deliberately and purposefully, at mid-career. Perhaps this remarkable versatility has been the worst enemy of Barker's reputation; but Kennedy's commentary does focus precisely on the most urgent matters which probably made Barker abandon the theatre at forty (to become, as Lewis Casson said, "a mere professor") : the absurd censorship and banning by the Lord Chamberlain of Barker's play Waste; and the failure to establish a national theatre; and probably most importantly, Barker's escape from these theatrical frustrations into 372Comparative Drama the security and luxury of a wealthy second marriage to an American millionairess. For some it was a flight from his closest, truest friends into the indolent, spoiled life of a country gentleman, something Shaw said was "a hopeless proposition." Kennedy, like Salmon, argues, however , that Barker did not "give up" the theatre as much as he simply moved on into other forms of theatrical expression. Whatever the truth, or versions thereof, Barker's success, the fulfillment of his dream of theatre , was posthumous, unreaUzed until the opening of the National Theatre in October 1976. On the other hand, his famous work as actor, director, playwright, and manager at the Royal Court (1904-07) and the illustrious Shakespearean presentations at the Savoy (1912-14), clearly and carefully reconstructed and described by Kennedy, show how Barker quite simply returned the theatre to itself: true repertory, a small ensemble of regular actors, no stars, no cuts or elaborate scenery. Here was focus...