Erwin Piscator's Political Theatre: The Development of Modern German Drama by C. D. Innes (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 213 welcomed, although Esslin and Russell Taylor are now so readily available in paperback editions that the large quotations from these critics' major books might well have been exchanged for something less easy to find. I would have welcomed a frankly astringent piece, like Nigel Dennis on "Pintermania." I would also wish to have a fuller bibliography of Pinter's own works that noted the two published versions of The Caretaker and the three versions of The Dwarfs (comparison of these texts often leads a student to grapple both with style and structure). The 1971 edition of the Poems should also have been noted, since it adds nine poems to the 1968 edition, including six not previously published. And I'd gladly exchange the Paris Review interview (which is available in book-form elsewhere) for the most revealing one with Mel Gussow in The New York Times Magazine, 5 December 1971. This brings me to further reaction to this volume. Pinter has given few interviews and made few speeches, but those that have been printed are so eloquent of his developing powers that I wish some publisher would reprint them in a separate volume; or perhaps a periodical might give over a special issue to this purpose. Among the now lengthening shelves of books about Pinter, one slim one might profitably be by the author. JOHN RUSSELL BROWN University of Sussex ERWIN PISCATOR'S POLITICAL THEATRE: THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN GERMAN DRAMA, by C. D. Innes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972. 248 pp. $14.95. As Ulrich Weisstein has suggested in an earlier review of this volume, it is probable that the organizational principle of Innes's book is based on that of John Willett's The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht: A Study from Eight Aspects. Innes has organized his material under the following eight chapter headings: 1. The Weimar Republic: Art and Environment; 2. The Agitprop Theatre: Politics; 3. Agitprop and Revue: Society; 4. Documentary Drama: the Material; 5. Epic Theatre: the Actor and the Structure; 6. Total Theatre: the Audience; 7. New Drama: the Author; and 8. Piscator: Contemporaries and Critics. These superficially logical subdivisions tend to overlap radically and force the author into covering the same terrain over and over again, but they never allow him to get very far beneath the surface. Instead of eight illuminating facets of a major figure and his work (as we have in Willett's Brecht book) we have instead eight randomly crossed tracks in a terrain which is never mapped as a composite entity. The organizational difficulties presented to the reader by this book are matched by difficulties of similar scale in the areas both of style and of content. Clearly Mr. Innes feels that insufficient attention has been paid to Piscator and his theatrical innovations. There are few who would dispute the need for further study of Piscator's important place in the development of modern German stage practice. But there may be fewer yet who would agree 214 BOOK REVIEWS that the best way to establish Piscator's place is by the kind of shrill evangelism that so often mars Innes's book. There seems little scholarly purpose, for instance, in attempting to establish the uniqueness of Innes's work (as the dust jacket attempts to do) at the expense of ignoring as valuable a piece of Marxist scholarship on Piscator as Hans-Joachim Fiebach's 1965 two-volume dissertation. But it is symptomatic perhaps that Innes ignores a work of Marxist scholarship specifically. He seems consistently to want to redeem Piscator for the "Western World" and to be somewhat embarrassed by the specifically Marxist orientation of much of Piscator's work. But this choice of focus, allied with Innes's passionate wish to establish the originality of Piscator's stage work, produces a very bad case of scholarly tunnel vision. In order to establish Piscator's originality, Innes must consistently deny the close ties which obtained between the revolutionary theatre and film in Germany and that of the Soviet Union in the 1920s. In Innes's rather extraordinary view, not only was Piscator working independently and with little or no knowledge of Soviet experiments in...