Kjeld Abell by Frederick J. Marker (review)

342 BOOK REVIEWS that of the director and, in fact, of all those involved in production. I find him vulnerable only when he, with sublime egalitarianism. gives all past scholarship an equal hearing. Six plays are treated, spaced about twelve years apart, from the trivial Strindberg play First Warning (1893) to the most important Swedish play of the past thirty yean;, namely Lan; Forssell's Sunday Promenade (1963). (First Warning is available in a Washington Square Press collection of Strindberg's onc-act plays; Sunday Promenade in Robert Corrigan's Vol. 4 of The New Theater of Europe.) In between we have Tor Hedberg's lohan Ulfstjerna (1907), which is never likely to be translated but serves admirably for analytical purposes. The two major Swedish playwrights after Strindberg are Par Lagerkvist and Hjalmar Bergman; they are represented by The Hangman (Englished in a Nebraska Press collection of Lagerkvist's plays) and Mr. Sleeman is Coming (in English in a University of Washington volume of Bergman's theatre), the latter one of the real classics of the one-act play fonn . Rounding out the picture is Stig Dagerman's The Condemned (available in Scandinavian Plays of the 20th Century. Third Series [Princeton, 1951]. but O.P.), probably the closest one can get to Ingmar Bergman without including Ingmar Bergman. We have here an admirably thorough though drastically foreshortened history of modern Swedish drama. lomqvlst'S approaCh na.s HS limitations; It works well on closed drama, less well on open drama. Yet when quantification becomes difficult, a sensitive mind steps in to put things in the right perspective. Nonetheless, critical language is sometimes problematic. Like the late John Gassner, I would be inclined, frequently, to call what Tt)rnqvist calls "symbols," dramatic "punctuation marks" instead. I do not like the term "symbol" with indetenninate focus. And I wish the label "epic" were not assigned so readily to any device or sequence not obviously dramatic. But Tornqvist, a product of the Uppsala School, is a leader in drama research. His memorable dissertation on O'Neill was wrillen in English; he speaks an impeccably beautiful English. Let us hope that his methodology soon finds a larger audience, in English. RICHARD B. VOWLES University of Wisconsin-Madison KJELD ABELL. by Frederick J. Marker. Boston: Twayne, 1976. 172 pp. God knows Kjeld Abell needs to be Introduced 10 the t:nglIsn-reaOlr..t;; world; his stature in Denmark is roughly that of Thornton Wilder or Lillian Hellman here. And yet I cannot think of a single production in the United States and Canada. The four best plays exist in adequate (sometimes better than adequate) English, though tucked away in remote spots and out of print. Somebody in the theatre should know his plays. And they are certainly superior to P.O. Enquist's The Night of the Tribades, which made it to Broadway (albeit briefly), apart from Ibsen and Strindberg's, the only Scandinavian play to do so in the twentieth century. And there are always the BOOK REVIEWS 343 academic theatres where Abell's theatre should find a congenial reception, opposed as it is to all complacency, cant, and compulsive restriction. What is it like? Giraudoux? It is customary to liken Abell to Giralldoux, with his wit, elegance, and theatrical legerdemain. ] would say, rather, that he is a cross between Shaw and Cocteau, if such a cross-fertilization is conceivable , and it is not. That may be just Abell's problem. A Shavian prolixity only occasionally finds the right objective correlative, so something fairly often seems just a bit out of phase in Abell. Still, his pre-eminence is undeniable, and he deserves just the kind of introduction that Twayne has given himdetailed , honest, and reliable. Nobody knows more about the Scandinavian theatre than Frederick Marker ; he and Lise-Lone Marker have provided us with the first concise and comparative view of the whole Scandinavian stage over the centuries. In the book under review, he makes each Abell play come alive in production, with attention to social setting, stagecraft, and contemporary criticism. He reconstructs the play without condescending to the usual expectations of plot summary. Here one can experience Abell without reading him, and...