Holy Theatre: Ritual and the Avant Garde by Christopher Innes (review)

312 Book Reviews tion with state support and with all the benefits and nightmares that official "slipport" has involved in the long and checkered history of the German stage. We have in Innes's work not merely a history of the critical reception of texts but something much more complex: a history of how plays were chosen and rehearsed as well as a history of how they were then received by critics and the general public. All this material il) buttressed in Innes's study by the facts and figures of the box office. Though this book examines a great many data, it is neither turgid nor colorless . The data are presented in a lively style and with sensitive attention to major details of productions. What emerges is a composite picture of the modern German theatre with all of its liveliness, problems, and contradictions . Though priced in hard-cover beyond all reason, the book in paper will be of extraordinary benefit to anyone wishing to have a comprehensive and reliable overview of modern German theatre. JOHN FUEOJ, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND CHRISTOPHER INNES. Holy Theatre: Ritual and the Avant Garde. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981. Pp. xi. 283. illustrated. Christopher Innes has written a highly instructive and cogent volume on Holy Theatre, tying all the loose strings together, systematizing what had been askew, explaining what had remained moot. Antonin Artaud, who created the. expression "Holy Theatre," applied it to a "spiritual" performance in which drama could gain transcendence; he was not referring to a religious happening in the sense of organized religion, but rather using the Latin word religio, which means a linking back to a mythological or primitive past, to an iIIo tempore - a beginning. The theatre, then, is to be viewed as a laboratory in which mythical material is explored and the "naked actor," when inhabiting the stage, is to be viewed as an archaic being, in archetypal attitudes. Innes, therefore, concentrates on "imagistic and quasireligious plays or psychodramas" which do not emphasize verbal or rely exclusively upon cerebral means of communication, but, on the contrary, focus upon dreams, the unconscious as a way of arousing audiences to full partici· pation. The onlooker may then be projected back to his "roots" during the dramatic spectacle, to the purest of states, without experiencing the upollu_ tion" of multiple theatrical conventions. Such theatre seeks to return to a natural condition and divest itself of all the mechanical and technical barnacles modem civilization has attached to it. The volume begins, as to be expected, with a description of the works of the symbolists and Jarry under the rubric "Dreams, Archetypes and the Irrational ," though the word archetype is not explained and is used in various ways throughout the volume. Maeterlinck's drama, neglected unfortunately by so many modem directors, is discussed for its concentration on atmosphere, its emphasis on the musical structure of language, its inner states plastically realized , its focus on intuition and the unconscious. Jarry's King Ubu emerged Book Reviews 313 from the symbolist mold: puppetry, scatology, the destruction of the logical world enabled the visionary and visceral experience to take on existence. After attending the opening, Yeats wrote: "After us the Savage God," a prophetic statement. Innes goes on to Strindberg, who broke out of the naturalistic background , and a discussion of To Damascus, A Dream Play, The Ghost Sonata, in which characters were referred to as "souls" and abstractions rather than individual flesh-and-blood personalities; where settings were unknown spheres of being. bathed in "unfamiliar perspectives"; and conventional plots and their linear constructions were banished. The best section of Holy Theatre is devoted to expressionist staging and German expressionism. phrasing first used in a dramatic context by Walter Hasenc1ever in his series of essays "The Theatre of Tomorrow ... the call for a spiritual stage." Innes defines the movement further with an analysis of Hasenclever's play, Humanity (1918), a work in which the everyday world is experienced as a nightmare - as vicious and decadent - which could be perfected via transformation. There follows a brief analysis of Ernst Toller's Transfiguration (1919), with its faith placed squarely on the individual. The expressionist's use of language, "emotionally...