Post-war British Theatre Criticism by John Elsom (review)

Book Reviews 317 two of these examples were "pillaged" from Frances Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1796), a repository of colorful thieves' cant to which Barnes returns frequently for bright baubles. Grose explains "rabbit suckers" as "Young spendthrifts taking up goods on trust at great prices"; "buss beggar" as "An old superannuated fumbler, whom none but beggars will suffer to kiss them." In dealing with Barnes's llse of parody and popular culture, including American musicals, songs and dance, and movies, Dukare is most infonnative , winkling out the parodic echoes, satirical inferences and nuances, and sources that sometimes Barnes himself had forgotten. Dukare also discusses the major theatrical influences on Barnes's style: expressionism; Artaudian and Brechtian devices; and English Renaissance - especially Jonsonian drama . These influences help create a powerful blend of visual and verbal intensity, savage wit and bitter satire, in which man's folly, greed and stupidity hurl him into ridiculous, extreme, and often brutal activity. The vanity of human wishes is frequently set against a cosmic backdrop beyond which the forces of the universe lie, hostile, indifferent, or laughing mirthlessly. "Blind Chance rules the world," King Carlos eventually learns in The Bewitched. and there is no true geometry in the universe. Barnes's mixing, switching and clashing of styles and moods; his shocking, disorienting, often spectacular theatrical coups, designed to keep his audience alert and aware of new perspectives , are described as "turning on a sixpence," part of what Barnes cans "a comic theatre of contrasting moods and opposites, where everything is simultaneously tragic and ridiculous." Dukore shows with numerous examples how such a theatre unites multiple disparate effects into a singular form that reflects something of our own fragmented world. There are also chapters on Barnes's early works and his adaptations, which will of course interest any BarnesophiIe who wishes to have a fuller picture of the playwright's apprenticeship and his approach to adapting Jacobean and European works for English audiences. Unfortunately, the texts of these remain unpublished. Perhaps Heinemann have plans to rectify this deficiency. This book will not be the last word on so controversial a playwright, who is only fifty years old. Barnes's latest work. . the seven monologues entitled "Barnes's People," published in the Complete Plays, is discussed in a postscript by Dukore. They offer new viewpoints, a more realistic view of the world, and a mastery of the dramatic monologue (reminiscent of Browning, I would say). We.should be grateful to Professor Dukore for a valuable pioneering study of a complex and demanding author too long neglected by the academic world. IAN TODD, PACE UNIVERSITY JOHN ELSOM. Post-war British Theatre Criticism. London, Boston and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1981. Pp. 270, illustrated. Compilations of theatre reviews and critical essays are common. Uncommon, however, is EIsom's group of reviews of carefully selected productions on the London stage from 1944 through 1978. 318 Book Reviews It is no accident that Elsom has selected the Old Vic's 1944 production of Richard III (with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh) with which to open and Harold Pinter's Betrayal at the National Theatre in 1978 with which to conclude. For the Old Vic was an important part of the National's early effort to become a reality. There were several "false dawns," as Elsam aptly names them, in the realization of such an institution. By 1978, however, when Betrayal opened, the firmly established National Theatre had become a symbol of the symbiotic union of establishment and experiment, even though the former held a slight edge over the latter in the plays the artistic directors chose to include in their offerings. So, between the two bookends of Eisam's book - Richard III and Betrayal - one finds a surprisingly accurate representation of what was happening on the English stage of both commercial and so-called noncommercial theatres since World War II. Indeed, the events before and after the much-discussed stage revolution touched off by John Osborne's Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court Theatre in 1956 have now faIlen into place as part of England's long stage history. Shakespeare, Farquhar, Ibsen, Chekhov, Eliot, Rattigan, Coward, Priestley...