The Revolution in German Theatre 1900-1933 by Michael Patterson (review)

580 Book Reviews ideational fann for which it seems to strive could be overlooked if the individual analyses were really illuminating. For the most part, they are not. Sometimes, as in his treatment of Ghosts, Dukore's discussion enriches the play, Yet, even here, where his presentation of Mrs. Alving as both prostitute and procuress is a useful one, he offers it in a context that robs Mrs. Alving of her growing self:awareness, an approach to once forbidden ideas that pushes her play in the direction of Rosmersholm. More often, Dukare provides pedestrian standard readings ofthe plays, packaged to fit the immediate theme, and too often, as in the section on The Master Builder, complexity is jettisoned for a narrower focus. A consideration of Heartbreak House with the pain and beauty of the play milked away by its conceptual base seems an unproductive sacrifice to a critical mechanism. Dukore, who on other occasions has shown himself a critic of substance, seems to be a victim of an approach which must have seemed a valuable way to talk about three playwrights he admires. GERALD WEALES, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA MICHAEL PATTERSON. The Revolution in German Theatre 1900- 1933. Boston, London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1981. Pp. xiii, 232, illustrated. $29.50. Michael Patterson' s book on the German theatre from 1900 to 1933, the first to appear in the Theatre Production Studies series edited by John Russell Brown, is an exciting beginning to a series that promises new insights into dramatic movements and individual texts through focusing on perfonnance. In the case of those plays growing out of the early twentieth-century Gennan theatre, considerations of petformance are particularly illuminating, for at least one of the major modes of the time, Expressionism, was as much a theatrical style as a philosophical movement. Patterson's book, the first in English to assess the range of German theatre during the first third of this century, begins with a brief but informative survey of the political and social, the philosophical, and the scientific and technological backgrounds of the theatrical revolution, then moves to the theatrical background, tracing German drama briefly from the classicism of Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, and Kleist, through the historical tragedy ofGrillparzer and Hebbel and the realism of Hauptmann, and, finally, to the styles that preceded and shaped Expressionism: the Naturalism ofOtto Brahm, the stylized realism of Max Reinhardt, the design-work of Appia and Craig, Neo-Romantic staging, and the experiments of Kokoschka and Kandinsky. Patterson's discussion of the theories of Expressionism provides an excellent sense of the meeting of philosophy and theatre, and his discussion of political theatre suggests the ways in which Piscator and Brecht transfonned the strengths of Expressionism to satisfy their own ends. By defining Expressionism as a specifically Gennan phenomenon, occasioned by the need of the country's intellectuals to react against social conditions through individual regeneration, Patterson is able to locate with some precision the chronological range of the movement: as a literary phenomenon it begins in 1912 with Sorge's DerBettler and ends by 1921 with Toller's Die Maschinensturmer; as a theatrical style it begins in 1916 with Hasenclever's Der Sohn and is exhausted, for all practical purposes, by 1923. Within the movement, he identifies and discusses two impulses: abstractionism, which sought to establish the primacy of form, and primitivism, which attempted to replace form with visceral expression. Book Reviews 581 When Piscator became director of the Second Proletarian Theatre in 1920, he had to free the theatre from the individualism and irrationalism of Expressionism before political drama could be born. Yet, as Patterson points out, "the abstractionist style of Expressionistic acting ... carried within it the de-individualized quality appropriate to collectivist political theatre," It was Brecht, not Piscalor, however, who realized this fact, accepting the nonrealistic, representative characters and setting ofExpressionism, but transforming its individual concerns into social and political ones. The book examines in detail the production values of Expressionism and the early political theatre through focusing on several plays. As an example of the abstractionist strain in Expressionism, Patterson analyzes productions of Kaiser's Von Morgens bis Mitternachts; he follows a similar strategy with the 1919 production of...