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Book Reviews III documentation precise. (I did notice a few slips and errors, however. The famous editor, Erno Osv~t. could not have reviewed a 1933 Molnar play, because he died in 1929 [po 141]. And Dezso Kosztolanyi [t885- t936] wrote poems about children, not novels [po 48].) Molnar is known in the West primarily as a playwright, though he also wrote novels, short stories and hundreds of sketches, some of them quite brilliant. Aside from the juvenile classic The PauL Street Boys, very little of his fiction and his journalistic writings is familiar to non-Hungarian readers, though over the years quite a few of these pieces have been translated into German, English and other languages. When one reads Gyorgyey's chapters on Molnar the novelist and journalist, as well as her brief but useful literary-historical introduction, one realizes that this urbane, cosmopolitan writer, this multilingual, peripatetic hotel resident and boulevardier, did come from a tradition, he did have roots in a city, in a culture. And as time goes on and we gain greater distance from the world he knew , it also becomes clear that in his seemingly supranational comedies, satires, farces, Molnar had more to say about that world than his often disapproving critics ever gave him credit for. IVAN SANDERS, SUFFOLK COUNTY COMMUNITY COLLEGE JOHN McGRATH. A Good Night Out. Popular Theatre: Audience. Class and Form. London: Eyre Methuen 1981. Pp. xiv, t26. $7.95 (PB). DAVID BRADBY , LOUIS JAMES AND BERNARD SHARRATT, cds. Performance and Politics in Popular Drama:Aspects ofPopUlar Entertainment in Theatre, Film and Television, 1800-1976. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1980. Pp. xii, 331, illustrated. $13.95 (PB). John McGrath may be the least-known of the writers of political alternative theatre in Britain. While David Edgar, Trevor Griffiths and Howard Brenton have entered the mainstream of the National and Royal Shakespeare Companies, McGrath has chosen to stay with touring - with half-a-dozen dedicated actors, playing village halls in the Scots Highlands and workingmen's clubs in industrial England. Further, his many plays have entered print late, obscurely (Aberdeen People's Press and West Highland Publishing Co.) or not at all. Till now, McGrath has represented socialist theatre for the masses through the practice of the two 7:84 companies he founded ten years ago (the history of T84 is usefully documented in an appendix to this book). The growth of touring companies offering an alternative, such as 7:84, since the late sixties is a striking development in British theatre, and has finally been studied by Catherine Itzin in Stages in the Revolution and in the volume edited by Sandy Craig, Dreams and Deconstructions . After the years ofdemonstrating his kind oftheatre, McGrath's A GoodNight Out provides the supporting theory. McGrath's book consists of six lectures he gave at Cambridge in 1979, with the disadvantage that his subject is chopped into six chunks of equal size. As well as justifying his own work, McGrath is engaging in an unfolding discussion with opponents (like Martin Esslin, accused of trying to tum Brecht into "a sweet little bourgeois dreamer," p. 89) and with semi-sympathizers (like Edgar, Griffiths and Arnold Wesker) 112 Book Reviews - so at times I felt I had come into the middle ofa debate. Each lecture includes personal experiences, elements of theory about class, theatre and entertainment, and history (Blue Blouses in Russia in the twenties; Daria Fo; Kurt Weill, praised for the rich culture he drew from popular entertainment). McGrath begins by challenging the belief that "the best theatre is about the problems and the achievements ofarticulate middle·class men and sometimes women, is pedormed in comfortable theatres, in large cities, at a time that will suit the eating habits of the middle class at a price that only the most detennined of the lower orders could afford, and will generally have an air of intellectuality about it" (p. 15). He mocks the critics who think that Pinter "has said something significant, or has - significantly - failed to say something significant" (p. 84), by writing Betrayal backwards. He shows, too, that the language of theatre not only is a matter of sets, lighting and so on, but...

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