Oskar Kokoschka: The Painter as Playwright by Henry I. Schvey (review)

Book Reviews "Meyerhold and Music," and "Zinaida Railill and Camille." The varied sources for these translations include letters and notes by Meyerhold. The translations read well, conveying the irritation and the warmth and loyalty and admiration his personality provoked in others. We share in the emotional and intellectual excitement that working with Meyerhold gave to his colleagues in the twenties and thirties. The book is a fine addition to Braun's work; to M.L. Hoover's Meyerhold: The Art ofConscious Theatre (1974), with its useful list of Meyerhold's productions; and to Konstantin Rudnitsky's splendid Rezhisser Meierkhold (1969), now available in George Petrov's lucid and elegant English translation as Meyerhold the Director (Ardis Publishers, 1981), at present the standard work on Meyerhold. We now possess, thanks to all these scholars, many ideas for how to "make it new" in the theatre. Mixail Sadovskij claims that Meyerhold wanted carved over the entrance to the new theatre which was to have been named after him these words ofPushkin's: "The spirit of the age demands major changes on the dramatic stage as well." Meyerhold's work shows us how many such changes were, and can still be, accomplished. ANDREW PARKIN, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA HENRY I. SCHVEY. Oskar Kokoschka: The Painter as Playwright. Detroit: Wayne State University Press 1982. Pp. 163, illustrated. $25. Henry I. Schvey is now an Associate Professor ofEnglish at Leiden University. In 1973 and again in 1977, he was granted a week of interviews with Kokoschka in his home in Switzerland. Some ofthis material he wrote up as articles in Dutch and English; much of it he submitted to Indiana University in 1977 as a doctoral dissertation on "The Visual Element in the Plays of Oskar Kokoschka." The final outcome of his researches is the present book, intended as an interdisciplinary study of the relationships between Kokoschka's plays and his work in the visual arts. Interest in Kokoschka as a dramatist normally focuses on the innovatory dramas of the expressionist period, and this is the case here - though Schvey, having listened to Kokoschka, is prepared to doubt the existence of expressionism; for Kokoschka opposed such classification, stating that there was no such movement, "only young people trying to find their bearings in the world." Such statements are not very helpful. Nearly all writers and artists reject labels and stress their own individualities, but this is no reason for the critic and historian to do the same. Kokoschka's early plays were startlingly different from anything else at the time and reasons for this divergence need to be adduced, yet Schvey merely points to the whole tradition ofnineteenth-century popular theatre as found in the works ofFerdinand Raimund and Johann Nepomuk Nestroy and in the magical world of the Austrian baroque. How Kokoschka compressed all of this into playlets of a few pages Schvey does not explain. Similarly, Schvey permits no explanation in terms of "influence." According to him, Kokoschka's sex-war dramas were not influenced by Strindberg, Wedekind, or Weininger; instead, their works merely "present analogies" to what Kokoschka was doing. Rejection of expressionism in general does make it easier, however, for Schvey to consider Kokoschka's oeuvre as a whole, without suggesting that the expressionistic Book Reviews 579 elements in the early playlets make a later historical drama like Comenius dull and literary by comparison with the earlier works. In general, Schvey deals with texts onthe one hand and pictures on the other. Less time is spent on the lives of the works on the stage. As a result, Schvey's book lacks the feeling of excitement which the plays themselves generate. Sokel, for example, has described Kokoschka as a dramatist who successfully created theatre "as a magic show, as visual and pantomimic liberation from the confusing fetters of realism and propriety." Schvey is aware of Kokoschka's theatricality and of the importance of the "vision," but prefers to hunt for literary symbols. Nor is this pursuit completely mistaken. Kokoschka made sure that there were plenty of them by his constant revisions, but symbols of day and night, sun and moon, life and death are not what make his plays fascinating. Indeed...