The Personal Vision of Ingmar Bergman by Jörn Donner (review)

336 MODERN DRAMA December the word "matricide" when "infanticide" is dearly intended. Not to be forgiven, however, is the presentation of the play in truncated form. With its last two acts deleted "because the substance of the play is contained in the first three acts" and presented with a note by Professor Sokel on how it all comes out we wonder if it is possible that the professor equates dramatic "substance" with "story." Vying with "The Beggar" for last place, is Walter Hasenclaver's "Humanity ," a morality play composed, like the scenario for a silent film, of brief scenes in which hysterical type-characters (little more than animated slogans) speak captions and hurl exclamations at one another while performing surrealistic feats. Almost as tiresome are two short plays by Kokoschka, "Murderer the Women's Hope" and "Job," in which the surrealistic high jinks, interesting enough in their own right and as foreshadowings of the amusement-park excitements of the modern "happening," are mythically inflated. In the latter play, for example, Kokoschka depicts Job as married to and cuckolded by Anima, but both these figures are so trivial in conception and rendition that neither warrants its imposingly connotative name and the gratuitously opened mythic and psychological veins are left unexplored. Yvan Goll's surrealistic one-act play, "The Immortal One," displays little of this poet's considerable and well-known gifts for pungent imagery and emotional power. On the other hand, a dramatic vignette, "Legend of the Periphery," from the little-known Rolf Lauckner's Cry in the Street is, except for its sentimental ending, most affecting. Dealing with the needs for sex, love, and hate of three old blind men and their encounter with the inevitable German expressionist prostitute, the play conveys all the art-nouveau horror of a lithograph by Munch and much of the poetic grotesquerie of a Ghelderode. Two very good full-length plays in this anthology are Carl Sternheim's "The Strongbox" and Georg Kaiser's "Alkibiades Saved." The theme of Sternheim's play is the alluring effect of money and its power to replace and even surpass in intensity sexual satisfaction. At its best, Sternheim's comic savagery is not unworthy of a place beside Ben Jonson's and Brecht's. In "Alkibiades Saved," Kaiser sardonically views physical pain as the womb from which philosophy is born. The play is most intellectually and dramatically successful in its comic scenes (Socrates harassing the fishwives in the market place with his questions reveals Kaiser's characteristic mastery of mob scenes) and in its ironic handling of Socrates as anti-hero; the play is least effective when it attempts exotic historical spectacle. The anthology concludes on the highest level with the first American publication of Brecht's "Baal" in an excellent translation by Eric Bentley and Martin Esslin. Brecht's conception of the Dionysiac-Or:phic poet, Baal, as he demonically pursues dissolution is Marlovian and mythic. Superbly integrating concrete scene with abstract significance, and dynamic theatrical effects with subtle lyricism, Brecht displays German expressionism at its most eloquent. Even without its other excellent offerings , this anthology would be indispensible for making available to the American reader, after so many years, Brecht's first play. LEONARD QUIRINO Rhode Island College THE PERSONAL VISION OF INGMAR BERGMAN, by Jorn Donner, translated ,by Holger Lundbergh, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Ind., 1964, 276 pp. Price $5.95. Ingmar Bergman is a film maker whose roots are firmly planted in the tradition of the theater. This is not to deny his unique contributions to the art of the film 1965 BOOK REVIEWS 337 nor his unquestioned ability to use the medium creatively. But Bergman began as a stage actor and playwright and has continued his work in the theater while he has been writing and directing thirty films. Currently, he is not only one of the world's leading film artists but holds the most important position in the Swedish theater as head of the Royal Dramatic Theater of Stockholm. He has often been quoted as saying that he can live without the film but not without the theater. Though this book concentrates on an analysis of Bergman's films, its author...