Contemporary Drama and the Popular Dramatic Tradition in England by Peter Davison (review)

Book Reviews British alternative theatre. Thus her monograph makes useful reading not only for drama scholars of the period, but for anyone concerned with the convergence of feminist criticism, radical politics, history, and art. EUN DIAMOND, RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PETER DAVISON. Contemporary Drama and the Popular Dramatic Tradition in England. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble 1982. Pp. xi, 193. $26. PeterDavison is obviously in love with his subject. A great deal ofresearch has gone into his book, and one gains the sense that every paragraph has been as much cherished as written. Like an overly proud parent, however, Davison may not have examined his material quite as closely as he has cared for it, and the premise does not entirely deserve the loving wealth of data he has lavished upon it. Dealing with the British theatre of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Davison suggests that the advent ofrealism led audiences to become passive spectators, no longer participating in the event in a direct manner, as in the popular tradition and the true sense of the French assister a. Before realism there was no attempt to create a perfect stage illusion: "At one moment disbelief could be suspended; at another the audience could be made conscious it was in a theatre" (p. 12). The convention of audience address and audience comment upon the stage action was lost in the desire to create a perfectly realistic illusion. Much of this is undeniable, though hardly a new perception. What is new in Davison's thesis is his further suggestion that the ultimate freeing of the stage from trammeling realistic conventions - which began in Britain somewhere in the 1950'S - was possible only because the audience had retained its ability to respond multiconsciously, "due to those forms of theatre that inherited the illegitimate tradition: music hall, variety, the radio half-hour comedy show" (p. 12). This idea is rather less obvious and seems to be based upon the fact that several British playwrights of recent date - notably Osborne, Nichols, and Griffiths - make use of music-hall routines in their work. Professor Davison may well have the cart before the horse. He seems surprised that when the popular tradition reasserted itself there were playwrights capable of making use of it (p. 127). But surely the popular tradition was revived in the drama in the 1950'S to a considerable degree because a working-class audience, and working-class playwrights, liberated by the Butler Education Act of 1944 from their subcultural status, started to cooperate on plays in terms ofthe popular life style and culture with which they had grown up. Vigorous, direct, bawdy, and going back to the Megarean expressions of the Dionysian impulse, the popular tradition was carried on in Britain not just in the music hall, but at the fish-and-chip shop, pub, football match, and parlor, while middle-class culture, stuffed into its starched shirts, was sanctimoniously watching its drawing-room realism. The liberation ofworking-class energies into the drama brought with it the direct responses of a popular tradition that had never been lost. Although Davison's thesis suffers from being too slight to bear the weight of his research, and seems at times both restricting and forced, I enjoyed reading much of the work. The long quotations of music-hall routines and radio programs brought back the days of my own youth, and one can always enjoy a good old sentimental wallow. Book Reviews 149 Readers who did not have this baptism, however, may find them unduly long and not entirely well related to the premise. Throughout the book there are some excellent critical reflections upon certain plays. Davison's remarks about Pinter and the function of the "pause" - that it allows the audience to create its own response - I find particularly good, possibly because they agree with my own perceptions! He is also good on Osborne's The Entertainer. But at times he tries too hard to force his thesis upon texts, as when he suggests that Jerry's main monologue in The Zoo Story is "wholly dependent upon music hall (or rather vaudeville) performer audience relationships" (p. I12). The monologue in question much more evidently belongs to that...