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Book Reviews 151 Instead of that, there is reference to ''Jjelle'' as the plural of "/jell" (pp. 141, 148). Fele (violin) becomes/edle on p. 323: ''forltrylle'' (p. 236) should be ''forlryl/e'' (p. 236), On p. 306 we find "dwarves" (a form which does not appear in any of my dictionaries); four pages later we see the correct "dwarfs." "Fictionary" appears on p. 312, "fictional" on the same page eleven lines down. "Utopic" appears on p. 183; two pages later the correct adjective "utopian" is used. With all these reservations, is the book worth reading? Yes, it is. Never before has so much infonnation about folk tales Ibsen might have known been gathered between two covers. Never before have references to these tales been so perceptively applied to Ibsen's plays, especially the later ones. Not always are the arguments for a reference entirely convincing. One continually encounters a critical reductionism, making Ibsen's complex characters into simple characters of ballad and legend. "Brand is a huldre or demon who has read Kierkegaard's Either-Or" (p. 110). He is surely more than that. "Hilde Wangel, Hedda Gabler, and Rebecca West ... all have demon natures" (p. I II). They all have human natures too. At the same time genuine insights abound: All of Ibsen's plays from the first to the last are about the ability to be the most one can be, about the great act, work of art or idea. His focus is always on a character - usually, but not always, a man - who has the potential for greatness . He may, as in KOllgsenmerne have the potential for being a great king, or he may, like Falk in Kjtelighedens komedie have the potential for becoming a great poet. Whatever the potential is, the protagonist has to solve the problems of dealing with life and love before it can come to fruition (p. 117) Jacobsen's lining up the archetypal myths and motifs in Part 11.3 is certainly very helpful. This book casts new light on Ibsen. Reading him will never the same as before we realized the influence of folk tales and legends on his depiction of characters and situations. The book should be read in (dare we hope?) a carefully revised and corrected edition. CHARLES LELAND, ST. MICHAEL' S COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO EUGENE VAN ERVEN. Radical People's Theatre. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1988. Pp. 238, illustrated. $27.50. With the exception of Stefan Brecht's dense and highly detailed two-volume Bread and Puppet Theatre, Theodore Shank's scholarly American Alternative Theatre, and Ron·Jenkins's entertaining Acrobats of the Soul, as well as occasional articles and a few obscure volumes, radical popular theatre forms in America have received too little attention. Internationally, considerable attention has been paid to the plays and politics 152 Book Reviews of Dario Fo, but not much else has been readily available on the diverse groups and artists who during the turbulent sixties turned to the streets and alleys, to the abandoned warehouses and forgotten theatres of the world, to offer their unique and powerful forms of alternative political theatre. Eugene van Erven's Radical People's Theatre is a welcome international survey of the most important of the numerous politicized theatre troupes and artists to appear in the past thirty years. For many of these artists, such as Peter Schumann, founder of The Bread and Puppet Theater, all arts are political: Whether they like it or not, if they stay in their own realm, preoccupied with their proper problems, the arts support the status quo, which in itself is highly political. Or they scream and kick and participate in our own country's struggle for liberation in whatever haphazard way they can, probably at the expense of some of their sensitive craftmanship, but definitely for their own soul's sake. (f.p.) Following a brief introductory chapter, van Erven offers a hurried overview of political theatre from ancient Greece to the mid-I96os. He follows this with an examination of the social and political phenomena of the late 1960s that is, as he puts it, "a confused picture in which elements of pacifism, civil rights agitation, antiVietnam...

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