Confronting Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire": Essays in Critical Pluralism ed. by Philip C. Kolin (review)

Book Reviews 135 athletic. David Mayer's account of "toga plays," notably Wilson Barrett's production of The Sign ofthe Cross. argues that the drama succeeded because the audience recognized the immediacy of its central theme, that "imperial power and Christian virtue can coexist." The theme of conflict between the fin de siecie naughtiness for which the decade was notorious. and the resistance of what Tracy Davis calls "the moral majority ," is the focus of Joel H. Kaplan's penetrating paper. "Pineroticism and the problem play; Mrs Tanqueray, Mrs Ebbsmith, and 'Mrs. Pat."· Jim Davis centres his account of Martin Harvey 's The Only Wayan the thesis that in a decade which Holbrook Jackson described as "a battleground between two types of culture, which he defined as the Yellow Book and the Yellow Press," the death of Sydney Canon played to the Boer War jingoism of the latter by exhibiting the spirit of self-sacrifice for a greater cause. Some of the articles focus less clearly. Hugh Maguire's piece on theatre architecture centres on the point that British theatres were architecturally less distinguished than those on the continent, but he does not discuss the economic differences that shaped the buildings. He seems to disapprove of architects "pandering" to the comfort and convenience of the audience. It is unclear what is wrong with the opinion of the Sketch, that "to the playgoer the inside is more important that the out, and the great questions are - Can I see well, can I hear well, shall I be comfortable, shall I be safe and will the decorations be agreeable?" Richard Foulkes has written a fine analytical Introduction, but his piece on Calvert attempts too much, setting down everything that actor did in the 1890s. His descriptions of Calvert's I Henry IV and Alilony and Cleopatra with Richard Flanagan at the Queen's, Manchester (Calvert played Falstaff and Antony) and his Casca in Tree's Julius Caesar are fascinating. but tantalizing: one wants to know more. But it would be ungracious to quibble further with Foulkes. His energy and initiative have brought us a timely and stimulating collection of perspectives on a decade about which we still know too little. ALAN HUGHES, UNIVERSITY OF VlcroRIA PHILIP C. KOLIN, ed. Confronting Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire": Essays in Critical Pluralism. Westport. Conn.: Greenwood Press 1993. ?p. xiv + 255. illustrated. $47.95 This is not a collection of previously published work like the anthologies of Jordan Y. Miller (1971) and Harold Bloom (1988), but fifteen especially commissioned essays, each of which takes a different critical or cultural approach to A Streetcar Named Desire. The editor contributes a feminist revaluation of one of the secondary characters , Eunice Hubbell, a useful bibliography of Streetcar scholarship, and an introduction that summarizes the other essays and notes recent experimental productions of the play. The other fourteen contributors cover a spectrum of critical method that includes the theories of Foucault and Krisleva. post-Soviet Marxism. Reader Response tech- 136 Book Reviews nique, Deconstruction, Chaos and Anti-Chaos theory, Popular Culture, Perception theory, Ethnicity, Mythology, and the more traditional approaches of Fonnalist closereading , analysis of translations and their reception, the play's relation to other Southern Literature, and its Film History. The aim of the collection is not only to illumine Williams's classic play from various angles, but also to demonstrate how recent work in literary and cultural theory can be usefully applied to dramatic texts in general. The result is rich and often exciting, but also, it must be acknowledged, uneven: a bit of a bumpy ride! Collections are.notoriously tricky to evaluate, and in this case the difficulty is compounded because not all the theories deployed are equally appropriate for Streetcar. Using as criterion whether or not a particular approach throws new light on the play itself, the essays can be divided into roughly three categories: a group where the methodologies are not helpful at all; a smaller group which transposes familiar responses successfully into different terminology but does not offer much that is significantly new; and a third group where the unfamiliar approaches are genuinely enlightening. As space is limited, I shall concentrate on the...