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718 Book Reviews analyses theatrically compelling. Drawing on the work of Raymond Williams, Lacey adroitly disentangles several conceptions of realism, distinguishing between realism as a project and realism as a style. Realism as a project attempts to show.social relations as they really are. Its ambition is to present a political, particularly materialist, analysis of the world. Realism, the style, offers verisimilitude of the outward forms of social life. In discussing selected plays by Arnold Wesker, Lacey shows how the tension between these two conceptions led to creative difficulLies, resulting in an imperfect balance between characterization and Wesker's didactic needs. As Lacey shows. this tension led some playwrights who initially used realistic means of representation to explore other dramaturgical strategies [0 analyze society. Occasionally, though, when discussing writers al a specific stage of their careers, Lacey might have noted more about choices these writers made at subsequent stages. For example, he quotes at length a 1964 article by Troy Kennedy Martin deriding the limitations of TV "naturalism " without mentioning that Kennedy Martin would later write the TV series Reilly, Ace ofSpies, probably his best known work. But then, I found myself hoping that Mr. Lacey will write another book, carrying his analysis forward into the 1970S and perhaps later. The book also includes a chapter on the relationship between New Wave theater and New Wave film. Although this chapter stands somewhat on its own, it is helpful because of the relationship between the two movements: they had similar aims (although Lacey rightly notes the differences); there was a crossover between personnel associated with the two media (most notably Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson ); and films were made of several key plays. PAUL HAXO, SAN FRANCISCO LINDA BEN-ZVI, ed. Theater in fsrael. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1996. Pp. xxi, 450, illustrated. $52.5°. "An American Professor of Drama and Theater who lives in Israel," editor Linda BenZvi is surprised to find herself in the unique position of commissioning "the first collection in either English or Hebrew to explore the historical, ideological, political, sociological, cultural, and aesthetic background of Israeli theater" (viii). Perhaps, for an undertaking such as this, a certain distance is necessary, and we Israelis are too involved to realize the wide interest generated by our theater abroad. Critic Shosh Avigal compares the patriotic protection of locally manufactured goods in the early years of the State to the fostering of "homegrown," original plays (31). Now that the local consumption of home produce has been finnly established, Ben-Zvi is promoting the export of these cultural waves, showing lis that what is homegrown is not necessarily also homespun. The bulk of this book consists of essays written by Israeli academics and critics, offering the insiders' cultural and political points of view. Only those few plays which Book Reviews 7'9 have been translated and perfonned abroad have received international attention. The book selS oul to correct this situation, by providing a finn historical background and surveying the major dramatic and theatrical achievements. The volume offers an embarras de richesse: historical surveys. dramatic and thematic analyses, interviews with playwrights, directors and actors, a report of a symposium on Palestinian theatre, tables, bibliography, glossary. and index. There is some unavoidable overlap, but the range and diversity of the material covered compensate for it. The historical survey of the Hebrew theater is divided up between Freddie Rokem (the early period, 1889-1948) and Shosh Avigal (from the founding of lhe Slale in 1948 to the present). The War of Independence is thus constituted as an anislic watershed. In Shosh Avigal's narrative, the phases of the Israeli theatre are directly related to the different Arab-Israeli wars. Freddie Rokern constructs his historical account around the thesis that between the two World Wars the Hebrew theater attempted to ovenum the traditional marginality of Jewish experience, redefining "the center and the periphery in cultural-ideological as well as geographic terms" (p. 62). Rokem shows the nascent theater as tom between two conflicting desires: the wish to create a unique Jewish expression and the wish to be part of European culture. Gershon Shaked traces the development of theater in Israel, in tenns borrowed...

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