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106 MODERN DRAMA May Joe (words) and Bob (music), the two slaves who cannot obey. In Cascando, we have three voices, three musical instruments: opener, voice, music. Voices and sounds to reach another human being. Has Beckett succeeded? He does not think he has. He confessed to a friend that in his radio plays he had not fully exploited the possibilities of sound. Giovanna Capone stresses the grief of the great poet whose tragedy is the fear of not communicating, not reaching, not being, the fear of not existing. "I do not exist. The fact is well known." "... death! One minute picking happy at the dung, on the road, in the sun ... and then-bang!-all her troubles over. All the laying and hatching. Just one great squawk and then ... peace." (All That Fall) The third chapter is dedicated to Harold Pinter who is "pretty well obsessed with words when they get going." In his first radio play, A Slight Ache, we listen to two characters who don't listen to each other, don't see each other. Giovanna Capone agrees with P. Ferris that listening to Pinter, "the general impression is always cleverness." Harold Pinter himself admits that the result of his work is often "completely incomprehensible to the audience." This is the reverse of Beckett's dream of reaching the listener by echoing in his conscience. Pinter's A Night Out is cited as a typical television play. For The Dwarfs, there is a quotation by Stuart Hall: "dramatically totally lacking in conviction" (the theatrical version seen in Boston is much more effective). The conclusion is accordingly that Harold Pinter does not excel as a radio dramatist. We wonder why he has been included in this book. If Giovanna Capone were to write a book on Italian and German radio dramatists, she would find out that not one of them has been influenced by Dylan Thomas (literary preciousness is seldom used as a medium of communication), nor by Harold Pinter (being incomprehensible is equal to artistic "defeat"), but many were influenced by Beckett. They use a naked, simple language. They want to be understood. Only a writer who knows how to throw a bridge to his fellow man is a real poet. Dramas for Voices is an interesting book and worth reading. MARIO FRATTJ TWENTIETH CENTURY INTERPRETATIONS OF THE ICEMAN COMETH, by John Henry Raleigh, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1968, 117 pp., $3·95· Eugene O'Neill wrote very few truly great plays. While recognizing his preeminence in American drama, we must now admit, as the revival of the past decade subsides, that only a handful of O'Neill's forty or so commercially produced plays survive today as worthy of serious literary study. The Iceman Cometh is, of course, among them. I have always felt that at the top of this restricted list should be, by a considerable margin, Long Day's Journey Into Night. Any system designed to rate the others must necessarily falter, although I would place Desire Under the Elms and The Great God Brown somewhat above The Iceman. My reasons, perhaps arbitrary and admittedly personal, do not now seem quite so valid as they once did, for after reading John Henry Raleigh's Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Iceman Cometh, an excellent collection of critical opinion about O'Neill's exploration of an American lower depths he knew so well, I must admit that the play emerges much stronger and more significant than I had realized. 1969 BOOK REVIEWS 107 I probably should have known better. During my own study of O'Neill at the time of the O'Neill revival I had read almost everything which Raleigh has included. However, seeing them together in this volume, and reading them straight through (one can complete the anthology easily in no more than two moderate sittings) create a different impression. For here in one well-edited book are pieces praising and condemning, analyzing and dissecting, expressed by every voice from the most scholarly opinion to the most off-the-cuff opening night comment . The ultimate and strong realization is that O'Neill wrote one of his most artistically well-integrated plays...

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