The Second Wave: British Drama for the Seventies by John Russell Taylor (review)

Book Reviews • THE SECOND WAVE: BRITISH DRAMA FOR THE SEVENTIES, by John Russell Taylor. New York: Hill & Wang, 1971. 236 pp. $6.50. Readers of Anger and After and The Rise and Fall of the Well-Made Play will know what to expect from Taylor's new book. He turns the same gaze intelligent and informed, yet relaxed - on every play, often too briefly. He works from texts (and occasionally his own interviews), rarely referring to the plays in performance. He trusts his own judgments, not bothering to refer to other critics, while revealing few strong personal reactions, whether boredom or enthusiasm. He dislikes generalizing, attempting this for some particular writers, but such conclusions as he offers are cautious and perfunctory. He gives a lot of useful information and a little worthwhile criticism. "Useful" is the key-word for his latest study. This time his subject is British playwrights who have become known during the sixties, the first book on these men (surprisingly, they are all men). Eight have chapters to themselves (Edward Bond, David Mercer, Peter Nichols, Joe Orton, Tom Stoppard, David Storey, Peter Terson and Charles Wood) and another 22 receive a few pages of comment. The best essays are those on Mercer, who is overdue for serious evaluation, and Stoppard, whom Taylor finds lacking in "fundamental seriousness." Nearly all the authors have written for television, and Taylor includes both this work and their handful of film-scripts. He mentions, on my count, 193 different pieces, his summaries ranging from "brightly negligible" for an early John Hopkins TV play to five and a half pages on Nichols' Joe Egg. Often, the pace is so rapid as to be very confusing: for example, when he outlines the plots of eleven of Nichols' TV plays in five pages. Obviously, the very best of the dramas discussed (Storey's Home, Peter Barnes' The Ruling Class, Bond's Narrow Road to the Deep North, Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) deserve much fuller analysis, an account of their sources, stage history and critical reception. Further, the book lacks a context, for it is not describing theatre in the late sixties. Taylor 331 332 BOOK REVIEWS gives readers no sense of the Pinters and Osbornes continuing to write, of the influence of off-Broadway writers, or of the differences between subsidized, commercial, experimental and provincial theatres, and the effects of all this on the dramatists. And "British Drama for the Seventies" (his sub-title) might possibly prove to lie in the hands of an unmentioned avant-garde, including Stanley Eveling, John Grillo, Jane Arden and the Portable Theatre group. I spotted few errors: Taylor fails to note that Simon Gray's Spoiled began as a TV play and misdates Hopkins' Beyond the Sunrise (actually 1969). The Dolly Scene is misplaced in Hopkins' evolution, as he fails to note that it was filmed nearly four years before its screening (such are the strange ways of TV companies). Since he gives the impression of being comprehensive , some surprising omissions should be mentioned: he ignores Stoppard's hysterically funny short film The Engagement, Wood's imaginative TV play Drums Along the Avon, (1967) and his iodiosyncratic film treatment of Jellicoe's The Knack (1965). From reading Taylor's study, it is clear that the British dramatic renaissance, now sixteen years old, continues and flourishes; every year another three or four young writers make their appearance. MALCOLM PAGE Simon Fraser University THE BODLEY HEAD BERNARD SHAW: COLLECTED PLAYS WITH THEIR PREFACES, VOL 4, edited by Dan H. Laurence. London: Max Reinhardt The Bodley Head, 1972. £4.00. BERNARD SHAW: COLLECTED LETTERS, VOL 2, edited by Dan H. Laurence. London: Max Reinhardt The Bodley Head, 1972. £6.00. The fourth volume of this definitive edition of the plays and prefaces happily appears almost simultaneously with the second volume of the letters from the same editor and the same publisher. The coincidence serves to remind us that these two sets of books, when completed (seven volumes of plays and four volumes of letters), will together provide us with an enormous amount of original Shaw material in very convenient chronological form. Our debt to Dan H. Laurence is considerable. Volume...