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140 MODER" DRAMA September of The Dramatic Experience is to say that I like the teAt so well I plan to use it in my own drama course. Wn.LIAM M. BURKE PASSAGES FROM FINNEGANS WAKE, A Free Adaptation for the Theater, by Mary ~:laIU1ing. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1957, 73 pp. Price $3.25. Any attempt to adapt Finnegans 'Wake presents staggering problems of cutting, of scenic arrangement, progression and depiction, of thematic emphasis, of the identification of character and speech, and, finally, of coherent dramatic meaning. In her free adaptation, Mary Manning manages to achieve a successful, sometimes brilliant, coherence and progression. The central progression from death to sleep to birth-from the wake of Finnegan to the sleep of Earwicker and to the birth of Anna Livia Plurabelle's child-is skillfully staged by having Finnegan's coffin become Earwicker's bed and finally the child's crib. This central prop, the coffin, becomes the focus of the drama. Around this S ignificant and symbolic center, flows the comic elan vital of Joyce's epic. Thus Miss Manning suggests within the scope of her relatively short adaptation, the richness of theme, the totality of conception and Joyce's epic death~in~life and life-in·death cycle of human existence. Nearly all the dramatic techniques of note are employed: the chorus of the ancient drama; the liturgy of the mass; the radio announcer of living newspaper drama; the fast, rowdy exchanges of vaudeville; the easy scenic shifts effected by a few props and costume changes of expressionist drama; and the use of gesture, object and character of symbolist drama. In spite of all the difficulties, Joyce's language, as he himself proved by his reading from the Dovel, is meant to be heard. The drama is as much dependent upon the ear as upon the eye. The intricate pattern of puns, the singing, roaring and guffawing of Joyce's new language bewitch the ear even when the meaning is lost in a rush of rich sound. The language often appears to speak more to the subconscious than to the conscious mind-an expression of feeling more than an c)."Pression of idea. Any cutting of so vast and intricate a work is bound to provoke some charges of oversimplification. and falsification. Given the obvious neces~ity to cut and cut drastically, nevertheless there nre instances where ?\:1iss Manning unnecessarily sacrifices some of Joyce's brilliant effects. Joyce's comic effects are often Rabelaisian; his sentences roar to a blast of laughter; to cut such sentences is to diminish the roar and thus truncate the comic effect. Such sentences are made for the stage-witness Sir Epicure Mammon's long edravagant passages in The Alchemist. One such sentence appears in the tale of the Ondt and the Grace~ hoper. Joyce reads as follows: He had eaten all the whilepaper, swallowed the lustres, devoured forly flights of styearcases, chewed up all the mensas and seccles, ronged the records, made mundhans of the ephemerids and vorasioused most glutinously with the very timeplace in the temitary .... ~ ( anning cuts it thus: He had eateo all the whilepaper, swallowed the lustres, devoured forty flights of styearcases .... But the characters of Shem and Shaun emerge graphically: Shaun, especially in the scene with the girls, Scene Five, suggests the burlesque comedian; Shem suggests Stephen Dedalus with an extravagant sense of hwnor. The adaptation captures the basic tone and abnosphere of the novel: the sense that behveen the two extremes of birth and death lies the dream of life-sometimes fantastic, sometimes lyrical, but marc often absurd. HD.'l\Y F. SALERNO ...

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