Drama in a World of Science by Glynne Wickham (review)

466 MODERN DRAMA February DRAMA IN A WORLD OF SCIENCE, by Glynne Wickham, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1962, 92 pp. Price $3.00. Professor Wickham's book, as he emphasizes in his preface, consists of four separate lectures delivered in various places in England and the United States within a period of one year. The lectures are related in theme, each considering some aspect of a mid-twentieth century crisis in the British theater, the main symptom of which seems to be public apathy towards the professional theater. Unfortunately, Professor Wickham has made no attempt to give a systematic analysis of the crisis or to carry any particular argument through the four lectures . The title of the book, Drama in a World of Science, is that of the third lecture, the theme of which is intended to be the focus of the other three. Professor Wickham's real concern, however, is not with the world of science but with the world of the university, for this lecture is an address at Bristol University on the occasion of his appointment there to the first Ohair of Drama to be established in Britain. With the exception of the first lecture, "The Post-War Revolution in the British Drama," Professor Wickham's main subject is the role which the university department of drama should play in the development of contemporary drama and in the production of plays. Though himself the head of such a department, he shows a much clearer awareness of its limitations than, I suspect, do many of his North American counterparts. He makes no claim that notable dramatists have been, or are likely to be, the products of the course in playwriting at Bristol, though Harold Pinter and John Arden each had one of his early plays discussed by a playwriting class. Furthermore he insists that it is not the function of a drama department to train actors. In fact he sees a positive danger in the confusiou between amateur and professional standards of acting which might be encouraged by university productions, and he is unrelenting in his insistence that university amateurs cannot achieve the quality of acting of the professionals. He even doubts that the universities should train the directors of the future and deplores the situation in America where the directors are graduates of drama departments, in which he says, cruelly but perhaps truthfully, "amateurs are training amateurs to train amateurs." The drama department should work where possible in cooperation with a professional theater of repute; in such a cooperative role it can make a constructive historical and critical contribution. For the student whose interests are academic rather than professional, the drama department offers a course of study which cuts across the usual specializations within the humanities and treats the full sweep of the development of the drama in western society. In addition, the department is directly concerned with the activities of its students in the production of plays. No other discipline, Professor Wickham feels, so well unites the varied creative, critical, and practical endeavors of the individual. Professor Wickham's book should be read by anyone who has a particular interest in the ideals and aims of the university department of drama. ROGER L. CLUBB University of British Columbia RELIGION IN MODERN ENGLISH DRAMA, by Gerald Weales, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1961, 317+XV pp. Price $7.50. In distinction of thought and style and in originality of contribution T. S. Eliot and Christopher Fry are in the forefront of contemporary English playwrights . Each is a religious dramatist and their plays-those directly concerned ...