Avant-Garde: The Experimental Theater in France by Leonard Cabell Pronko (review)

110 MODERN DRAMA May A.VA.NT-GARDE: THE EXPERIMENTAL THEATER IN FRANCE. by Leonard Cabell Pronko. Universtiy of California Press. Berkeley and Los Angeles. 1962, 225 pp. Price $4.75. One of the paradoxes of the avant-garde theater in France today is that. while it has been generally condemned by the majority of French critics, it has enjoyed an enormous and unexpected success on the European stage. At the same time. these same plays, which have not found general acceptance by the American public . have received critical acclaim in this country. So the most important studies dealing with the experimental theater in France of the last twenty years have all been published in this country. One of the most gratifying aspects of the American interest in this subject is the fact that the many books dealing with this subject which have appeared in the last few years have for the most part been of an extremely high caliber. Martin Esslin's The Theatre of the Absurd and Jacques Guicharnaud's Modern French Theatre are the two best examples among many. While Mr. Pronko's effort suffers somewhat by comparison with these distinguished predecessors, "the intelligent lover of theater" for whom this book is intended will not be disappointed. There are two major weaknesses in this otherwise stimulating work. First of all. the author has felt it necessary. as he had done in his earlier The World of Jean Anouilh. to recount in detail the plots of each one of the plays he mentions. In this case such a cumbersome procedure is particularly disturbing because, as Mr. Pronko himself points out. the plots in the contemporary French theater are reduced to a bare minimum and really have very little importance. The second flaw is the lack of originality which the author displays in the first chapter. We are told the by now so familiar story of the development of the theater of the absurd from the first performance of Jarry's Ubu Roi through Apollinaire's Les Mamelles de Tiresias. Cocteau's early experimental plays. surrealism and Artaud's "theater of cruelty" to Ionesco. Nothing new has been added to this account. The following two chapters, which constitute the bulk of the work. are devoted to a perceptive analysis of the plays of Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco. But the most promising chapter is the following one on theater and anti-theater. For here Mr. Pronko touches on a crucial problem which has not yet been sufficiently dealt with, the element of ritual in the contemporary theater; its presence is conclusively demonstrated in the work of Jean Gen~t. A final chapter is devoted to a few of the writers who are not yet well known in America. Some of them, especially Jean Tardieu, Jacques Audiberti, Jean Vauthier, Henri Pichette. Michel de Ghelderode. and Georges Schehade, certainly deserve the fair hearing which Mr. Pronko gives them. The omission of Boris Vian, Fernando Arrabal, and many others is regrettable. In his conclusion the author explains the existence of the contemporary forms of drama by the revolt which they represent against "the now decadent forms of realism and naturalism which . . . continue to dominate our commercial, and in some instances our art, theater" (pp. 197-198). The "mingling of the serious and the comic" (p. 204) he finds characteristic of this new theater. The bibliography which terminates this volume is a useful one. REINHARD KUHN The University of Buffalo ...