The Oxford Companion to the Theatre ed. by Phyllis Hartnoll (review)

102 MODERN DRAMA May the early fifties, is considered very briefly, but for the most part only four writers are discussed: Osborne, Pinter, Arden and Wesker. A book of this kind can be useful in three ways. First, it may help us to see the plays more clearly by suggesting what (if anything) some of them have in common ; second, it may offer provisional judgements; third, it may set the writers in the context of modern drama. A word about each of these possibilities. (1) .Have the best plays of the decade anything in common? Only their rejection of the theatre of middle-class manners (Coward, Rattigan). Tom Milne notes the concern with violence that runs through Saint's Day, The Birthday Party and Serjeant Musgrave's Dance; Martin Esslin relates Pinter's work to the problematic nature of man in Waiting jor Godot. But in general it is recognised that categories are not helpful since the period, as Raymond Williams remarks, is both eclectic and confusing. (2) Evaluation. Most of the book is cheerfully uncritical, so the few exceptions stand out clearly. Richard Gilman's analysis of Arden (as a writer engaged but not didactic) reads well, and John Russell Brown brings out the importance of the subtext in Pinter. The two full-length studies, of Look Back in Anger and The Homecoming, would carry more conviction if we were not asked to compare Osborne 's hero with Hamlet and the texture of Pinter's play with Troilus and Cressida. Mr. Dyson adds, without a smile: "Jimmy Porter, however, if a Hamlet figure in some respects, has less basic nobility of mind, less talent, less sense of destiny than Hamlet." (3) Context. The best essay in the book comes from Raymond Williams. Starting from the split between Shaftesbury Avenue and the art theatre (the 'free,' independent theaters of Europe in the 1880'S and '90'S), he examines briefly the exhaustion of English verse drama in Eliot's failure to design a non-naturalistic action in which poetry of some intensity could be spoken. The plays of the younger dramatists he sees as a renewed attempt to bring a fuller life into the theatre: an attempt stimulated simultaneously by the formal originality of Brecht and Beckett and by social changes in England which released the restless energies of Look Back in Anger. "We have then the curious situation of a revival of naturalist drama which, when its structure of feeling is analysed, is only intermittently consistent with naturalism." Robert Brustein, observing the resemblance between this strain and American left-wing drama of the thirties, fears that the English playwrights may end in a desert of social realism. He may be right. Certainly his strictures on Osborne and Wesker (whose writing, though full of sincerity, "is almost completely wanting in art, being crude, zealous, garrulous and naive") are just. Pinter and Arden, as he suggests, seem more hopeful. RONALD GASKELL University of Bristol, England THE OXFORD COMPANION TO THE THEATRE, ed. by Phyllis Hartnoll, Oxford University Press, London, 1967, 1088 pp., illustrated. $15.00. The third edition of the Oxford Companion to the Theatre is indispensable and irritating. Indispensable because it is still the only theater encyclopedia in English, though encyclopedias are now in progress at McGraw-Hill and Thomas Crowell. These new works will be encyclopedias of drama whereas the Oxford Companion remains aggressively loyal to the theater. The unequivocal preface to the first (1950) edition is reprinted in the third: "In short, this is a com- 1969 BOOK REVIEWS 103 panion to the playhouse, and is meant for those who would rather see a play than read it...." Begging the question of whether any such choice need be made, or whether playgoers who do not read plays are likely to read about them, the Companion takes the word "theater" literally, providing full information on physical structures but dealing shabbily with the dramas housed therein. Paradoxically in view of the statement of intention, the Companion contains only 179 pictures as against 1022 pages of text, but the overall quality of the former is superior to the latter (though these tired old eyes wished that all the plates were full...