L'Expressionisme Dans Le Theatre Europeen (review)

336 BOOK REVIEWS really "sexy" as sexuality went on the French stage. She excelled in the portrayal of Magdalenes, but she never gave a very effective performance as a really "bad" woman. Vulgarity lay outside her range, and all her best work was steeped in poetry. In the last analysis, the main constituents of her seductiveness seem to have been intense femininity, a super-sensitive responsiveness, and great womanly charm. EDWARD WAGENKNECHT Boston University L'EXPRESSIONISME DANS LE THEATRE EUROPEEN, Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Paris, 1971. 407 pp. After an eclipse of some thirty years, Expressionism has lately been drawing a good deal of attention. Complex, contradictory and diverse, it affected all the arts - painting, poetry and the novel, theater, cinema, graphic and scenic art - more or less intensively for some fifteen years, between 1910 and 1925 approximately. How far its influence reached - geographically speaking - is difficult to tell, but its center was, indisputably, Germany and Austria. Continuing its major series of studies on the theater, the research team for drama and musicology of the French National Center for Scientific Research has in conjunction with the Center of Germanic Studies of the University of Strasbourg devoted one of its impressive volumes to the question of Expressionism. The overall title does not entirely describe the contents of the book which includes a brief nine-page study on O'Neill. The volume consists of twenty-two papers given by as many scholars, Belgian, Czech, English, French and German, at a colloquium held at Strasbourg in 1968. They are fairly short papers and they cover a wide range of topics. To these are appended six valuable texts by such representative expressionists as Walter Hasenclever (three texts), Georg Kaiser, Paul Kornfeld and Yvan Goth; a study of the production of Hasenclever's Der Sohn and a remarkably complete chronology that situates Expressionism, both in regard to political events and to non-expressionist cultural events, between the years 1885 and 1933. As one now expects from this research group the volume is well documented and carefully edited although one misses the bibliography which would have made it a more valuable tool. In their foreword the editors summarized the goals of the book - in fact describing its contents: "This collection of analyses and documents proposes an overall view of expressionism in European theater and an examination in depth of its various manifestations. We attempted to indicate its sources, to present the work of its precursors (Strindberg, Wedekind), to examine the historic, sociological and cultural context in which it originated and developed. Through the doctrines formulated, and more specifically through the works and their production, we attempted to define the general characteristics of the movement without masking its apparent contradictions . . . . We proposed to study its major themes and modes of expression, while situating with accuracy the most important personalities (Hasenclever, BOOK REVIEWS 337 Kaiser, Kornfeld, Stenheim, Toller, Brecht, Goll) ... the papers deal, some on stage productions, on the lyrical theatre (Schonberg, Berg, etc.), on the stage sets, while others on the cinema or the graphic arts . . . recall and specify those links which, in a civilisation in movement, connect the different arts without destroying their specificity." The claim is ambitious. In fact the twenty-two papers, the bulk focusing on the "Germanic domain" give us glimpses of the complexity of Expressionism rather than any synthesis; nor can they really treat their topic in depth. That is the fate of the colloquium. Certainly the most perfunctory of the papers are those that deal with the non-German domain - more particularly the study of Expressionism in France in the interwar years limited to brief remarks on three dramatists - Lenormand, Gantillon and Pellerin - omitting such figures as Roger Vitrac and Artaud among others. One feels a certain disappointment too in Lotte Eisner's all too brief study of the expressionist cinema. Perhaps the best group of papers are the three which deal with expressionism in the lyrical theater - by Hans Curgel, Rene Leibowitz and Jean Jacquol respectively. But despite these reservations the book as a whole gives the reader a sense of the diversity and significance of the movement, an invitation to probe further and to follow...