Man's New Shapes: French Avant-Garde Drama's Metamorphoses by Kenneth Steele White (review)

Reviews 85 lover for the last fourteen years of his life, is seen as a hopeless neurotic who kills Orton and then himself out ofjealousy for Orton's success. Only "murder made them equal again," Lahr writes. Orton had wanted to leave Halliwell, but had not; his death, Lahr says, was the result of his "loyalty to a friend." Orton's life, as Lahr writes it, makes excellent reading, much like a comictragic novel with a totally lovable anti-heroic protagonist, but whether it is "the truth" or not, [ am not sure. [ do know that [ am suspicious of the black/white characterizations Lahr uses. Stylistically, Lahr tends to overexaggerate ("The history of theatre is the history of first nights"; "Orton was the first contemporary playwright to transform the clown's rambunctious instincts from the stage to the page"), to write lines that sound fine but are of debatable accuracy. I get the uneasy feeling that, in order to make the story a good read, Lahr has overstereotyped his characters. This technique leads to troubling overstatements ; for instance, Lahr is simply wrong in claiming that Orton's death was no fault ofhis own. Halliwell's suicide note indicated that he killed Orton because he was crazed by Orton's taunting accounts of his numerous infidelities. The danger with a biography in which the author loses the reader's confidence on a few points is that one might tend to dismiss the rest of the volume. This should not be done with Prick Up Your Ears, which will remain for a long time the best study of Orton's career. The book is thoroughly researched and amply documented; Lahr had access to Orton's files and he conducted hundreds of interviews with Orton's friends. The book also includes helpful notes, a chronology ofOrton's plays and films, a list ofhis publications, and a well-chosen selection of illustrations. Some of the most fascinating parts of the book are the frequent excerpts from the diary Orton kept in the months before his death. The quality of writing in this diary is remarkably high (Orton took pains with everything he wrote), and the content is sensational, to say the least. One hopes the diary will be published in its entirety someday. John Lahr's previous biography of a theatrical personality was Notes of a Cowardly Lion about his father, Bert Lahr. To young Lahr, "Joe Orton was the only other person to make me laugh in the theatre the way my father did. In their unique ways, both men created the purest of theatrical experiences:joy." At its best, Prick Up Your Ears conveys the joy - and the horror - of Orton's life and work. Lahr's sensitive and appreciative study should do much to excite interest in the work of a writer too often neglected on this side of the Atlantic. DENNIS LYNCH, NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY KENNETH STEELE WHITE . Man's New Shapes: French Avant-Garde Drama's Metamorphoses. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America 1979. ?p. 120. Following his earlier work on Savage Comedy, Kenneth Steele White here continues to study the grotesque in contemporary French theatre. This time he 86 Reviews adjusts his lens onto the metamorphic imagery which reoccurs in the theatre from Vbu Rai up to Vitrac and Genet, and he asks what new dramatic effects have been brought about: "What echoes or partial echoes of these images have been heard in history? How have these metamorphoses influenced the intellectual bases of innovations in avant-garde plays during the last eight decades?" In his attempts to delineate the emerging new "shapes" of man, White shows how the dramatic "hero" becomes increasingly displaced. Profession, family, community no longer give support. The individual, if we can still call him such, is at the mercy of anonymous powers against which he can no longer defend himself. The identity of the "hero" has gradually become questioned, reduced, stylized; indeed, man's humanity has changed. The realm ofobjects rises onto an equal plane with man, being no longer an environment but a partner. Since Surrealism and Cocteau, the emancipation of objects has increased dramatically , and in the end man himself becomes construed...