The Modern Stage and Other Worlds by Austin Quigley (review)

Book Reviews AUSTIN QUIGLEY. The Modern Stage and Other Worlds. New York & London: Methuen 1985. Pp. xvi, 320. $39·95; $12.95 (PBl· When the pages on A Doll's House from Austin Quigley's The Modern Stage and Other Worlds appeared originally in this journal in 1984, a colleague of mine expert in Ibsen remarked that they would become indispensable reading for anyone teaching the play. Now, the same can be said of several other chapters in this study, most notably the ones on Pinero's TheSecolld Mrs. Tanqueray, Ionesco's The Chairs, and Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape. Quigley intends that his book differ from all those of the last twenty years or so entilled "the theatre-of-something-or-other" (Absurd. Revolt, Paradox, Commitment , etc.) which, he feels , tend to pigeonhole works thematically and structurally that belong together only tonally at best. Still, however, desirous of providing a framework that will allow plays - both conventional and innovative ones - to illuminate each other, Quigley proposes a less rigid and more protean category thatmight be calJed - though he resists using it as a subtitle - "the drama of inquiry." In a pluralistic, which does not necessarily mean radically relativistic, universe, theatre functions, as Quigley argues, asjust one of many unique ways of knowing reality and discovering meaning. If audiences "learn how to learn new things in the theatre," that epistemological method then can be applied to "the world outside the theatre." Quigley offers three paradigms for the interplay between what transpires on the stage and what happens in reality: the theatre world might "duplicate" or replicate the outside world, in whic~ case the playwright simply reflects and conveys "established knowledge"; or the onstagc world might go a step further and "illuminate" the world offstage, in which instance the writer rediscovers or "reveal[s) hidden .. . knowledge"; or, finally, as a consequence of the dramatist's attempt to go beyond what the audience already knows and create "new knowledge," the world of the stage might actually "replace" other worlds. If replication and even sometimes illumination can be effected within the naturalistic mode, to move from illumination to the replacement of the 308 Book Reviews external reality by the one created onstage demands a shift to expressionistic techniques, as in Strindberg's A Dream Play. Quigley is at his insightful best when, capitalizing on the theatre as "a world with a language of its own," he meticulously explicates the image networks through which plays communicate visually: in The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, Drummle's gazing out of the room reflects the limitations of the ethically constricting society in which he lives; in A Doll's House. the multiplicity of doors defines domains, and the dressing and stripping of the Christmas tree is linked to Nora's changing clothing and the motif of deception and masquerade; in A Dreall Play, the locked door with the cloverleaf hole and the painted wings imply finiteness and the failure of the urge towards ultimate transcendence; in The Chairs, the stage space duplicating the auditorium, and vice versa, signifies the co-existence of "presence and absence," "real and unreal"; and in Krapp's Last Tape, the dark periphery enclosing light, and the light encircling dark, reveal the possibility for uncovering "moments of value." The seven chapters in Part Two can, as Quigley apparently desired, each be read as a discrete analysis ofa key text - generic, stylistic, philosophical - of modem drama, and can, funhennore, even be read without reference to the oftentimes fascinating, if somewhat laborious, methodological context established in Part One. To consider each play independently from the perspective ofconflicting worlds results in several different foci on theatrical genres, value systems, and so forth. The Second Mrs. Tallqueray is viewed as questioning whether the well-made play is so circumscribed a form as to preclude thematic seriousness and ambiguity, while A Doll's House is regarded as proposing that moulding by society's mores at best can be controlled and never completely escaped, despite Nora's defiant gesture in slamming the door. [f A Dream Play, by exploring different varieties of theatre, foregrounds the difficulty of achieving transcendent knowledge, Brecht's Life of Galileo espouses recognizing several competing...