Get the Guests: Psychoanalysis, Modern American Drama, and the Audience by Walter A. Davis (review)

Book Reviews 537 (again for reasons of his own) who pressed for Pin's knighthood and recruited him against censorship and.for a National Theater. Interestingly. this Fourth Act ("Resolution"), in many ways a diminuendo. contains Dawick's most useful shadings of the accepted portrait. New details about the Shawl Pinero friendship show a resilience that weathered Shaw's expulsion from the Dramatists ' Club (due to his anti-war stance), though "the genial insults they had exchanged ... became a thing of the past and their letters and meetings less frequent." The outbreak of war, soon after his stepson's suicide, affected Pinero deeply: "it's as if an iron door had suddenly banged ~nd shut out the operations of one's brain." Yet, though inspiration failed him, audiences did not. A musical version of The Magistrate successfully captured the wartime mood; another, based on In Chancery, ran for a year after peace was declared. And, during those years, at least seven of his plays were translated onto the silent screen. At the end of the decade, his wife's death left him "in bad physical case" and, though he continued to raise funds for needy ex-servicemen, he felt ill-attuned to the theatre's increased commercialism. Nevertheless. successful revivals of major plays kept his name alive in the 1920S until the repeated failure of new work brought about an eclipse some years before his death in 1934. Dawick's Pinero remains elusively private, fanatically organized, and ultimately sad. As for the plays, Dawick frequently links them to their creat