Anglo-American Interplay in Recent Drama by Ruby Cohn (review)

Book Reviews 223 'Men, in readings that rapidly devolve into story, as opposed (0 method. Surely all Bond's plays offer vivid examples ofReineIt's three chosenelements in singularly precise ways: in, for example. the differences between the staged gesture, narrative shape, and historic fable of The Narrow Road and their fe-working in The Bundle (after Bond discovered a political vocabulary with which to reinvest his instinctively theatrical pictographs). The chapters on Churchill and Hare are just as barren. Again they start off well (as Reinelt pinpoints each writer's Brechtian stance) but fail to animate Churchill's dramatic strategies (surprisingly, given Reineit's own politics) and (in my opinion) Hare's individuality. In her view, Hare has recently experienced a sea-change in concentrating upon his characters' interior lives. Accordingly, his social trilogy documents "personal angst," a verdict which, given the plays' distanced staging at The National Theatre, seems to twist text to theory! Theoretically, though, Reinelt is frequently thought-provoking. Practically, her work seems naive both in tenns of contemporary British politics " (which she subsumes in oft-repeated diatribes against "the deadly couple of Reagan and Thatcher") and current production methods. As Trevor Griffiths (the subject of her fifth chapter) once told her (and those interviews with her six authors provide many of the book's most resonant moments), "Brecht mediates the first progressive wave of naturalism/realism in very significant ways and inflects it, even if you're not aware of Brecht as a system." By being too systematic, Reinelt rides over the theatrical subtleties of most of her texts. Beyond that lie problems of style. In her "Acknowledgments," Reinelt admits to a "personal voice" which, in itself, is attractively refreShing. In actuality, though, this infonnality collides with the trappings of academic criticism, veering from phrases like "basic 'nerd' to wanna-be revolutionary" into jargon-ridden lines like "a ruling class of privileged bourgeoisie has continued to enforce radical individualism and capitalist socioeconomism as the dominant hegemony." Each page exhibits that stylistic unease, and even her standard voice lacks drive and preCision and so compounds the argument 's generality. In all fairness, Reinelt's choice of texts and playwrights (particularly her sixth, John McGrath) is adventurous. But, despite those enticements, her style and method are distressingly unsophisticated. ANTHONY JENKINS, UNIVERSITY OP VICI'ORlA RUBY COHN. Anglo-American Interplay in Recent Drama. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 1995. Pp. vii, 190. $39.95. Anglo-American Interplay displays the veteran critic's strengths and weaknesses in a book which ignores most of what is happening in contemporary theater and drama criticism . Cohn claims to offer "my impression of a transatlantic dramatists' exchange through the languages of the stage, mainly but not entirely expressed in words heard" ( I)" The strongest passages in the book are those in which Cohn exercises her famous 224 Book Reviews ear for patterns in "words heard," stage dialogue, and her talent for readable, useful catalogues of linguistic patterns and devices. However, Anglo·American Interplay is weakest al its description of a "transatlantic dramatists' exchange." There is a major book to be written on the cross-currents of and differences between contemporary American and British drama which reflect different cultures and sensesof language. This project would make much more of Shepard's English pilgrimage and what he learned from playwrights active in London in the early 19705. Pinter is in Buried Child, as he is in Mamel's plays. The differences are significant, but so are the influences . Were not the British playwrights Cohn discusses influenced at all by American dramatists? Contemporary British playwrights 1know point to Tennessee Williams as a major influence. Can one define the attitudes, manners, and linguistic patterns that make British drama different from America? Instead of probing the interesting, difficult questions her topic raises, Cohn organizes her chapters around six English-America pairs of playwrights who are, to varying degrees, comparable: Neil Simon and Alan Ayckbourn, Edward Bond and Sam Shepard, Harold Pinter and David Marnet, Maria Irene Fornes and Caryl Churchill, David Hare and David Rabe, and Christopher Hampton and Richard Nelson. Cohn often admits that her pairs "do not readily lend themselves to juxtaposition ," but she...