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BOOK REVIEWS emphasis leads to at least one major omission. Although P.J. Bourke, dramatist and manager of the Queen's Theatre, is mentioned in relation to Behan, there is not a single reference either to his melodramas or to those of J.W. Whitbread at the Queen's. These plays formed the mainstream of republican theatre over the two decades preceding the Easter Rebellion, and leaving them out is a particularly serious distortion in a political history. It unduly emphasizes the role of the Irish Literary Theatre (Yeats et al.), reinforcing a misleading conventional view heavily invested in by the canonizers. Murray has missed the opportunity to present a challenging political analysis of Irish drama - which is a pity, since on other levels his commentary is valuable. Equally, his publishers have·missed the student market - the readership most likely to profit from this book. Charging $59 for a paperback Gust $10 less than the hardcover) is simply not sensible. CHR ISTOPH ER INNES, YORK UN IVERSITY , TORONTO ALAIN PIETTE AND BERT CARDULLO. The Theater of Fernand Crommelynek: Eight Plays. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1998. Pp. 421. $57·50. ALAIN PIETTE AND BERT CARDULLO. The CrommelYllck Mystery: The Life and Work of a Belgian Playwright. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1997· Pp. 150. $32.5°. How many playwrights who were assumed to be an integral part of the canon have vanished from American theatres and bookshops! Their works are unavailable in any current edition and no longer considered for revival. The list is formidable: Gorky, Toller, Kaiser, Giraudoux, Ghelderode, Maeterlinck , Mayakovsky, Gombrowicz, Salacrou, lonesco (the recent Broadway production of The Chairs is the exception that proves the rule), Schiller, Hugo, Capek, and on and on. These authors, continental Europeans all, have been edged out by the politics of inclusion. One has only to leaf through any recently published anthology of world drama to see that, in the justifiable flurry to recognize the theatre of women, Latinos, African-Americans, and gays, the casualties have been continental European playwrights. Only Shakespeare, Shaw, Ibsen, and Chekhov remain. And so, when Tony Kushner , Anna Devere Smith, and August Wilson (some major anthologies boast two August Wilson plays) are included, the aforementioned are eliminated willy-nilly in a lamentable compensatory bloodbath. Imagine, then, what courage and wit it has taken for Susquehanna University Press to come out with not one but two books about a European playwright who has been barely known to the English-speaking world! If Femand Crommelynck (1886--1970) has any repute at all, it is through Meyerhold's Book Reviews 137 landmark 1922 production of his Magnanimous Cuckold. It is true that Crommelynck was the toast of Paris through the 1920S and 1930s, but he then vanished from sight. Moreover, he never knew the heyday that his countrymen Maeterlinck (in the 189Os) and Ghelderode (in the 1960s) enjoyed in America. His was strictly a European career. The single notable exception was a ralher lackluster 1981 production of The Magnanimous Cuckold at Yale Rep. Is it, then, imprudence or wisdom that has brought Alain Piette and Bert Cardullo to author these two books? The Crommelynck Myste/y is essentially a critical appreciation of the Belgian playwright, with some biographical background, and the Theatre of Fernand Crommelynck is a compendium of his eight most important works in English translation. The former contains an exhaustive bibliography, which includes an extensive list of reviews of productions , a mammoth effort in and of itself, that will prove indispensable to any scholar delving further into the subject. The latter contains two previously extant translations, of The Magnanimous Cuckold by Jan-Albert Goris and of The Sculptor ofMasks by Nadine Dermoy-Savage. Piette has undertaken new translations of the other six plays in the volume. Given that the only other book on Crommelynck in English heretofore had been Bettina Knapp's 1978 study, published by Twayne, we may answer Ihat Crommelynck is surely significant enough to merit this much attention. Crommelynck was particularly known for his special twist on the farce, giving it a grotesque and pessimistic flavor. In this sense, he was in the same court as his countryman Ghelderode. Piette and Cardullo differentiate between the...

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