The Theatre of the Absurd by Martin Esslin (review)

112 MODERN DRAMA May to the modem· audience. I do not maintain this thesis; I suggest it merely as an alternative. My quarrel with Mr, Kitchin on this point is not with his value judgment, but rather with the fact that he does not develop a coherent argument to defend his position. Another weakness in this book is a familiar anti-American bias. As in so much English and continental writing, it is undoubtedly unconscious. Yet a patronizing of American drama is clearly evident, all the more apparent since Mr. Kitchin has judicious notes on Brecht, Beckett, and Ionesco. This perspicacity in continental affairs contrasts sharply with a myopia on American matters. Some of the comments about Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller are devastating. He holds them responsible for the decline of the English stage and castigates them for sensationalism, eroticism, and a breakdown in form. I am not called upon to defend American dramatists; indeed, I personally believe, for example, that Brecht's future is more secure than Miller's. But a real tone of patronizing is evident, and while it does not irritate me for patriotic reasons, I am critically offended by its presence. Mr. Kitchin makes much of the supposed immorality of \Villiams, for example, but glosses over the decadent motifs in Brecht. vVhile immorality, supposed or real, does not bother me either on the stage or in actuality, I can only wish that those who are offended would respond to the prurient in the same guise on both sides of the Atlantic. Mr. Kitchin has some perceptive comments, however, about the English stage. Through many years of theater attendance, he has developed an admirable sensitivity to performance. His pages on the quality of acting for Gielgud, Olivier, Guinness, among others, are arresting. His assessment of the new English writers, like Braine, Amis, and Osborne, is founded on argument and is convincing. The series of interviews, reprinted from the London Times, is an amazing study in depth of twenty-four personalities, from Ingmar Bergman to Maria Callas. Incisive, pithy, pregnant with thought, the interviews, I feel, show Mr. Kitchin at his best as a skillful interrogator, ever sensitive to the artist and not the personality in a man. GEORGE Ross RIDGE Georgia State College THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD, by ?vlartin Esslin (Anchor Books), Doubleday & Co., New York, 1961, 364 pp. Price $1.45. So many works have in recent times been devoted to the theater of Beckett, Ionesco, Adamov and their contemporaries that the tenn "avant-garde theater" as applied to their plays has become almost a misnomer. The present study in no way suffers by comparison with the often brilliant analyses which have preceded it, nor does it to any significant extent duplicate material presented by such distinguished writers as Joseph Chiari, David Grossvogel, Wallace Fowlie, and Jacques Guichamaud. The originality of this work is clearly to be found in its approach. While the previously mentioned writers have presented either merely expository or frankly philosophical essays, Martin Esslin, who paradoxically is not a member of the academic world, has written a scholarly work. The advantages of the latter method are best seen in the first section in which Mr. Esslin discusses the four dramatists whom he quite rightly considers as the major figures of thc theater of the absurd, Beckett, Ionesco, Adamov, and Genet. While his predecessors had contented themselves with the dramatic texts as a basis for their discussion, rvlr. Esslin uses subsidiary writings and source materials which shed a new light on the plays. So, for example, he studies Beckett's theater in relation not only to the well-known 1962 BOOK REVIEWS 113 novels of the dramatist, but also to his early essay on Proust, in which there is found a discussion of the concepts of time and habit which is of immense help in clarifying the enigmatic En Attendant Godot. In the same way the study of Adamov begins with an extended analysis of the latter's little known autobiography, L'Aveu, which does much to clarify the terrifying, nightmare universe which Adamov presents in his early dramas. So it is not surprising that the study of Ionesco's theater should be...