The Work of Living Art by Adolphe Appia (review)

100 MODERN DRAMA May Such a popularly oriented book can but be propaedeutic to the scholarship which must one day definitively place Tennessee Williams in the long history of the drama, ancient and modern. Wisner Payne K.inne Tufts University THE WORK OF LIVING ART, by Adolphe Appia, University of Miami Press, Coral Gables, Florida, 1961, 131 pp. Price $6.50. Although L'Oeuvre d'Art Vivant was published in Geneva in 19U, this translation by H. D. Albright is the first to be made into English. Even in Europe it is less well known than his other full-length studies of the theater, La Mise en Scene du Drame Wagnerien and La Musique et la Mise en Scene, although Appia regarded it as his most important book, the one which best expressed and summarized his ideas. Also in this new volume (the second in the Books of the Theatre series published by the American Education Theatre Association and the University of Miami Press) is a short collection of notes for an additional work bearing the title Man Is the Measure of All Things. Through some contretemps of book manufacture the text ends in the middle of a sentence on Page 87, although in the Foreword is reference to a note on page 107. The Work of Living Art is a book for the theater esthetician or philosophe rather than a practical guide to the theater worker, whom it will disappoint if he finds Music and Theatrical Production useful and invigorating. Appia'stheories are again expounded, theories which helped revolutionize twentieth century stage production: the esthetic validity of plastic and three-dimensional settings, designed to make the actor the important factor on the stage; the necessity for organic unity between action and setting-and the play itself, of course, although Appia dismisses as nonsense the textbook cliche that dramatic art is merely a harmonious combination or union of all the other arts: it is a separate and individual art; the role of music; and-here Appia with Craig has been most influential -the suggestive and coalescent function of light. Some of these revolutionary theories of half a century ago have passed into conventional theater practice today: the simplification of setting (a revolt against realistic scenery) to emphasize "the living actor" rather than the dead setting; the use of setting to suggest, rather than to imitate slavishly; the conviction that non~intellectual drama can be intellectually as well as esthetically stimulating; and the skillful use of light to unite all elements of production and reveal the spiritual core of the drama. Readers today may disagree with Appia's near obsession with music, a result of his passion for Wagnerian music-drama; or they simply may not understand what he is saying, for his near-mystical enthusiasm for music leads him to a soaring rapture they cannot share. Fundamental in his esthetic of the theater is his persuasion that "living art" rather than "dramatic art" best describes the intent and peculiar values of theatrical production~ But superior craftsmanship and technical mastery in mechanics of production are indispensable. The author, too, is convinced that only the path of technique can lead us to a collective universal 'beauty whose model is the work or living art. "To wish for the end without acquiring the means is illUSOry.•.." The 'book is not easy reading; in fact it is often obscure. One reason probably is that Appia reduced it by half from its original length, believing (mistakenly) that he could clarify and -simplify his concepts if he omitted documentation. And so he removed it. The reader yearns for illustrative material other than references to Wagner's operas and an occasional vague mention of Racine or 1963 BOOK REVIEWS 101 Shakespeare, to enable him to grasp exactly what Appia has in mind. Many of the roIling periods, which possibly roll more intelligibly, or at least more impressively , in the French and German versions, convey very little to the workaday lover of the theater. For all its patches of obscurity and cloud·touching rranscendentalism, this third -book of Appia's should take its place alongside the two earlier studies, and join the good company of studies by Craig...