Swedish Theatre by Niklas Brunius, Göran O Eriksson and Rolf Rembe (review)

1969 BOOK REVIEWS 109 Looking at this trilogy as a whole, now that its three component parts have been described, it is possible to synthesize a description of its overall form. It has a tripartite structure unified into one form. This consists of consecutive imitations of action, passion, and character. These involve, progressively , external actions symbolic of the internal action of the characters; defective passions stemming from the insubordination of the will of the family members to a just pattern of familial behavior; and, finally, a double reversal of character: Orin, from fatherly inhibition to motherly indulgence; Lavinia, from motherly indulgence to fatherly attempt to balance indulgence and inhibition by exercising control. All of this is accomplished in a naturalistic dramatic mode utilizing a series of plots: complex-multiple with triple issue; complex-single with triple issue; and, complex-multiple with double issue.... What is not absurdly obvious here, or absurdly abstract, is absurdly wrong. For instance, Mr. Long's terms "fatherly inhibition" and "motherly indulgence" show his total ignorance of the central ideological conflict in the play: the struggle between a life-denying Puritanism on the one hand and a pagan acceptance of life and love on the other. There is no reversal of character in Orin and Lavinia, for both of these viewpoints have warred in them from the beginning. But even assuming that Mr. Long is correct on the reversal of character, he still errs in the direction he gives it. Lavinia does not move from motherly indulgence to fatherly control in the course of the trilogy. She is dominated by the family Puritanism in the first two plays, makes a desperate effort to take over her mother's life-loving identity in the third, and failing, gives herself over to torment by the family Puritan conscience, not to any attempt at "balance" of "indulgence and inhibition." Orin does not move from fatherly inhibition to motherly indulgence. At the end of the trilogy he is entirely identified with his father's Puritanism and his father's destiny, so he commits suicide. It is not necessary to present further examples from this book. It is all a similar mixture of the obvious, the meaningless, and the incorrect. And the underlying scholarship on O'Neill is spotty and inadequate. In mercy to himself, Mr. Long should have left this academic exercise unprinted. DORIS ALEXANDER Pennsylvania State University SWEDISH THEATRE. With Essays by Niklas Brunius, Goran 0 Eriksson and Rolf Rembe, Swedish Institute, Stockholm, 1968, 109 pp. 9.50 Sw. crowns. This small volume consists of three essays, authored by Niklas Brunius who is one of the directors at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, GOran 0 Eriksson , well-known theater critic in the Swedish capital, and Rolf Rembe, Secretary General of the Swedish Actors' Equity Association. Swedish Theatre also includes a complete bibliography of Swedish dramas in translation, in my opinion the most valuable part of the volume but, strangely enough, containing no listing of the names of the compilers, whose work must have been considerable and whose identities should not have been withheld. Unfortunately, the three essays that make up the factual and analytical presentation of the Swedish theater seem to have been written independently of each other, so that there is a certain over-lapping of the subject matter and an unnecessary repetition of quite a bit of the material. One feels the lack of a co-ordinating editor. 110 MODERN DRAMA May Of the essays in the volume the most difficult to write must have been Brunius' survey of the Swedish theater. It is virtually impossible to avoid superficiality in a presentation, where material covering two hundred years of theatrical history has to be limited to some forty pages. Brunius tries to give us the stage background of the Swedish theater from the days of Gustaf III to Ingmar Bergman. He attempts a survey of major Swedish playwrights during the same period of time and a discussion of Sweden's most important directors and actors (where one misses a more fair mention of a director like Bengt Ekerot). Finally his essay also refers to Swedish stage persentations today, including productions over the radio and on TV...