Essays on Contemporary British Drama ed. by Hedwig Bock and Albert Wertheim (review)

Book Reviews HEDWIG BOCK AND ALBERT WERTHEIM, EDS. Essays on Contemporary British Drama. Munich: Max Hueber Verlag 1981. Pp. 310. $1O.9S(PB). This is in some ways a useful book but also an uneven one. Students of postwar British drama will probably find a collection CfUp-lo-date essays on major playwrights by major critics a welcome addition to their reading lists, but it ought to be accompanied by an occasional word of warning and correction. These essays, for the most part, share a similar pattern of organization: an interesting opening paragraph. frequently with a very engaging first sentence; a quite specific thesis, usually concerning some theme or dramatic technique, which is used to organize the entire discussion; the discussion itself, concerned with the work of a single playwright, giving a general chronological overview of his entire opus. There is a tendency to connect critical discussion with biographical information, and in a number of essays, an attempt to account for artistic development by psychologizing the playwright himself. There is also a considerable amount of plot summary in order to illustrate themes and techniques, demonstrate certain political and social concerns, and supply evidence for whatever thesis the particular essay advances. All of this suggests that the volume was designed to appeal to students, and was intended in both its content and organization to be useful primarily to the nonspecialist. (Individual essays, of course, have sections which scholars ofmodem drama will find fresh and illuminating; it is largeJy the inclusion of routine biographical information, the rehearsal of previously established theses, and the chronological sweep through the playwright's entire work which suggest a student audience.) There is one chapter for each of the following playwrights: Osborne, Wesker, Arden, Orton, Barnes, Gray, Storey, and Griffiths; and there are two for each of Stoppard, Pinter, and Bond. Although individual teachers might want to argue for omitting Barnes orStorey or Gray or Griffiths and including some other favored playwright, the selection is nonetheless a sound one, representative of the years covered. The essays themselves, however, are not all equally sound, in either critical acumen Book Reviews or writing skin. There is a rather startling disparity ranging from the urbane scholarly grace of pieces by Enoch Brater and Ruby Cohn (to mention only two of the fine critics who manage the book's formula well), to the rather embarrassing piece by one of the editors, Hedwig Bock, naive in its critical approach and at times misleading in its information. "Naive" and "misleading" are, of course, strong allegations. Nevertheless, the following quotations from Bock's essay "Harold Pinter: The Room as Symbol" will, for some readers at least, justify that assessment. "The one question left at the end of the play [The H omecoming] is not, whether Sam is really dead and Max has had a stroke. It is the question of what will Ruth do when she is 50?" (p. 180). (Lady Macbeth's children again?) ''The plays Pinter wrote after The Homecoming: The Tea Party (1964), The Basement (1967), Landscape (1968), Silence (1969), Old Times (1971), No Man's Land (1975), Betrayal (1978) have not reached the quality of his earlier plays" (p. 180). (They do not easily fit Bock's trite thesis about intruders.) "In the end Anna and Kate are both on the divan, Deeley sits away from them in an annchair" (p. 181). (Old Times ends with Anna and Kate on separate divans, not the same one, and that distinction, as well as theirdifferent postures, is ofgreat importance to the final effect of the play.) "The playas such [Betrayal] may be considered not interesting, since it deals with rather unexciting every-day events" (p. 182). (Method of treatment, not mere subject matter, is what makes art and interests the sophisticated critic.) Fortunately, however, Pinter's work is discussed by two contributors. A.R. Braunmuller's "Harold Pinter: The Metamorphosis of Memory," much more reliably and usefully than Bock's essay, singles out important elements in Pinter's work and presents them with appropriate suggestion oftheir complexity. Braunmuller includes the obligatory reference to menace with the brevity that it now deserves, moving quickly to discussion of the interrelationship between memory and narrative...