New German Dramatists by Denis Calandra (review)

Book Reviews charcters, "mars" the play because she is "too didactic," although she is no more didactic than the equally mock-heroic Martin Doul in The Well ofthe Saints, who is not didactic at all according to Benson. The critic is aware of the ironic incongruities that beset the tragicomic Martin, due, as he wisely indicates, to "Synge's willingness to abide in uncertainties"; nevertheless, when confronted by the ironic uncertainties of Nora Burke in In the Shadow afthe Glen, he unwisely complains that "Synge's characterization of Nora is incongruous." He accurately stresses one of the prevailing themes in all of Synge's plays when he says, "Always at the centre of his drama there is the struggle between those forces that restrict human liberty and those energies that enhance it"; nevertheless, in commenting on the tragic restrictions that drive Deirdre and Naisi to their deaths - their fears of the ravages of time, growing old and losing their beauty and love - Benson seems to think that a modest mention of this theme is adequate. After quoting a vividly tragic speech by Deirdre on her fears and sustaining energies, he concludes that "the same sentiment is repeated again and again ... and ends by being expository and tendentious." Aside from ignoring the fact that Synge was probably one of the least tendentious of playwrights - Synge who believed that the "drama, like the symphony, does not teach or prove anything" - Benson reveals insensitivity when he seeks to reduce the liberating energy of the anguished Deirdre to uncharacteristic moderation and restraint. He also overlooks the symbolic function of Synge's excesses of imagination and language, necessary excesses of folk imagery that dramatize the struggle between freedom and repression. Synge created a theatre of extravagant and ritualistic words which cumulatively sustain and liberate his characters in their tragic and tragicomic conditions. Eugene Benson is only half aware of this subtle process in Synge's dramatic imagination. DAVID KRAUSE, BROWN UNIVERSITY DENIS CALANDRA. New German Dramatists. New York: Grove Press 1983. pp. ix, 190, illustrated. $13.50; $9.95 (PB). Denis Calandra's work is an introduction to the contemporary German theatre as represented by two Austrians - Peter Handke and Thomas Bernhard; two East Germans - Heiner Milller and Thomas Brasch; and three West Germans - Franz Xaver Kroetz, Rainer WernerFassbinder, and Botho Strauss. Though he acknowledges tqe seriousness of intent that seems to pervade the writing of new German dramatists, even to the point of "tedious solemnity," Calandra makes no claim for a common temperament or characteristic mode. Having established the polarities - the absurd and the political, the private and the polemical - he selects as the most significant recent German-language drama those plays of the past fifteen years that fall between the extremes. In his introduction, Calandra identifies Kroetz and Handke as playwrights who oppose the prevailing order but find different modes of expression, Kroetz writing in a Book Reviews realistic, political tradition, Handke preferring a nonrealistic poetical approach. He devotes a chapter to comparing Handke's mime, My FootMy Tutor (1969), with three of Kroetz's plays: The Choice Jor Life (1973/1980), StallerhoJ (1972), and Ghost Train (1972). The chapter begins with a promising identification of similarities in form, all four plays relying on short, elliptical scenes, focusing on minute details, sharing a particular power relationship between and among their characters, and reflecting particular attitudes toward language. But, finally, Calandra resists the extended analysis that might connect these plays and justify their comparison. Calandra's attempt to avoid the pedestrian devotion of one chapter to one play or playwright is admirable, yet his couplings remain tenuous, or at least not connected to any identifiable pattern in contemporary German theatre. After the chapter on Kroetz and Handke, Calandra discusses Handke's short pieces and Kaspar, The Ride Across Lake Constance, and They Are Dying Out. He then returns to Kroetz, pairing him now with Fassbinder and "drama for the masses," before treating him singularly in a chapter on "the search for new forms." Muller and Brasch are biographically coupled as "voices from East Germany," Thomas Bernhard and Strauss as "private visions." Calandra's discussions of individual plays are solid, though too often they prefer...