British and Irish Drama since 1960 ed. by James Acheson (review)

Book Reviews 233 ual search for the means of drawing a spectator's attention away from stories and onto moments of perception and speech" (178). Capturing those moments requires different strategies for both playwright and critic. The degree to which a reader accepts this point will affect the degree to which a reader will appreciate this book and the subjects it confronts. One frequently sees such elliptical approaches utilized by established practitioners and critics (Herbert Slao and Robert Brustein come quickly to mind), and their readership benefits from a corpus of antecedent work when approaching such strategists. We do not have that privilege with Robinson, but we can perhaps look forward to his voice in future enterprises. In sum, this book will please many, disappoint others, but engage everyone who chooses to spend time with it. WILLIAM W. DEMASTBS, LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY, BATON ROUGB JAMES ACHESON, ed. British and Irish Drama since 1960. New York: St. Martin's Press 1993· pp. 230. $40.00 The editor of this excellent volume of original essays on dramatists "who illustrate some of the distinctive characteristics of British and Irish drama of the past thirty-odd years" must have had cogent reasons for excluding from his re-evaluation of the canon the rhapsodic vituperations of Osborne and Ayckbourn 's continually surprising innovations of theatrical form. But while one may resent their displacement by other contenders (I remain unconvinced by Andrew Parkin's claims for the thealrical virtuosity of Peter Nichols), the inclusion of Tom Murphy and Tony Harrison comes as a shock .of revelation that opens new perspectives on important modem theatre. Four articles are given to dramatists who established themselves before 1960 and who, in the editor's opinion, have "continued to develop in interesting new ways": Beckett. Pinter, Shaffer, and Nichols. Only James Acheson's article on Beckett. however , validates his editorial criterion for inclusion - a postmodern reading that argues for the elusiveness of meaning in plays where the "shape of ideas" deliberately frustrates our grasp of absolute epistemological certainty. In moving beyond the traditional certainties of the intertexts that inform his drama, Acheson maintains, Beckett reveals only the "absolute absence of absolute knowledge" about life, about God, and about the text performed. John Fletcher's article on Pinter, on the other.hand, defies all editorial criteria for inclusion. His thesis is that the muse deserted Pinter in the mid-seventies when he divorced her in the person of Vivien Merchant, and that he simply ran out of inspiration. "Pinter," he writes, "is probably a genius." But his reductive evaluation of a dramatist whose dramaturgy he equates with Noel Coward's makes it extremely difficult to infer the source of this genius. The best of the articles in this volume carefully avoid merely encyclopedic overviews and manage, with extraordinary success, both evaluative and analytic discussion of their subjects. Anthony Jenkins on Edward Bond is particularly helpful in offering a 234 Book Reviews historical and political context - from the impact of the Berliner Ensemble's visit to London in 1956, Ihrough the Second French Revolution of 1968, to the Falklands War and the collapse of Eastern Europe - to account for Bond's retreat from the vanguard to the esoteric ma~gin of left-wing political theatre. "After perestroika," he points out, "Bond cannot specify a communist alternative." For Howard BrenlOn, on the other hand, it is Stalinism itself that forces confrontation with the blood in the revolution's cradle. Not only does Hersh Zeifman's article articulate, clearly and persuasively, Brenton's assertion of socialist idealism against its perversion by a communism turned vicious and tyrannical, but his analysis of The Romans in Britain establishes it as a central text in modem British left-wing theatre. Another fine evaLuation of the most popular of England's political dramatists is James Gindin's essay on David Hare - a moralist, he argues, who probes experience "more deeply than fidelity to political cause ___pennits" and who, in a play like The Secret Rapture, calls profoundly in question the adequacy of humane liberalism to contain evil, accommodate the self-destructive propensities of human beings, or control the ardently desired freedoms that his characters are unable to live...