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Drama on Drama: Dimensions of Theatricality on the Contemporary British Stage ed. by Nicole Boireau (review)
- Modern Drama
- University of Toronto Press
- Volume 41, Number 1, Spring 1998
- pp. 170-172
- 10.1353/mdr.1998.0033
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
'70 Book Reviews Smith additionally notes the exclusion of the drama from the burgeoning field of cultural studies. Unfortunately, it appears that American drama is in one case too low and in the other too high. Add to all of this the perennial debate over whether or not a dramatic text is "merely" a script for the theatre, another facet that Smith reveals to be an unfortunate civil war of sorts between potential allies for the recognition of American drama as both text and performance. (The recent emergence of performance studies, Smith suggests, has rather inadvertently dealt a serious blow to efforts at establishing the value of dramatic texts by themselves.) The study, however, goes beyond mere academia and documents numerOllS past attempts to place the American drama on a popular center stage both in the theatre and in print. While many concerted efforts succeeded for brief periods of time at shining a warm light on the American drama, they could not be sustained, resulting in returns to marginalization. The almost overwhelming numbers of causes Smith presents for the marginalization of American drama nevertheless fails to convince her that the Americandrama deserves its bastard status. Herdefenses are reasonable. and I believe they are quite convincing in the other direction. Namely we should, more than ever, fight for the positioning of the American drama in the center of innumerable debates over the opening of the canon (actually, any number of "canons") and additionally work to place it more directly in the spotlight of popular scrutiny. Fair treatment will gamer equitable and positive results. WILLIAM W. DEMASTES, LOUISIANA STATE UN IVERS IT Y, BATON ROUGE NICOLE BOJREAU, ed. Drama 011 Drama: Dimensions of Theatricality on the Contemporary British Stage. London and New York: Macmillan '997. Pp. 256. $49·95· The fifteen essays in this collection, by scholars from different countries, are brought together in order to explore different forms of reflexivity in contemporary British drama. Among the key figures discussed in some depth are Beckett, Pinter, Wertenbaker, Bond, Barker, Churchill, Stoppard, McGrath and Hampton. Aside from considering the most obvious kinds of reflexivity, such as the use of metadramatic discourse or the play-within-the-play, the essayists examine more complex forms of reflexive appropriation: adaptation, translation, re-contextualization and transcoding of previous theatrical models . Ever since Brecht's experiments with "counter-plays," pouring progressive ideological wine into old bourgeois bottles, the British children of Brecht have embraced reflexive forms as the necessary weapons in forging a political theatre or a theatre of ideas. These essays are a useful reminder of the extent to Book Reviews [71 which the reflexive lurn became a formal obsession with modem British playwrights . However, over the past fifty years, there have been enough reductive, even simplistic, revisions of medieval, Shakespearean and Jacobean plays built on this model, to take stock of whether this kind of intertextual interrogation is productive. This is a central question that this collection simply doesn't address. All of the essays are oddly complacent and, surprisingly, lacking in critical reflexivity, especially on this count. Although the editor claims that the "authors re-interrogate conceptual frameworks and reassess their validity" (p. xv), there was little evidence to support that claim in this helerogenous collection of essays. An equally bleak note has to be sounded about its standards of academic prose. Some essayists clearly assume that a shared theoretical discourse is sufficient proof against the vagaries of the English language. Sadly, this is not the case. The prose here deserves a prominently displayed linguistic health warning. Among many contenders, my award for Highest Opacity Rating in a Single Sentence went to this particular specimen: "Bemused audiences have witnessed the dual process of re-creation, out of prior creation, have stood through the travestied reflexive metaphor of war and peace in an end-of-the-century process of interrogation . or ratherin some form of decadent game echoing the increasing conflict of distorted beliefs and emotions, in an irrational society" (p. 3). One obvious danger in dealing with "drama on drama" is that contributors can limit themselves to a blow-by-blow account of the reflexive devices used by a playwright. For example, Nicole Boireau begins...