Drama + Theory: Critical Approaches to Modern British Drama by Peter Buse (review)

124 REVIEWS deconstruction, the idea of definitions is at least questionable. For students trying to get a grasp on concepts, however, a pithy verbal summary can be confirmatory. In relating many of his "definitions" in the glossary to specific positions or theorists, Fortier achieves the trick of saying something useful while also avoiding the untenable imposition of linguistic fixity. Also added to this second edition are suggestions for further reading and question sections at the end of each chapter. The first is valuable particularly for the inclusion of primary sources to which it is hoped students will turn. The second, while inviting students to make the theory their own through application, seems to me to elicit simplified rather than complex responses. But students have to start out from their current position. Fortier notes that there are many published introductions to theory in various guises. In my view, his particular contribution is to promote the application of theory to theatre and performance by furnishing students with a very sound and readable introduction. From Artaud to Zizek, Fortier gives lucid accounts of key concepts that will continue to enable students, if they follow Fortier's example, self-reflexively to locate perspectives in a complex forcefield rather than naively to adopt the voice of truth. For, as Nietzsche taught us, "truth" is no more than the honorific title assumed by the argument which has got the upper hand. PETER BUSE. Drama + Theory: Critical Approaches to Modern British Drama. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Pp. xi + 204. £40.00 (Hb); £11.99 (Pb). Reviewed by Susan Bennell, University a/Calgary Any retrospective on the last half of the twentieth century cannot ignore the faJ-reaching impact of critical theory for disciplinary domains in the liberal and fine arts. Author Peter Buse suggests, however, that drama studies has been less influenced by theory than many other areas and takes this fact as his motivation to engage a group of plays considered to be representative of "modern British drama" and contemporary, relevant theory. Rather like pairing the right wine with a particulaJ food, the author brings together some of the most influential thinking by key critical theorists with plays by canonical figures of post-war British drama. His aim, as he puts it, is to encourage a bidirectional exchange or interaction: "Not only can theory add to drama, but drama can add to theory, inflecting it in ways previously unanticipated. Rather than seeking the failings in any individual theory - and undoubtedly there are some - this books asks in what ways the texts of theory can gain from the theoretical insights that drama itself has to offer" (r). To this end, then, nine Reviews 125 plays are given nine theory partners and each pair is allowed a chapter-length exploration. This novel format is driven by Buse's determination to do something other than the typical critical or historical survey of the period, which, he quite rightly notes, has the inevitable effect of allowing only a one- or two-page discussion of any single play and in which the "same fate all too often awaits theoretical texts or issues mentioned or raised in passing but never explored in detail" (7). Thus, the project is established as a supplement to those survey texts and as an explicit venture in bringing theory into active discourse with some of the best-known plays of the last fifty years. Buse hopes that his approach will bring about "different reading strategies" (7) and, in some ways, this reveals what seems to be the underlying impulse for the book: to teach the corpus of modem British drama in a less determinedly historical, more theoryinformed pedagogy. The author is admirably invested in addressing a student audience and does a good job in keeping his discussions both accessible and informative. Difficult theoretical terms are often glossed as they are used, and references to his own classroom praxis keep the pedagogical interest in sight. For example, in discussing a photograph from the original production of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, Buse refers to his students' misidentification of the male characters - that in this visual image they more readily saw Alan Bates as Jimmy than...