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398 BOOK REVIEWS strange oblique personality of the dramatist ... did not find its proper outlet on the stage." He often did rise above the personal to the universal in his plays, and did so in ways which enriched the theatre and its possibilities. One is, however, grateful to John Reilly for making this dramatist known to a wider public. Adamov deserves, albiet belatedly, this attention. MARGARET DIETEMANN lona College TOWARD A MODERN THEATRE: KISHIDA KUNIO, by J. Thomas Rimer. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974. xi & 306 pp. $14.50. Kishida Kunio was an intellectual active in the theatre world of Japan in the mid-twenties and thirties, though he lived on into the mid-fifties. After a short introduction raising the question of "modernization" in the Japanese theatre this study outlines principal theatrical developments prior to the commencement of Kishida's activity, the growth of his own interest in writing plays and certain general conditions which were to determine the course of his career as a playwright. Chapter VI ("The Plays") provides extended plot outlines and spot translations for readers curious about his dramatic work. At its best (that is, in the two central chapters entitled "Kishida as a Man of the Theatre" and "Kishida as a Playwright") this book provides testimony through the dramatist's own words, translated from miscellaneous articles, about the problems and difficulties faced by a representative intellectual and literary man in sustaining a career as a playwright and man of the theatre in Japan along lines which were familiar to him: especially from the formative experience of a visit to France, first hand acquaintance with theatre there, and a personal association with Copeau and the Vieux Colombier between 1920 and his return to Japan in 1923. Kishida's career is a representative one. It is not, in the larger sense of the word, an eminent one. His activities do include, however, the co-founding of a theatre (Bungaku-za), the level of whose acting has generally been recognized even until recently as of the highest professional competence in Japan within the genre it practices, a genre toward the development of which Kishida's lifelong efforts were directed. It is important to note, however, that the "New Theatre Movement" (shingeki) which the title and outlook of the book implies to be the culimination of theatrical activity in Japan in our century, is nothing but a single genre, whose prominence today is in jeopardy - if not, in fact, quite illusory. Only a minimal amount of information is available to Western readers about contemporary Japanese theatre and for that reason the good news of the liberation of the theatrical imagination there - from the need to emulate western norms, from the desire to be "serious," "literary," or "humanistic" (standards of aesthetics of theatre shared by both Kishida and the author) and from a dependence upon actors "who lead the kind of lives we lead: ... whose conceptualizations , interests, and perceptions are the same as ours, [who] receive the same education as ours" (p. 88) - has yet to be widely known in print, although examples of really representative contemporary work of the most imaginative sort have already been seen outside Japan. This book is the most recent, detailed and well-documented treatment at BOOK REVIEWS 399 length of an aspect of twentieth century theatre in Japan available in English, a fact which by itself alone almost compels one's recommendation of it. It is impossible , however, to conceal a personal regret that a work of this nature was undertaken by a scholar who evidently either has little personal interest in theatre as performance, or who felt that such an outlook has little place in a study of an "intellectual," "literary" playwright. A more serious shortcoming in the work itself , it seems to me, is that it finds no place in a treatment of Japanese theatre in the twentieth century for a more positive and sympathetic account of the rich variety of other performance types existing simultaneously with the genre which it treats; especially since only a more catholic grasp of this sort can prepare us intellectually for the various new directions theatre there has taken since 1960, directions and points of departure...

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