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388 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 other delights while the Abbey staged literature. In fact, the Abbey=s >interregnum= (as O=Neill calls it) at the Queen=s was remarkable at the time, and in retrospect, for its consistency in producing feeble new plays and laxly staged old ones. But audiences may have, as O=Neill claims they did, seen a mirror of sorts held up to their lives. The bulk of O=Neill=s book consists of useful documentation. The four appendices supply various data for the fifteen years in question, in context with data for the Abbey overall up to 1966. So it is possible to make comparison between the Queen=s years and the Abbey Street years. For instance, the number of translations into Irish during the fifteen years at the Queen=s was thirteen, while eighteen were done during the forty-seven years on Abbey Street; the equivalent figures for translations into English being two and twenty-one respectively. The Irish language, then, had a high priority and profile in these years B a fact not unrelated to the Abbey=s status as a state-subsidized theatre. Of the book=s five chapters, four are devoted to short commentaries on the plays, listings of players, directors and designers, and biographical sketches of authors. That is to say, they are compilations of much the same sort as the appendices. But they do allow a little room for brief authorial commentaries, which sometimes sound rather like old Holloway=s: >a most commendable piece of writing for the state, even if marred by an unsatisfactory denouement and an overabundance of characters (49).= (In this case, by the way, an >overabundance= is >nineteen plus Aothers.@=) The brief introduction offers a quick >panoramic sketch= of Irish social conditions in, and beyond, the years in question. It is rather a dry, bleak account that will make younger readers glad not to have been there, and even reluctant, perhaps, to read its plays B especially in the light of what went before and what came after. As to what came before at the Queen=s, O=Neill=s first chapter is an affectionate account of the Queen=s up to the Abbey=s sojourn there, notably of its rich repertory of melodrama. That story is an altogether livelier one. It is a pity, though, that O=Neill has almost nothing to say about the contrasting architectures of the converted morgue that was the first Abbey and the Victorian theatre that temporarily replaced it. Imagine the Tarragon moving to, say, the Winter Garden. But The Abbey at the Queen=s does not pretend to be a work of reflection or analysis. It is content to be a modestly conceived and very handy compilation. (MICHAEL J. SIDNELL) Dorothy Anger. Other Worlds: Society Seen through Soap Operas Broadview 1999. 172. $18.95 Long derided and dismissed as trivial escapism, soap operas came into their own as a topic of serious academic inquiry in the 1980s under the influence of new perspectives such as cultural studies, postmodernism, and feminist HUMANITIES 389 analyses of popular culture. The latter in particular serve as a general backdrop for Dorothy Anger=s study, which, she claims, does not have >one fixed Apoint of reference@= so much as >an engaged perspective= derived from her own enjoyment of the genre. Anger is generally critical of earlier feminist analyses for reading too much into B or out of B soaps, and for seeing them primarily as a source of gender stereotypes. Her own point of departure is anchored in the broad appeal of soaps to >familiar, human situations, dilemmas, emotions,= and in their ability to mix realism and the mundane with romance, fantasy, and intrigue. The approach Anger takes to address this appeal is a comparative one. The book opens with an overview of the evolution of the soap opera, particularly in the US: the early days of radio soaps, their migration to television, and the various stages B from moral advice-giving to the airing of social issues to the incorporation of >action/adventure= narrative and dramatic elements in the 1980s B through which the television soap has developed. This sets the scene for...

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