Theatre and Alchemy by Bettina L. Knapp, and: Holy Theatre, Ritual and the Avant Garde by Christopher Innes (review)

handsomely designed, and illustrated with a profusion of black and white photos of memorable productions and personalities, and printed on heavy stock to make it a long-lived reference. The Court seats only four hundred and one, so its triumph is not only an artistic one, but also one of deft arts management, an area of increasing concern in America, where so many off-off Broadway and regional theatres must survive on a non-profit basis, hoping for subsidies. Courses in arts management are burgeoning, and more books on the subject are appearing all the time. In Arts Management Benedict and Coe provide a useful service in itemizing a number of the better ones, organizing them by subject-Fundraising , Marketing and Public Relations, Planning and Facilities-and then summarizing the content of each, avoiding value judgments. This bibliography is one in a series issued by the Center for Arts Information; others deal with Money forArtists, Jobs in the Arts and Arts Administration, and allied topics. Glenn Loney Theatre and Alchemy. Bettina L. Knapp. Wayne State University Press, 283 pp., $19.95 (cloth). In 1938, Antonin Artaud entitled the third chapter of The Theater and its Double, "The Alchemical Theater." He stated: "There is a mysterious Identity of essence between the principle of theatre and that of alchemy. For like alchemy, the theatre, considered from the point of view of its deepest principle , is developed from a certain number of fundamentals which care the same for all the arts and which aim on the spiritual and imaginary level at an efficacity analogous to the process which in the physical world actually turns all matter into gold." For Artaud, theatre was the Double of an archetypal reality, a kind of mirage. Bettina Knapp, the author of one of the earliest studies of Artaud published in the English speaking world uses the alchemical process to question a number of important plays (A Dream Play, Escurial, Break of Noon, The Only Jealousy of Emer, The Water Hen, Axel, The Dybbuk, Matsukaze, Shakuntala) in the way an alchemist "questions" matter in order to extract from It the prima materia from which gold is produced . This philosophical approach is particularly rewarding when applied to plays by poet-dramatists who were interested in illuminism, the occult, SwedenborgIanism, and the hermetic sciences. Thus, Strindberg experimented with the decomposition of sulfur,Yeats practiced automatic writing and turned the "winding, gyring, spiring treadmill" of his ancestral stair Into a symbol, Claudel tried to convey the living presence of a spiritual universe, as real to him as any physical manifestation and Villiers de l'Isle Adam spent a major part of his life in the study of occult theory and practice. Bettina Knapp's structure for her book follows the steps of transmutation: Nigredo, Albedo, Rubedo. The choice of plays, as she says In her Introduction , is "intuitive" since "any play may be Interpreted alchemically." This is a poetic approach, one that clearly demonstrates that a sensitive critic is also a creator whose meditation is tuned to seeing the world through the 114 work of art. The alchemical process was a physical way of interrogating the cosmos; Theatre and Alchemy also takes us through the steps of uncovering and recovering our universe. Rosette Lamont Holy Theatre, Ritual and the Avant Garde. Christopher innes. Cambridge University Press, 276 pp., $32.50 (cloth). Taking his title, but not his substance, from Brook, Innes argues that the dominant mode attempted by avant-garde theatre, from Jarry to Wilson and Monk, has been tragedy, which he defines, only partly after Aristotle, as a cathartic form using ritual and myth, the irrational and the primitive, to "evoke subliminal responses and tap the unconscious." Innes rests his case almost exclusively on theatre history, providing some interesting individual discussion, for instance those on Artaud and Barrault, but he does not create the firm conceptual framework drawn from anthropology, religion and dramatic theory one would have thought essential in a work of such ambitious scope. So one is not fully convinced of the tragedy theory. Why are these mythic theatre pieces not "archetypal masques" as Northrop Frye would have it? Or a form of mystery play, a genre description...