The Actor’s Freedom: Toward A Theory of Drama by Michael Goldman (review)

352 Comparative Drama ing: Captain Jack Boyle is a Falstaffian rogue who has the “same flam­ boyant humour and glorious mendacity, the ingenious sense of selfindulgence and self-preservation,” and who epitomizes the triumphant anti-hero. Krause’s insistence upon the paycock’s comic resiliency and the affirmation he embodies in the face of “chassis” misses the deeper implications of O’Casey’s satire, where Boyle’s drunken evasion of con­ sciousness stands in stark contrast with Juno’s creative endurance. Far from a triumphant anti-hero, the paycock remains ethically bankrupt, the dramatic embodiment of the perversion of the creative energy human nature is capable of. Surely, Krause’s revised edition should have cor­ rected this error for now he could have benefitted from a letter O’Casey wrote to Ronald Rollins, published in 1966, in which he states: “The Cap­ tain and his parasitical companions have let their selfish, petty interests ruin their lives— and the lives of others.” But in an important sense such criticism is incidental, for Krause’s original work still remains an admirable piece of appreciatory criticism. In Krause’s respecting hands the man and his art are joined, and the portrait of O’Casey’s upbeat resilience gives biographical substance to the felt robustness of his plays. Since Professor Krause published the original Sean O’Casey: The Man and His Work, criticism of O’Casey has begun to mature seeking out ritual and mythical elements in his plays, determining his debt to the popular dramatic tradition and his position in theatre history during the first half of this century. We are now more fully aware of the unity between the earlier Abbey plays and the later symbolic and expressionistic dramas, of the influences of the historical and political events on O’Casey’s life and work. All of the work on O’Casey which has been and still remains to be done will in some substantial way be indebted to Professor Krause whose book remains the first full length, serious treatment of O’Casey as one of the outstanding British dramatists of this century. MICHAEL W. KAUFMAN State University of New York at Albany Michael Goldman. The Actor’s Freedom: Toward A Theory of Drama. New York: The Viking Press, 1975. Pp. vii + 180. $8.95. The major concerns of Professor Goldman’s interesting book derive from his stated premise that “the powers of the actor determine the playwright’s art as the possibilities of language determine the poet’s.” The Actor’s Freedom “proposes a new way of thinking about drama,” and that “new way” has much to do with developing “a way of talking about drama that is not contaminated by notions derived from literature.” To carry out his stated purpose, Goldman convincingly argues that “to understand the nature of drama—it is necessary first of all to think about acting—about the nature of the actor’s appeal, the kind of energy his art possesses,” and “his relation to the audience and the world.” Reviews 353 Goldman sees in the actor’s appeal to audiences what he labels “a double impulse . . . of attraction and repulsion.” Further, he explains: We come together to adore their [the actors’] fearful energies, to be infected by their risks and recklessness, to enjoy what happens to them. And the actors feel the same double impulse toward us, which in turn becomes part of what we feel as we watch them mastering their audience. Our reaction to them heightens the double impulse, drives it toward a point of tension. We are at once the risk the actors run and the immense body of pleasure they control, a wave of threat and promise constantly beating against their per­ formance, bringing it to life. In like manner, the roots of audience interaction with the “actoras -character” during a performance, according to Goldman, stem from a powerfully ambivalent response akin to that experienced by the “actoras -character.” In sum, Goldman perceives “the joint activity of actor and audience as a means by which man attempts to complete his relation to the world, especially to everything in the world that strikes him as dangerous and strange.” Because acting encompasses such...