Modern Drama in Theory and Practice by J. L. Styan (review)

REVIEWS J. L. Styan. Modern Drama in Theory and Practice. 3 Volumes. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981. $27.50 each vol., $75 the set. Serious students of the drama have come to expect a sensible, yet penetratingly subtle, commentary from J. L. Styan, who has been arguing for a stage-centered dramatic criticism for over twenty years. From his an­ alytically wide-ranging The Elements of Drama (1959) to the controver­ sial Chekhov in Performance (1971) and the engrossing The Shakespeare Revolution (1978), Styan has combined an unpretentious brilliance with a charming and lucid writing style to illuminate both the excitement and the difficulty which await all who inquire into the nature of the most complex art form we know. Unaccountably, his critical achievement is less broadly acknowledged than that of several literary critics or intellec­ tual historians writing principally on the drama (one thinks, for instance, of Robert Brustein, Raymond Williams, Northrop Frye, and Jan Kott) ; but his work should prove more enduring, for the simple reason that he writes about plays as they should be known—as designs for theatrical realization. “A play,” he says simply in Drama, Stage and Audience (1975), “is poetry, something made; it is drama, something done; and theatre, something perceived” (p. 31). This same theoretical schema defines both the approach and the value of Styan’s newest contribution to the discipline of drama study, Modern Drama in Theory and Practice (issued in three hard-cover volumes, each with its own sub-title: Volume 1, “Realism and Naturalism”; Volume 2, “Symbolism, Surrealism and the Absurd”; Volume 3, “Expressionism and the Epic Theatre”). In a preface that is identical for each volume, Styan says: “The new attempt of this study is to look at some of the important plays of modern times, not as isolated literary works, but in relation to their production and performance” (p. xi). Citing style— “the way of seeing of writer, player or spectator”—as the key to dramatic interpre­ tation, because it is “the one ingredient . . . which a play and its per­ formance should ideally have in common” and “the sine qua non of dramatic communication,” Styan proceeds to describe in considerable detail no fewer than eighty signal plays in performance, from Zola’s Thérèse Raquin and Ibsen’s A Doll’s House to Edward Bond’s The Woman, while also sketching in major theoretical programs and experi­ ments as these were set forth by a host of theatrical and dramatic artists. So does he fulfill his aim of making this book’s real subject, “in the widest sense, the bearing of theory on practice, and of practice on theory” (p. xii). 79 80 Comparative Drama The result is not merely another, possibly superfluous, book on that unaccommodating mass of plays, ideas, theatre experiments, and “-isms” which we call “modern drama.” Rather, Styan has produced a miracu­ lously economical account of drama, stage, audience, and aesthetic theory since Zola, Büchner, and Nietzsche, an account at once synoptic and comprehensive, critical and informative, selectively detailed and interpretively incisive. The substantive scope of this relatively modest, 542page text (which includes 114 illustrations) will impress theatre historians and drama critics alike, while providing teachers and students with an indispensable reference work that is a pleasure to consult. There is a great deal to admire in the structural scheme as well as in the content of Modern Drama in Theory and Practice. For instance, a concise summary of the defining “-ism” introduces each volume and draws the large theoretical lines for its historical span of descriptive and interpretive commentary. Especially helpful are Volume l ’s outline of the Naturalist revolt against the prevailing Romantic, melodramatic, and well-made dramas, and Volume 2’s explanation of Wagner’s, Appia’s, and Gordon Craig’s symbolist programs for regarding drama and theatre as integrated endeavors to fashion a whole art of visual, aural, and poetic elements. Then, in short chapters, averaging between two and four thou­ sand words apiece, each volume highlights the significant figures and episodes in modern drama and theatre’s progress. Many of these essays are positively crystalline in their expressiveness. The appreciation of the Saxe-Meiningen troupe’s...