Drama, Stage and Audience by J. L. Styan (review)

Reviews 367 silence by Soviet critics. If for no other reason this volume is important for Tjalsma’s retrospective. And there are other reasons to rejoice: Ivask’s account of the Khlysty (God’s People, although the word means “whip”) is entertaining and perceptive. Students of Russia’s Silver Age will find much here to savor—evidently sex and spirit did mix in those good old halcyon days. Ivask’s biographical notes on Kliuev (“an Oscar Wilde or Paul Verlaine in bast shoes”) and on the Khlysty prophets (some, like Radaev, had many mistresses) are tantalizing. Equally praiseworthy is E. J. Brown’s perceptive study of “Mayakov­ sky’s Futurist Period,” the best work done on the Russian poet by any critic, although one can argue with Brown about various textual inter­ pretations, especially on the verse, “I love to watch children dying,” or on the poem, “Listen!” Brown seems to contradict Renato Poggioli’s view that the lasting literature of the past century “issued from the margins rather than the center of the avant-garde.” Malmstad and Shmakov, on the other hand, agree with Poggioli. The poet Kuzmin, they suggest, selected materials from the margins of avant-garde movements and incorporated them into the body of his work. Thus to know Kuzmin is to study the margins. Whether the topic is poetry, art (Bowlt on the “Union of Youth”) or architecture (Starr’s account of the Union of Contemporary Architects), the point made by each of these critics is simple and plain: Politics pollute. How sad; for a considerable amount that was written in Russia during that fruitful period of experimentation and discovery (1900-1930) ranks with the best created in the West during the same time. Much was the product of overzealous groups striving for recognition and an ever-fleeing raison d’etre. Gibian and Tjalsma prove that the time has come to go beyond the margins. E. J. CZERWINSKI SUNY, Stony Brook J. L. Styan. Drama, Stage and Audience. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 1975. Pp. viii + 256. $14.95. This book is Professor Styan’s third attempt to explain the dynamics of drama to that endangered species, the general reader. In these works, as in his more specialized studies of Shakespeare, Chekhov, and modem playwrights, Styan views the text of a play as “a pattern of coded signals” designed for actual or imagined performance. These signals are written in words but involve visual as well as aural phenomena, what theater audiences see as well as what they hear, what a reader visualizes as well as what sounds in his head. The first half of this book suggests some of the ways such signals operate: how, for example, visual and aural signals have been or might be translated into theatrical reality through details of costume and music, how sight and sound work in harmony or in effective contrast, how they build series of impressions in the minds of spectators or readers. 368 Comparative Drama As always, Professor Styan writes with clarity and vigor. Impatient with theoretical discussion, he makes his points through extended analyses of particular examples, telling us how certain passages were intended to or might be read, and what gestures, actions, or business did or could accompany them. Most of these analyses are firmly anchored to the words in the text. In commenting on the opening scene of Macbeth, the meeting of the three weird sisters on the heath, he shows how Shakespeare arouses a feeling of eerie menace in a mere dozen lines by complementing whatever crude effects the Globe used to represent thunder and lightning with a rich series of poetic effects—heavily accented tetrameter couplets, broken lines, question-and-answer format, allitera­ tion, evocative diction. But occasionally one feels that Styan is not de­ coding the dramatist’s signals so much as he is imposing his own notions on the text, an acceptable enough endeavor had he only given us fair warning. In the same scene, he finds that the sounds of the lines “set in motion a circular, accelerating dance movement, one in which each line is de­ livered at a new pitch as the dancer arrives at a place nearest...