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462 MODERN DRAMA February LADY GREGORY, SELECTED PLAYS, selected by Elizabeth Coxhead, with a foreword by Sean Q'Casey, Hill & Wang, New York, 1963, 269 pp. Price $5.00. Perhaps the two current kinds of drama critics may be described as the public critic and the private critic. The public critic is usually a professional journalist whose job is to evaluate the professionally produced plays of the metropolis. The remarks of the public critic are for the most part restricted to the plays produced in any current season, and the bulk of those remarks concern the new plays by new or currently admired authors. Because the public critic's pronouncements appear in the public press, they have the dramatic impact of news as well as considerable immediate effect upon the modern drama. The private critic has much less immediate impact, but he can have a more lasting and important one. The private critic is the unprofessional reviewer, frequently an academic, whose reflections appear either in books or in the pages of a handful of small·circulation magazines like Modern Drama. The private critic is not restricted by the plays of the current season. His subject matter may 'be selected from the entirety of the modern repertoire. The main value of the private critic is that he serves as an antidote to the professional critic, as a conscience for the drama, and as a reminder that the glory of the modern drama is not confined to those few plays and playwrights which are in any particular season popular. The great fault of the modern professional stage is that it depends primarily upon new drama, and, consequently, many superb plays and playwrights of the near past are rarely revived. The great function of the private critic is to remind us, continually and persistently, of that part of the modern repertoire which is in danger of being ignored or forgotten. In her work on Lady Gregory, Elizabeth Coxhead is calling attention to forgotten merit, and is thus a private critic who is fulfilling her best possible function. Lady Gregory will never rival Jean Kerr on the commercial stage, and she will be even more rarely performed by the slavishly imitative amateur stage, unless a private critic persistently reminds that amateur stage that Lady Gregory is first-rate. This eclipse of Lady Gregory has little to do with the merit of her plays. Among her Irish colleagnes, the work of Padraic Colum, St. John Ervine, Lord Dunsany, T. C. Murray, Lennox Robinson, Paul Vincent Carroll, Denis Johnston and until recent years of O'Casey himself has been just as ignored. In America the work of Rice, Anderson, Sherwood, Howard, Green and Meyer has been similarly eclipsed by the current popularity of Williams, Miller and Albee. In England the work of Osborne, Wesker, Pinter and Delaney has relegated to the dusty back shelves of libraries the work of Barrie and Galsworthy as well as the quite recent work of Bridie and Fry. Among the Germanic speaking people, Brecht not Hauptmann is staged; among the Spanish, Lorca not Benevente; among the French, Anouilh not lola, Ionesco not Cocteau. The reason for the wholesale eclipse of the first-rate writers of the near past has a great deal more to do with the commercial necessities of the professional stage than with intrinsic merit. Consequently, this collection, which brings back into print nine of Lady Gregory's most interesting plays, is the proper kind of work for the private critic to engage in. The modern drama is rather like an iceberg; seven-eighths of it is always submerged. If that seven-eighths is ever entirely lost, what remains will surely sink. In his Foreword, O'Casey calls Lady Gregory a first-rate writer rather than a masterly one. That is a just and nice distinction, and I would only modify it by adding that Lady Gregory sometimes rises to mastery. In this selection 1964 BOOK REVIEWS 463 that mastery is notably apparent in the delicately wry The Rising of the Moon and in that tight and poignant tragedy The Gaol Gate, which is surely one of the few plays which does not wither by a comparison to Riders to...

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