O Servidor da Humanidad ed. by Norberto Avila (review)

234 MODERN DRAMA September speaks thus: "It is senseless to ask the modem dramatist to be what he is not and cannot be; it is important to recognize what he is. For this raggletail. disreputable impossibilist embodies what may be the last genuine humanist value of our crippled civilization: an abiding, indestructible respect for the truth (he holds this even when he no longer believes the truth is attainable)." (P. 416) And finally: "The theatre of revolt is not a tragic theatre, but it teaches us how to be tragic men; and if comfort and happiness are not often found there, strength and courage are." (p. 417) In spite of its weaknesses the book or any chapter of it may be read with profit and with relish. There are stimulating ideas; many provocative questions are raised rather than settled; and its theme does ultimately run through the book like a current of fresh water, giving life and intellectual nourishment even when one thinks the current may have gone astray, sometimes even uphill. A small annoyance is the absence of specific sources for the many quotations and added material. Sometimes, indeed often, the footnotes rise to the middle of the page, like very rebels themselves, as in the chapter on Shaw, and they tend to remain completely anonymous and mysterious. There is, in fact, almost another little book lying at the bottom of the pages, a circumstance not so objectionable as it is curiously hard to understand and account for. The Theatre Of Revolt is a notable book and will prove valuable, not so much as a definitive statement as a provocative and stimulating one and as a splendid model for later drama criticism. GERALDINE HAMMOND Wichita State University o SERJ1IDOR DA HUMANIDAD~ by Norberto Avila, ed. Panorama-SNI, Lisbon, 1963. o Servidor da Humanidad is characteristic of the plays of this vanguard Lisbon playwright. This play, which won a Lisbon Manuscritos de Teatro prize in 1963 and was subsequently performed by the Teatro popular de Lisboa and the Portuguese television channel, shows a deliberate blurring of dream and reality, a whimsical sense of humor, and sympathetic solitary characters. As in his o Homem que caminhava sobre as ondas (Lisbon, Atica, 1960), A Descida aos Infernos (Lisbon, Rumo, 1960), A Pulga (scheduled for production in Bordeaux, 1964-65), and A Porta do Labirinto (given a concert reading by the Portuguese atelier of the Universite du Thelitre des Nations, June, 1964, and scheduled for production in Orleans in 1964-65) a non-Portuguese spectator finds little that seems specifically Portuguese in them. (The full length plays, 0 Servidor da Humanidad~ A Pulga, and A Porta do Labirinto, have been translated into French and German.) Instead Avila meditates in a universal idiom on the ambiguity of power, identity, and death. o Servidor da Humanidad follows the inventor of a machine which registers the thoughts of others. He first tries it on his wife, who dies when confronted with proof of her infidelity. Thus £reed £rom his personal problem, the inventor devotes himself to humanity. The principal scenes are a press conference, where the inventor explains his machine, and a mortuary, where he circulates the machine among men at a watch. He achieves a complete image only of a dead man. A Pulga, a more tender dramatization, shows an octagenarian on the day he fails to catch a flea. Beginning to feel old and ill, he reviews his life and 1966 BOOK REVIEWS 235 discovers, in a sequence with a voice representing his double, that he has never lived. His sympathetic housekeeper advises him to look for the flea. Magnifying glass in hand, they kneel on the rug to find the flea. Reversing this optimistic conclusion, A Porta do Labirinto metamorphoses a nightmarish experience which Avila had. When the nameless hero, called Man, wakes without memory, his pieces of identity lost, his name omitted from his hotel register, he opens the door to his essential identity. In an abrupt sequence of scenes his identity eludes the other hotel guests whose monologues reveal human obsessions (money, family, power, justice, illness, war), a police inspector with a humane lie detector, a farcically grotesque television investigation. Trying...