The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht; A Study From Eight Aspects by John Willet (review)

1960 BOOK REvIEWS 427 solution is possible; but the salvation of the American theater, despite the earnest, intelligent best wishes of the editors of tllis anthology, will not come from an offBroadway direction. Off-Broadway, in short, is interesting rather than influential as a phenomenon of the postwar years. Hence, onc cannot become unduly excited over any single play reprinted here, although each one provides an evening of playgoing pleasure. It is interesting that only James Lee's Career, with its surprising final line that the heartbreaks of the acting profession ("No homc. No family. Twenty-five years that averaged hventy dollars a week.") are "worth it," deals with an American locale. The American soldier who agonizes in Alfred Hayes's The Girl on the Via Flaminia is always referred to as a rich and privileged soldier from across the sea; but he resembles Everyman, and the situation is deliberately universalized. Sean O'Casey's Purple Dust makcs for splendid talk, of a sort all too rare in contemporary plays; everyone has kissed the Blarney Stone; but O'Casey has written better, and the point he makes is a small one, after all. Dragon's Mouth, by Jacquetta Hawkes and J. B. Priestley, has turned into tedious print, although within the theatre it seemed like important debate. The staged "reading," we suspect, is a dead end. Certainly comparisons of Dragon's Mouth with DOll Juan in Hell have not been generous to the former, or pleasing to the Priestleys. Jean Anouilh's Ardele, despite its hunchback symbolism, can be a moving experience; and James Forsyth's Heloise, which retells the medieval story of Abelard with considerably more sympathy than Mark Twain did in The Innocents Abroad, is poignantly, quietly beautiful . Produced with taste and an indispensable minimum enthusiasm, anyone of these plays could fit into a Broadway house. (Only Marjorie Barkentin's adaptation of James Joyce, Ulysses in Nighttown, produced under Padraic Colum's supervision, will remain forever limited in appeal, although in some ways it is the most ingenious solution to any of the problems set by these seven plays. It attempts much, and has a very special kind of integrity.) Career has been made into a film; The Girl on the Via Flaminia moved uptown soon after its original production; what has been .done off-Broadway can be, and has been, done commercially for larger audiences. It is difficult to see the future writ small in off-Broadway productions. One may, however, be thankful that New York playgoers are so hungry for theatre that they willingly support these hundreds of groups, this actors' movement, in addition to the glossy and intellectually empty productions of midtown Manhattan. "No pleasure," Publilus Syrus wrote hvo thousand years ago, "lasts long unless there is variety in it." And off-Broadway theatres certainly provide variety. HAROLD OUEL THE THEATRE OF BERTOLT BRECHT; A Study From Eight Aspects, by John Willet, New York, New Directions, 1959. 272 pp. Price $8.00. John Willet's rather slender volume will be considered by any student of modem drama an indispensable reference work on Brecht the playwright and theorist. It represents to date the only comprehensive study of his work, and is, above all, the only book written about him in English. Readers familiar with the scholarly German tome by Ernst Schumacher on Brecht's early theatrical endeavors and the scanty Brecht studies published in France will welcome Willett's study of Brecht's entire theater as a much needed supplement. But the book pinpoints only too clearly the dilemma with which its author was faced in writing it. With the exception of the Threepenny Opera, Brecht's plays 428 MODERN DRAMA February are still almost unknown to readers and audiences outside of Germany. To remedy this situation, the book's main part, entitled "Eight Aspects," is preceded by an elaborate "Groundwork," made up of analyses of Brecht's plays. But these matterof -fact analyses are not as effective as their author would wish them to be in dispelling the "sweeping verdicts and confusing interpretations" to which the playwright has been subject. Nor do they convey to us the essence of that extraordinary dramatist who had had...