Modern French Theatre. The Avant-Garde, Dada, and Surrealism by Michael Benedikt and George E. Wellwarth (review)

1965 BOOK REVIEWS 345 in his sentimental and loveable moments, but also while happily engaged in boiling his Unbelievers in prose. Shaw-not the Abbey Theatre-was O'Casey's Mephistopheles, as readily appears once the orchestra stops .playing and the green follow-spots are turned off. Written presumably a few years ago, Mr. Cowasjee's book refers to a number of items of O'Caseana as supposedly lost, when they have actually been in print since 1962 in a volume edited by Mr. Robert Hogan under the title Feathers from the Green Crow. In particular, this applies to that grim little comedy, Nannie'$ Night Out, one of O'Casey's most brilliant dramatic sketches, performed in the Abbey in the Fall of 1924. The existence of any script of this play was resolutely denied by the author for a great many ears, for reasons only known to himself. But now, thanks to the persuasive charm of Mr. Hogan, not only has this script miraculously appeared from nowhere, but also a copy of Cathleen Listens In, which Mr. Cowasjee and Mr. Robert Caswell had to reconstruct from scraps of Actors' Sides salvaged from an Abbey cupboard. One feels they might have been saved this trouble. Finally, a special tribute should be paid to what is probably the most authoritative part of the book: an endearing introduction by O'Casey's good angelhis wife. DENIS JOHNSTON Smith College, Massachusetts MODERN FRENCH THEATRE. THE AVANT-GARDE, DADA, AND SURREALISM , by Michael Benedikt and George E. Wellwarth, E. P. Dutton & Co., New York, 1964, xxxv+406 pp. Price $6.9'5, This anthology of French avant-garde works presents for the first time a comprehensive view of the experimental works which shaped the modern French theater and, by extension, much of the current English and American theater. Almost all of the seventeen plays included were previously totally unknown to the English-speaking public and are today almost impossible to find even in French. If this book therefore served no other purpose than to make these texts available in some form, it would already be of great value. But the editors have gone considerably further. Their thorough and intelligent introduction brings the plays into focus by stressing their intrinsic values and by situating them in the constant struggle against realism which, thanks to the impulsion created by such avant-garde works, has been the dominant characteristic of the contemporary French theater. The anthology begins with Alfred Jarry's "King Ubu" that brilliant and revolutionary work which created a sensation in 1896 and whose influence reaches down to our own day. The other authors represented are: Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean Cocteau, Raymond Radiguet, Tristan Tzara, Andre Breton and Philippe Soupault, Louis Aragon, Armand Salacrou, Rene Daumal, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, Antonin Artaud, Roger Vitrac, Jean Anouilh and Jean Aurenche, Robert Desnos, Jean Tardieu, Robert Pinget, and Eugene Ionesco. The choice made by Messrs. Benedikt and Wellwarth is, on the whole, an excellent one. Perhaps they stress Dada and Surrealism somewhat heavily in view of the fact that this theater did not prove overly fruitful in its relations both to later avant-garde theater and to the traditional, non-avant-garde theater which,. after all, the avant-garde movements attempt to influence through their revolution . Perhaps such expressionistic authors as Simon Gantillon and Jean-Victor 346 MODERN DRAMA December Pellerin might have been included to show still another facet of the French experimental stage. In the realm of surrealism, Georges Neveux'''Juliette ou la de des songes" would seem to be a more successful and a more significant play than those inclu4ed. But these considerations are trifling compared to the importance of presenting in English such works as Apollinaire's "The Breasts of Tiresias," Cocteau's "The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower," and many others. The translations by the editors are quite satisfactory, although they tend to ·be somewhat wooden in spots. What Benedikt and Wellwarth succeed in doing so well in their introduction is the analysis of those elements in this theater which liberated the . French stage from the dreary conventions it had inherited from the nineteenth century. There is no literary genre in any country where the...