French Drama of the Inter-War Years: 1918-39 by Dorothy Knowles (review)

100 MODERN DRAMA May tieing writers: Anouilh, Salacrou, Robbe-Grillet, and Thornton Wilder (as quoted by Alan Schneider). These men were not deceived: "as important as the opening of Pirandello in Paris in 1923" (Anouilh, p. 13); "Tennessee Williams regards Godot as one of the greatest plays of modern times" (Alan Levy, p. 7'7); and so on. If Beckett was upset by Miami (which is unlikely) he must have been gratified by the instant, wholehearted and passionate accolade of his peers. Of almost equal interest are the attitudes of actors and directors. Having assisted in a production, I sympathize with Peter Bull's lament that "an identical cue kept recurring every few pages of the script, so that it was remarkably easy to leave out whole chunks of the play" (p. 40). And it is hard not to agree with Alan Simpson, the Dublin producer, that Beckett is wrong in insisting on "Nothing to be done" rather than on "It's no good" as a translation of "Rien afaire" (P.45). Beckett doesn't make it exactly easy for his players and directors, but this is the necessary intransigence of genius. Without Beckett's we should not have Godot; nor, for that matter, should we have had this charming, but not trivial, anthology. JOHN FLETCHER FRENCH DRAMA OF THE INTER-WAR YEARS: I9I8-39, by Dorothy Knowles, George G. Harrap and Co., Ltd., London, 1967. 334 pp. 35 s. The historian of modern drama is confronted at once with the problem of defining the nature and limits of his subject. The chronicler of theatrical activity at a particular place and time may be content simply to list the plays performed and to arrange them in general classifications. At the opposite pole, a history of drama may be restricted to a consideration of the major playwrights and their plays. This is the approach followed, for example, by Jacques Guicharnaud in his Modern French Th.eatre. Dr. Knowles' book is much closer to a factual chronicle than to a critical history; it aims at presenting a record of theatrical activity in France from 1918 to 1939, and is essentially a contribution to theatrical history rather than to dramatic criticism. There is an occasional concern with styles and techniques, and with problems of critical interpretation, but the greater part of the volume is largely a description of the plays performed, presented under the heading of their individual authors. The labor that went into the making of Dr. Knowles' book must have been prodigious. Clearly, she has seen or read all of the plays she discusses-and she discusses not dozens but hundreds in the course of her study. For almost every play, there is a plot summary and an account of the circumstances of its production . The value of the study as a reference work is therefore very great. The reader unfamiliar with, for example, the many plays of Henri-Rene Lenormand or Denys Amiel will find reasonably full and perceptive accounts of them in this book. It is to the author's credit that in her discussion of individual playwrights, she devotes more attention to the major figures of the period (Claudel, Cocteau, Giraudoux, Anouilh, Salacrou) than to any of the lesser writers, yet the effect of her method is to weigh down the volume with page after page of summaries of the works of playwrights who were never very important in the first place, and whose plays are almost totally unreadable and unplayable today. As part of the record of theatrical activity of the time, the detailed account of plays by Simon Gantillon, Bernard Zimmer, Steve Passeur, Alexandre Arnoux, Edouard Schneider, Edouard Bourdet, Louis Verneuil, Henri Kistemaeckers, etc. etc. is no doubt justified; but Dr. Knowles is generally so intelligent in her critique 1969 BOOK REVIEWS 101 of the major playwrights that one cannot help wishing that she had conceived of her book differently. Dr. Knowles has organized her study in twelve chapters, most of which purportedly deal with dramatic themes, styles, or attitudes. There does not seem to be any logical basis for the sequence of chapters, nor, for that matter, for the sequence of playwrights discussed within a...