Modern British Drama: 1890-1990 by Christopher Innes (review)

Book Reviews CHRISTOPHER INNES. Modern B,.itish Drama: 1890-1990. Cambridge University Press 1992. Pp. xxiii, 484, iIIuslrated. $59.95; $t8.95 (PB). What makes Modern British Drama 1890-1990 particularly worthwhile is the way Christopher Innes eschews chronology. Scything through a century of plays, he groups them into realism ("the objective reproduction of ordinary contemporary life"), comedy, and poetic drama, with an important postscript on women writers whose ideas are shaped in "radical contrast to ... outward dramatic forms" and whose achievements exemplify this book's own stance "as a report~ in-progress." Although such divisions downplay the theatre as the measure of passing generations, this account does begin with a chronological table and takes note, along the way, of timely collisions such as "Stoppard's breakthrough in 1966. This was also the year Joe Orton's Loot was performed ... ; however, Stoppard's ... drama deals with philosophical issues rather than social problems (Ayckboum), or sexual polemics (Orton)." That intermittent commentary gives readers a useful time-frame. What's lost on the social swings, like the Manchester School's focus on provincial manners, is more than compensated for by Innes's generic roundabout which whirls figures like Coward, Orton, Pinter, and Griffiths together as "comic mirror." Innes has an encyclopedic grasp of his material which enables him to make links across decades - for instance, between D.H. Lawrence's and Edward Bond's shared "contention that the only viable culture comes from the uneducated working classes." The lines he draws between disparate playwrights and, in his most developed critiques, between the high points of a particular writer's oeuvre establish this book as a repository of challenging ideas. Refracted through the lenses of Innes's three categories , playwrights like Barrie, O'Casey, Whiting, Osborne, and Rudkin take on a new look. In Shaw's The Quimessence of Ib"senism (1890) Innes sees the emergence of a modernist stance: "Essentially didactic or therapeutic, it uses theatre as a tool for achieving change." So the " advanced" plays of the 18905, which Pinero thought should merely reflect their audiences' opinions " illuminated, enlarged, and, if needful, Modem Drama, 36 (1993) 467 Book Reviews purged," receive short shrift and, in a judicious introductory chapter, Shaw becomes 'the reference point for the new century's drama. "In claiming a direct social function for theatre, Shaw not only gave a strong political cast to the mainstream of English drama, but set its stylistic lenns." At the other end of the book stands an equally effective analysis of the way "Beckett's drama can be seen as an extension of the symbolist line in British poetic drama from W.B. Yeats to T.S. Eliot." One could regard that (though Innes doesn't) as a fe-discovery of a theatre that is neither didactic nor narrative: an antidote to what Dennis Johnston called " the honeyed poison of G.B.S." And surely Pinter shares the poets' transcendental vision. Innes groups him with the subversive comedians and, in consequence, reduces him to •'the most consistent - and in a sense limited - of modem British playwrights in his subject matter." That literal view does demonstrate the connections between the threatening double-talk of early plays and the bullying officialdom of late plays like Mountain Language: " the psychology of politics ." a worm's eye view of the boot (hat crushes it." The metaphor deftly inscribes Pinter's inner spaces, yet elsewhere Innes tends to explain and flatten what, from another viewpoint, defies explanation and moves into a world where external reality, as in Beckett's plays, "is problematic, being filtered through imperfect senses and interpreted according to received ideas." Aside from that, lhe book's organizing principles work well, although Peter Nichols, grouped with the Brechtian realists, seems rather out of focus (no discussion of Joe Egg) and Peter Shaffer is overestimated as a poet. Edward Bond could have been placed with the comedians instead of the realists, as indeed could Shaw, but [nnes's account of Bond's career is especially convincing. Informed by a knowledge of contemporary European theatre, that essay sympathetically explores Bond's aggressive imagery while acknowledging the reductive ideology of his later work: "The politics that make his...