Drama
Now
ERIC RUSSELL BENTLEY
W
ITH THE
help of a sheaf of recently printed plays* I shall try
in this review to identify and characterise several different
levels of dramatic art as it now exists.
There are some of course who believe that plays are not meant
to be silently read any more than musical scores. Unlike music, how–
ever, .drama is conceived and recorded in words. The theatrical direc–
tor is simply an interpreter of the dramatist's words. Since every
reader of a play is a self-appointed director with a theatre in his own
mind I propose to assume that the well-equipped reader can experi–
ence and appraise the play in his study and that a play which is bad
to read
is
a bad play. Good literature may be bad drama
but the
converse does not hold.
It
is a pity Charles Lamb did not see the
philistine inference which would be drawn from
his
assertion that
much great dramatic literature was not theatre: it was that great
theatre
is
not literature. Hence the unfavorable overtones in the word
"theatrical" and in the word "literary." Actually, to call plays "too
theatrical," as we do, is like calling sugar too sweet; but so
is
calling
plays "too literary."
The proof that the anti-literary drama pundits do not mean
what they say is that they print plays. A printed play may of course
be used as a memento of a pleasurable evening in the
theatre-used
but scarcely
evaluated.
This is hard on the critic. Confronted with a
printed play he has little excuse for airing his knowledge of actors,
electricians, designers, directors, producers and box-office managers.
The only man to be praised or blamed is the man who on Broadway
is happily protected or unhappily buried by all these: the author. Let
us consider some current authors in inverse order of merit.
*S.R.O.: THE MOST SUCCESSFUL PLAYS IN THE HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN STAGE.
Compiled by Bennett Cerf and Van H. Cartmell. Doubleday, Doran.
$3.75.
ONE
ToucH OF VENUS.
By S.
J.
Perelman and Ogden Nash. Little, Brown.
$2.00.
ANNA LucASTA.
By Phillip Yordan. Random House.
$2.00.
]ACOBOWSKY AND
THE CoLONEL.•
By Franz Werfel. Viking.
$2.00.
GET AwAY OLD MAN.
By William
Saroyan. Harcourt, Brace.
$2.00.
FouR PLAYS.
By
J.
B. Priestley. Harper's.
$2.50.
RED RosEs FOR ME.
By Sean O'Casey. Macmillan.
$2.00.
