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at the hands of the father, as well as representing all the humiliations
women have suffered at the hands of men. Miss Barnes's Electra, parody–
ing the Ghost in
Hamlet's
"Hamlet, remember me!" says to her mother,
"Woman, remember you." But the mother does not have the strength
for this, and the play ends with her murder of her daughter. I should
add that there are several male characters, including an Orestes and a
Pedagogue, all with good English names, of course. And the general
theme of the play is rather strong: the horror of what men do to women
in making them mothers, and women
to
men in giving birth to them.
SOUTH: Now that sounds interesting!
NORTH: I don't deny a certain distinction in the writing. But I
am judging
The Antiphon
as a play-I don't know if there are any
categories for judging a closet-drama. A play has to be capable of being
presented on the stage, as even Beddoes's
Death's Jest Book
could be, I
believe. Now
The Antiphon
is simply unplayable. I note that on the
book jacket Edwin Muir is quoted as saying it would be a "disaster" if
this work were not known. The disaster of this work, I should say, is
that it cannot be known. For it
cannot make itself known on the stage
as its form requires it to do.
And how hard it is to read! I sat up all
night over it, and would never have kept on reading if I didn't have
my review to write.
SOUTH: I'm going to suggest that nobody read MacLeish's
J.B.
or go to see it either, yet I read it quickly enough, in about half an hour
to be exact, and from it turned to the Book of Job which took me all
night.
NORTH: In any case, you see what modern verse plays are like.
SOUTH: I still don't see why it should be impossible to write a
good one.
NORTH: I would not say that a good verse play is impossible to
achieve. What I think is that such an accomplishment is unlikely, and
that what is unlikely is hardly a proper object of a sensible man's ac–
tivity. Now a good dramatist must be fundamentally sensible.
SOUTH : Don't you think T. S. Eliot is?
NORTH: Unquestionably. But just look at his plays. He has been
writing prose plays disguised as verse ever since
Family Reunion.
Since
that work, which he himself admits was a failure, he has devoted himself
to writing a kind of
non-poetic
verse play. The results, if we are to
judge by
The Confidential Clerk
and
The Cocktail Party
are works
which are fundamentally prosaic- much more so than Chekhov's plays
in prose, for instance. Perhaps Mr. Eliot has to write plays in the way
he does since his whole sensibility had already been formed on the
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