TH E ANTI- EST ABLI SHME NT DRAMA
More than any other art ·the drama is dominated by fashion, for
the good reason that it is the art most dominated by personalities. The–
ater people know, for the most part, only theater people.
If
they are
important enough, actors have plays written for them and playwrights
have reviewers rooting for them. Whatever its gossip, its factions, its
hatreds, the theater looks after its own. To reverse Lionel Trilling's
famous dictum, it will preserve at any cost the illusions its own snobbery
generates. With enough personal force and style, a man of the theater–
playwright, actor, or critic-can create a fashion which nothing, except
the laws of inertia that govern all performances, will destroy.
There is a simple explanation of all this : the theater is the only
art which, in England at least, has no truck with the intellectuals. Sooner
or later every other art form, with the possible exception of the cinema,
is subjected to dispassionate analysis by men who are as committed to
the implications of the work as to the practical details. Granted, the
intellectuals usually create theories of art which, like the artist's own,
are more interesting than useful. But they also create standards; they
argue out their judgments ; they reason from their personal impressions.
In a word, they think. And this makes for a certain free and disinterested
space around the subject in which fresh air can circulate. Now thinking
is a tradition that has hardly affected the British theater since the death
of Ben Jonson. A few maverick foreigners have managed it: Goethe,
Buechner, Brecht or, on a more superficial level, Sartre. But the English
stage has had to make do with, at best, conversation pieces. From time
to time, of course, ideas go around; Shaw's plays are full of them. But
as one knows from elsewhere than the theater- from coffee bars, cock–
tail parties or faculty meetings- ideas can flourish independently of
thinking. Shaw's characters exchange ideas with the canny enthusiasm
of small boys exchanging marbles, but they have no truck with the
endless difficulty of registering experience freshly, of organizing and
judging it according to standards one has lived out. A good dramatist
may master ideas well enough to create from them lively conversation,
but the pressure of lived experience which gives them life and validity
is not usually his concern. To judge from their prose statements, for ex–
ample, John Osborne and Arnold Wesker might be rather muddled
