Bentley on Theater

In Search Of Theater by Eric Bentley. Knopf. $6.00.

This is a collection of after-season play-reviews, interviews with theater-people and descriptions of theater-things abroad, reviews of books by actors and playwrights, obituaries and farewells, diary-pages of experiences during production (plus a few critical essays, on Pirandello, Yeats, Chekhov, and Ibsen). Bentley likes to go to the theater and work in the theater and mull it over; he has had grants-in-aid enabling him to travel and see and mull some more. The reader of such a book finds himself in a peculiar lukewarm middle zone. On the one hand there is no hot involvement, whether as spectator or artist. For instance, a morning-after review has a crucial relation to a going local enterprise, and therefore its kind of in-group allusiveness—”Charles Laughton, whose performance, exhilarating to the theater-lover, might be entitled ‘Beyond Stanislavsky”‘—in a daily review this makes sense; but what is the use of such a style in the after-season summaries printed in this and other magazines, and now reprinted between boards, for a wider audience? Then allusiveness will not do, it becomes just mulling reminiscence. On the other hand, starting from Bentley’s collection of observations, we almost never are taken to the intellectual realm of the precise structural definitions of a critic or the practical rules and advice of a master. (To my mind, in this long book only the essay on Pirandello catches an essence.) To put this another way, in gathering these pieces Bentley does not undergo the discipline, nor reap the reward, of organizing a book; for a book goes responsibly from beginning to end and therefore, having to be sequential and ultimately consistent, it probes the subject. Here we are given many inconsistencies that would not be flat contradictions in the give-and-take of polemic and immediate experience, but when they are allowed to stand so in a book neither the authors nor the reader gets any wiser. (E.g. p. 126: “A narrow aestheticism, Cocteau’s notion of drama as dressing up, rather than the Aristotelian and Elizabethan notion of imitating life”; p. 320: “This is the primordial histrionic longing, the adult equivalent of the child’s love of dressing up. The true playwright has an actor’s nature, etc.”) In Search of Theater is printed in Parts I to V, but alas! there are no such parts.