This book is a fully revised and largely expanded
successor to Mr Williams's widely read Drama
from Ibsen to Eliot (1952). In it he argues that
although plays are meant to be acted, any play
in which the text is no more than an outline, to
be filled in by acting, production and decor,
must fall short of the purpose and full scope of
drama. The naturalistic theatre is criticised because
in spite of some great achievements, the
devices it makes use of to express the depths of
human experience are never really adequate substitutes
for the traditional language ofthe theatre
:
poetry. Ibsen is examined from this point of
view, and we are given chapters on Strindberg,
Chekhov, Shaw, Pirandello, Synge, as well as
on the poetic dramatists, Yeats, Eliot, Auden and
Isherwood, and Christopher Fry. For this revised
edition new studies of Brecht, Beckett,
O'Neill, Miller, Lorca, O'Casey, Biichner, and
British dramatists such as Whiting, Arden, Pinter
and Osborne, are included.
Raymond Williams is no study-theorist: he is
careful always to relate drama to the kind of
theatre for which the dramatist was writing; and
he has many pertinent observations to make on
the acting and production of plays, on stage language
and stage conventions. But perhaps his
book's greatest virtue is that it makes us reconsider
the aims and essential values of drama,
and provides us with some objective standards
by which to judge the theatre of our own day.