Theatre
The Hand that Cradles the Rock
By ALAN BRIEN ALL gall is divided into three parts. So it is not surprising that there should be three kinds of dramatic critic. Mr. Alan Dent a while ago netted and classified them. He announced that there was the critic who had some- thing to say and a lively and provocative way of saying it. There was the critic who had nothing to say and a lively and provocative way of saying it. And there was the critic who had nothing to say and a dull, vulgar, or dead way of saying it. 1 think all of us in the business would hope to be in one of the first two, and the maxim 'Metaphysician, heal thyself' should be poker-worked and hung round our necks. Mr. Dent missed but a fourth, and even more tragic, category—the critic who has some- thing to say and an obscure and sibylline way of saying it. The last kind is rare in newspapers for obvious reasons. No one is obliged to study dramatic criticism as he would study a set text for an examination. The reader soon gives up dipping into the really suety critic whose one over- cooked idea rumbles around in his brain pan like a damp dumpling in a stew. But he may find difficulty in deciding which of two critics really has a message worth considering behind the flickering neon of his prose style. Levity is the soul of wit, and the explosive pun, the blinding image, the convulsive joke, the hypnotic button- holing soliloquy can equally conceal matter or the lack of matter. To judge the accuracy of a critic's aim it is necessary to have seen not only the easiest but also the most elusive of his season's targets. Too many critics are like Turgenev's hunting dog —which pointed brilliantly, stalked impeccably,
retrieved tenderly, but had absolutely no sense of smell. Turgenev grew fond of his maladjusted dog as readers grow fond of their maladjusted dogmatists. Some even begin to swear that they can sniff the same non-existent scent and sense the same imaginary moments of high drama and deep philosophy as the nose-less critic can. But the fourth brand of critic has few fans. He is printed only in magazines whose writers barely outnumber their readers, in books which never leave the university library. He remains an aban- doned quarry from which occasional rugged lumps are mined secretly at night by lesser men and then washed and sifted to provide a genuine nugget of knowledge in the glittering shop window of their knowingness.
In a week without any professional perform- ances, it is worth considering some critics in stiffer covers who embody in varying degrees the four categories of criticism. M. Antonin Artaud is probably in the last section. 1 had read half of The Theatre and its Double* before I discovered from the blurb that he had died in 1948 after nine years in an insane asylum. I realised sud- denly that I was reading the manifestos of a madman when I had thought I was reading the ravings of an idiot. I immediately began to pay respect to his opinions. Exactly what sort of theatre would emerge if M. Artaud's inflam- matory sedition awoke answering fire in the bellies of our producers and managers, I do not know. His opening essay compares the drama to the plague—but only the plague is described in marrow-chilling detail of charred tongues, bloody membranes and hardened pus. In a later essay, he lays about the theatre of yesterday with a murderous meat-axe while chanting the praises of his new `theatre of cruelty.' This is drama where actors and audience are 'victims burnt at the stage, signalling through the flames.' It stages events and not men. It is a kind of electric trance with the spectator in the centre surrounded by spectacle. It weaves sounds, lights, rhythms, gestures, images, fireworks, masks into an epilep- tic code which has no key. The 'theatre of cruelty' seems to be a De Mille dress rehearsal of the Apocalypse played for keeps. M. Artaud's prac- tice is nonsense. His theories, concentrated in many hallucinatory epigrams, are full of un- expected revelations. Though they are more likely to inspire directors than to enlighten critics, they breathe a hungry passion for a dangerous theatre which burns like a blow-torch.
Harold Clurman's Lies Like 7'rutht is also born out of a passion for a distinctive kind of theatre. Mr. Clurman was one of the founders of the Group Theatre in New York. He has been both director and critic and, he says, 'I take money seriously and 1 take art seriously, but I find it hard to swallow the confusion of the two with- out mocking both.' This collection of reviews written between 1947 and 1957 shows his double vision in action. As a director, he examines the total impact of each performance with stereo- scopic eyes—he sees words become people, he sees people become ideas, he sees ideas become emotion, he sees emotion enrich words. As a critic, he searches for the human significance hidden within all the elaborate mechanical make- believe of stagecraft. His criticisms are always considered, intelligent reports. He has something to say. But he has neither a lively and provoca- tive way, nor an obscure and sibylline way, of saying it. He might be giving evidence before a Royal Commission. Published in a weekly paper, his reviews must have been enormously valuable : first, to the players; second, to his fellow-critics; and, khird, to his readers. But no one would ever be fired to rush out and catch the next performance.
The collected reviews and essays of Mr. Walter Kerr,: drama critic of the Herald Tribune, are first of all the work of an immensely skilful and engaging journalist. They have that easy, unbut- toned, drawling ease which British readers insist on regarding as 'typically New Yorker.' There is a strain of donnish, almost pedantic, erudition below the surface, but it is never allowed to obtrude in the conceited, long-haired manner of the British intellectual. Every polysyllable is balanced by a couple of slangy colloquialisms. Mr. Kerr, despite the hard work he has put into his digging, is determined to suggest a lazy man stirring the topsoil with a spoon. Never must the American reader be allowed to think that the theatre might be a dangerous, sap-filled, deep- rooted plant which is sprouting through his living-room floor and pushing against the roof of his bedroom. Mr. Kerr is a bright, witty, well- read, middle-brow critic—a breed unknown in British popular newspapers. Like many New York critics, he is over-concerned to demonstrate his knowledge of the financial mechanics of the com- mercial theatre, rather as if he were afraid he might otherwise be dismissed as a dilettante who didn't know a gross from a twofer. It seems to me that critically he has a weakness for the fine, flimsy curlicues of poetic writing and a blind spot about the merits of relentless matter-of-fact demolition of social hypocrisy. But, once your own personal measurements are calibrated against his scale of values, Mr. Kerr becomes a man well worth knowing. Pieces of Eight deserves its place beside his earlier book How Not To Write A Play on the bookshelf of any enlightened theatre- goer.
* Evergreen Original, New York, $1.95. t Macmillan, New York, $6.
PIECES AT EIGHT. (Reinhardt, 21s.)
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