Retreats from Realism in Recent English Drama by Ruby Cohn

(review)

June Schlueter

Comparative Drama, Volume 26, Number 3, Fall 1992, pp. 284-286 (Review)

Published by Western Michigan University

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.1992.0001

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/487334/summary

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284Comparative Drama
least some specific recognition: John Henry Raleigh's learned "Strindberg
and O'Neill as Historical Dramatists," a substantial contribution to the
study of the historiographical tendencies of these two dramatists, and
Jean Chothia's ingenious reading of verbal and scenic images in The
Hairy Ape. Raleigh's comparison constitutes the most substantial, sus-
tained argument in the book and should prove of real interest to all
students of historical drama.
The volume's few weaknesses mirror those of New Essays on Ameri-
can Drama, although they are somewhat less conspicuous: namely, a
number of not so "new" ideas and methodologies, and some truly
egregious copy-editing. Both problems really damage the quality of New
Essays, and I shall take up the former, more important defect momen-
tarily. I hate to complain about sloppy proofreading—who hasn't been
guilty at one time or another of such lapses?—but in several cases the
unreasonably large number of spelling and punctuation errors becomes
distracting. In Johan Thielemans' "From LeRoi Jones to Baraka and
Back," an able and interesting essay in several respects, Ron Karenga's
name is spelled three different ways; another essay comparing stage and
film versions of Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is authored
by either C. Bordewijk or J. M. Bordewijk-Knotter, depending upon
where you happen to look in the volume. You get the idea: someone at
Rodopi (or is it Roddoppi? Rodapi? Does it really matter anymore if
words are spelled correctly?) needs to attend to the important details of
proofreading or define more rigorously that horrible phrase and process
which have insinuated themselves into academic publishing: "camera
ready."
My suggestion that there is little "new" in this volume is, of course,
not totally fair or accurate. As I noted above, Henry Schvey provides
strong insights into Miller's later plays The Archbishop's Ceiling (1977)
and The American Clock (1980) and makes a convincing case that
The Price (1968) reaches the aesthetic "level of his earlier works"
(p. 96). Sy M. Kahn is persuasive in arguing that "to come to terms"
with Williams' Out Cry (the 1973 version) is "to confront the very heart
of Williams' work as a whole" (p. 41), and Liliane Kerjan provides a
useful, much-needed exposition of Albee's most recent work. New Essays
on American Drama, therefore, possesses a number of attractions, its
most appealing being its strategy of foregrounding the lesser-known, less
often discussed plays of the "big four" American dramatists. In this
regard, there is something of value "new" about the collection—and
about the later selections in Eugene O'Neill and the Emergence of Ameri-
can Drama.
STEPHEN WATT
Indiana University

Ruby Cohn. Retreats from Realism in Recent English Drama. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. 213. $49.95.
Ruby Cohn's latest contribution to the study of modern drama, like
her many others, is the work of a capacious mind, stimulated by a life-
time of reading and a forty-year "love affair" with the theater. The book
Reviews285

moves with ease through nearly four decades of contemporary English

drama, exploring a panorama of well-known and little-known plays,
nearly all of which Cohn has seen. Though not comprehensive, the book
is generous in its sampling, with John Arden, Caryl Churchill, Harold
Pinter, Trevor Griffiths, Stephen Lowe, Charles Wood, and some forty-
five others representing the special spirit and idiom of the post-1956
British stage.
Cohn is most interested in plays that challenge "the mimetic repre-
sentation of contemporary middle-class reality" (p. 1), but she is liberal
in defining "retreats from realism," including, for example, Shakespearean
offshoots, plays that rewrite history, and plays that rely on surface realism
but which may be read allegorically. In addition to discussing non-realistic
devices in some one hundred plays, Cohn identifies patterns, establishing
six fluid but discrete categories: "Staging England," "Shakespeare Left
and Righted," "Diversities of Verse," "Theatre Framing Theatre,"
"Splitting Images of the Mind," and "Fictional Histories."
"Shakespeare Left and Righted" extends the coverage of her earlier
book, Modern Shakespeare Offshoots (1976), with Charles Marowitz,
Tom Stoppard, Arnold Wesker, Edward Bond, David Hare, David Edgar,
and Howard Brenton taking center stage. In "Theatre Framing Theatre"
she further secures the persistence of Renaissance drama on the con-
temporary stage through examining the device of the play-within-the-play
in popular theater (John Osborne's The Entertainer [1957], for example),
in self-conscious plays (Osborne's A Sense of Detachment [1972]), in
plays that borrow their inner plays (Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guilden-
stern Are Dead [1967]), and in those that invent their plays-within
(Edgar's O Fair Jerusalem [1975]).
"Dreams," "Ghosts," "Doubles," and "Distortions" make up the
"Splitting Images of the Mind" section. Included in it are plays as
distant from drawing room drama as Heathcote Williams' ACIDC (1970)
and as traditionally realistic as Michael Frayn's Make and Break (1980).
Here especially the fluidity of Cohn's categories is apparent—the neces-
sary consequence of a project that seeks to record deviations from an
"ism" that too readily surrenders its formal distinctions.
More compatible bedfellows may be found within the book's opening
and closing categories: "Staging England" and "Fictional Histories,"
both concerned with the presence of the past and the political present
on the contemporary stage. The first surveys those plays preoccupied,
directly or obliquely, with the fading post-war empire. With Jimmy
Porter (Osborne's Look Back in Anger [1956]) as model of a disillu-
sioned generation, others penned plays that dramatized England as a
family (David Mercer's Belcher's Luck [1966], for example) or Britain as
an institution (David Storey's Home [1970]). The section on "Fictional
Histories" is equally fascinating—and equally tentative in its claim to
retreat from realism (such plays are "non-realistic by reason of their
visible pastness" [p. 162]). Greek legend, medieval and Renaissance
matters, and England past and present are reconstituted in such plays,
which include Howard Barker's Bite of the Night (1988), Peter Barnes'
Red Noses (1978), Peter Shaffer's The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964),
Pam Gems' Queen Christiana (1975), and Timberlake Wertenbaker's
286Comparative Drama
The Grace of Mary Traverse (1985). (Gems and Wertenbaker appear
sporadically in Cohn's pages, along with five other women, including
Caryl Churchill, for whom Cohn has obvious admiration. But, as Cohn
observes, contemporary English drama is still a male domain.)
One could not ask for a more skilled guide for this special tour of
the contemporary English stage. Yet at its end, one feels rather abruptly
abandoned. Though Cohn offers general observations throughout—Eng-
lish drama was slower than American drama to challenge realism; more
recent English drama shifted from social concerns to the individual
mind—she resists the summary closure that could provide a sense of
coherence to her catalogue of "retreating" plays. One could also wish
that she had more actively made use of her extensive firsthand experience
with the performance of these plays to provide greater detail of how
particular non-realistic devices were realized on the stage. But it is unfair
to complain of what a writer has not given us at the expense of what
she has. Retreats from Realism in Recent English Drama is a lively,
informed, and provocative document of the last thirty-five years of the
London stage.
JUNE SCHLUETER
Lafayette College

Frances Teague. Shakespeare's Speaking Properties. Cranbury, N. J.:

Bucknell University Press, 1991, Pp. 222. $35.00.
It would seem by now that every nook and cranny of Shakespeare's
plays and their productions have been examined and re-examined in
countless studies. However, Frances Teague of the University of Georgia
has taken a unique approach in a finely researched examination of the
significance and varied meanings of props in Shakespeare's plays. Teague,
who has written studies of Bartholomew Fair and women writers in the
Renaissance, is no stranger to Shakespearean studies. Her 1986 book, One
Touch of Shakespeare: The Letters of Joseph Crosby to Joseph Parker
Norris (Folger Press), illuminated a little-known aspect of Shakespearean
production.
Teague's Shakespeare's Speaking Properties breaks new ground. She
identifies 'props' as a term which "everyone uses, but hardly anyone
defines" (p. 15). To make up for this perceived omission she offers a
variety of definitions, both traditional and revisionist, but stresses that a
property is most usefully seen to be significant on account of its function
in the play. Here the action is the key to displaying the meaning of the
prop in production whether he or she is "showing" it or "demonstrating"
it. A simple stool is more than a piece of furniture to sit on; it becomes
in the play a signpost to time, place, and character. In this sense, the
prop enters the dramatic action of the play and, along with language,
assists in revealing the full meaning of the play.
Teague insists that while "any Shakespearean has things to say about
Richard II's crown or Yorick's skull, few realize that these objects fit
into patterns of presentational imagery—one property metaphoric, one
métonymie. And although critics have long noted verbal image clusters
that recur throughout the plays, they have not noted some significant