A Drama of Political Man: A Study in the Plays of Harley Granville Barker by Margery M. Morgan (review)

Abstract

246 MODERN DRAMA September That these two plays should have been selected for such extensive treatment may surprise a few readers. Yet it is hardly questionable that no other plays written by Americans since the end of World War II have so affected American theater, and certainly no other plays have captured the imagination of the theater-going public as have these two. JOHN S. LEWIS University of Kansas A DRAMA OF POLITICAL MAN: A STUDY IN THE PLAYS OF HARLEY GRANVILLE BARKER, by Margery M. Morgan, Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1961, 337 pp. Price 30s. C. B. Purdom's Harley Granville Barker-Man of the Theatre, Dramatist and Scholar, which appeared in 1956, was designed as the first full-length study of Barker's life and ''his work as a whole." Mr. Purdom's comments on the plays, however, were perfunctory, rather apologetic, and for the most part quite incidental to a biographical concern. In A Drama of Political Man, Margery M. Morgan now sets out "to do justice to the work of a very interesting and commonly underestimated playwright." Her study, the first to give Barker serious critical appraisal, admirably accomplishes its purpose. Miss Morgan begins by sketching in the social and intellectual background to which Barker's thought and art must properly be related. She describes his place among the Fabian Socialists and his general assumption (as her title suggests) that the individual's success or failure is to be understood in terms of some larger political context. She reviews his close friendship with Bernard Shaw-their affinities and differences and their indebtedness to each other. She indicates the extent to which Barker drew upon the Continental dramatists, especially Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Chekhov, and Strindberg. And she shows how his desire as actor to give a mental dimension to his roles and how his effort as director to bring a new fluidity and rhythm to the English stage affected the tone and form of his own drama. Yet she never allows her awareness of sources and influences to carry her far from her central object, the analysis of the plays as play~ as works of art which must be tested for their intrinsic strength or weakness. From a rapid discussion of Barker's early experiments Miss Morgan turns to a detailed examination of each of the longer works from The Marrying of Ann Leete, the highly artificial Symbolist piece written in 1899, to His Majesty, the ironic disenchanted tragicomedy completed nearly thirty years later. Her estimates are always sympathetic and sometimes enthusiastic; she ranks The Voysey Inheritance , for example, "among the finest and most complex dramatic structures to be found in the English language," and she declares that "there is hardly a word in the text of The Secret Life that is not as organic to the verbal carpetpattern as any single note to a musical score." Yet her sympathy does not blind her to many specific defects; she sees the inadequacy of Alice Maitland as the good angel of Voysey, and she finds The Madras House weakened by an intrusive didactic purpose. Miss Morgan is particularly sensitive to the aesthetic details that apparently preoccupied the playwright: the conscious use of musical analogy, the implications of the repetitive imagery, the elaborate punning, the careful choice of stage properties, the precise directions to the actors prescribing gesture and movement. Though we may perhaps think some of her readings oversubtle, she is usually able to marshal enough evidence to disarm our objections. Of The Madras House, she writes (after an adroit explication of its symbolism), "it is not necessary to identify every allusion, grasp every pun, elucidate the mention of Woking, 1962 BOOK REVIEWS 247 or recognise Hercules in the Drapery trade, in order to follow the play and its argument and enjoy much of the comedy. Whenever recognition of such devices does take place, it increases delight; and this is the final justification of the method.~' This is also the logic of Miss Morgan's own critical procedure. ffitimately we accept her ingenuities more readily than what from time to time may seem to us an element of excessive cleverness, a tedious brilliance, in Barker himself . ' The great virtue...