Drama + Theory: Critical Approaches to Modern British Drama by Peter Buse (review)

Abstract

MLR, 99.1, 2004 181 Ultimately, this close textual study raises major general questions. If Smith's ana? lysis carries conviction, then current attempts to displace the canon are (to use a Swiftean word) 'mad'. The canon is historically there 'like Teneriff or Atlas unremov 'd' (to use an allusion my own students no longer understand). Without those ancients you cannot understand our (post)moderns. But what does one mean by modern or postmodern anyway ? Ironic intertextuality? Ontological scepticism? If so, was this not always so? Read with these preoccupations, there are few more contempo? rary texts than Beowulf, Ovid's Metamorphoses, or even those t/r-textsof European culture, the Socratic dialogues as told by Plato. Cardiff University Malcolm Kelsall Drama + Theory: Critical Approaches to Modern British Drama. By Peter Buse. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. 2001. xi + 204 pp. ?40 (pbk ?11.99). ISBN 0-7190-5721-3 (pbk 0-7190-5722-1). Peter Buse takes nine plays since 1956 and pairs each with a particular theorist, indeed with a particular essay or work of a theorist. Because of the availability of feminist criticism he desists from that approach, and because of the vast range of theoretical writing on Beckett that dramatist is omitted. Though post-structuralist in emphasis, the book also omits Derrida since he is largely preoccupied with non-dramatic textuality . Buse's aim is to demonstrate how bringing play and critical text into direct dialogue with each other can be mutually illuminating. Buse does not dogmatically impose any theoretical reading but with diagnostic clarity he exploratively applies ideas, often equally critical of both play and text. Osborne's Look Back in Anger faces Lacan's 'The Significance of the Phallus'. Pinter's The Homecoming is linked with Freud's 'The "Uncanny"'. Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is paired with The Postmodern Condition of Lyotard. Homosexual playwright confronts homosexual thinker with Joe Orton's What the Butler Saw seen through the beady eyes of Foucault's The History ofSexuality. Althusser's famous essay 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses' is used to appraise Trevor Grifhths's Comedians. Anachronism and anti-historicism link Caryll Churchill's Top Girls and Walter Ben? jamin's 'Theses on the Philosophy of History'. Mass media bring together Hare and Brenton's Pravda and Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulacrum (with reference to further works). The ambiguous imperialism of Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good is measured against the unambiguous critique of Edward Said's Cul? ture and Imperialism. Finally, fairlyrecent trauma theories, represented by Shoshana Felman's Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, cope with Sarah Kane's Blasted. To illustrate the manifest variety of this study I turn to the discussions of Osborne and Churchill. In Jimmy Porter political protest is seen, in part, as thwarted desire for an au? thority which would compensate for the deficiency of the original symbolic order, a provisional compensation precluded by the substitutions of the Lacanian objet petit a . Thus Alison and Helena are doomed to fail the desiring subject, Jimmy,while the absent substitutes for the Other, Hugh, Webster, and Madeline, fulfilthe illu? sion of authenticity, thereby adding the seductions of nostalgia to the compulsions of anguish to fill the emptiness of self-consuming desire. Buse's approach certainly makes a change from the usual Angry Young Man 1950s realism angle (though in all chapters he is careful to supply informed bibliographical notes). Again with Top Girls the theoretical alignment offersa refreshing redirection from the now well-worn feminist rails. Churchill's drama exploits anachronism by bringing together female figures from iSz Reviews actual history,legend, painting, and literature to celebrate with the Thatcherite Marlene the triumph of women. Subsequent acts reverse chronology, going backwards into Marlene's ascent, and with the challenginghistoricismof dramatic presentation, undermining her progressivistview of linear history. In this Buse ably compares Ben? jamin's anti-historicist theory of discontinuity, which rejected conservative history as a history of victors over victims. Both Churchill and Benjamin resist the foreclosure of history, insisting on the dynamism of the past as open to permanent retroactive interpretation of a radical kind. A more conventionalkind of study subjectingplaywrights...