Theatre: The Rediscovery of Style by Michel Saint-Denis (review)

Abstract

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 of Miss Morgan's detailed analyses is that they lead us constantly back to the plays; they greatly enhance the reader's appreciation, and they should be of high value to any possible producer. Future production is indeed one of Miss Morgan's concerns. Her last chapter asks, "Does it work in the theatre?"-a rather ironic question insofar as Barker wrote with all the capacities of a great actor and was, moreover, one of the great directors of our century. But her statement of the case against the plays' "working" is formidable: they frequently seem academic, too self-consciously artistic, too glossy or fastidious in style, and they demand unusually large all-star casts which must be put through long rehearsals to achieve the intended symphoniC unity of effect. Nevertheless, Miss Morgan's book has discovered in the best of the plays solid enough virtues to give her confidence that the obvious obstacles to production could and should be surmounted. And as her readers we must share to a considerable degree in her hope and excitement. JEROME H. BUCKLEY Harvard University THEATRE: THE REDISCOVERY OF STYLE, by Michel Saint-Denis, Theatre Arts Books, New York, 1960, 110 pp, Price $3.00. In 1958 Michel Saint-Denis paid his first visit to the United States. The Juilliard School of Music had agreed to establish a school of dramatic art in the new Lincoln Center in New York and had invited him as an adviser. The volume reviewed here is a result of that visit; it contains, apart from an introduction by Sir Laurence Olivier, five lectures: The Theodore Spencer Lecture which Saint-Denis gave at Harvard, and a series of four lectures to the American Shakespeare Festival and Academy at the Plymouth Theatre in New York. The dimension of what he has to say is quite out of proportion to a volume of one hundred pages; no one can deny the exactness, precision, and authority which the book emanates. Whether one accepts his views or not depends on one's own commitment: SaintDenis thinks, for example, that Stanislavski is too one-sided and narrow. Michel Saint-Denis is relatively little known in the United States. He has never directed a play on Broadway and, to my knowledge, only one of his productions was ever shown there, Oedipus Rex with Sir Laurence Olivier shortly after the second World War. In Europe, however, his position and influence are impressive , and he is one of the very few directors who have genuinely transcended the boundaries of their native tradition. Saint-Denis started with the Theatre du Vieux-Colombier when it re-opened after the war in 1919. He headed La Compagnie des Quinze in the early nineteen-thirties. From the later thirties into the nineteen-fifties he directed and taught in England. Olivier, Gielgud, Redgrave, and Guinness acted under his direction, and his plays ranged from Shakespeare to Andre Obey and from Sophocles to Chekhov. His record as a teacher is extensive . Before World War II he formed the London Theatre Studio with Tyrone Guthrie and John Gielgud. Mter the war he founded the Old Vic Theatre Centre and the Old Vic School. In 1953 he participated in the establishment of the na- 248 MODERN DRAMA September tional theater movement throughout France and became the head of its eastern center in Strasbourg. Theater architecture also occupied his attention. In 1950 he and the French architect Pierre Sonrel worked on the reconstruction of the Old Vic in London. Later the same partners built for the national movement one of the most versatile new theaters in Strasbourg. These are the official credentials, then, of Michel Saint...