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

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1963 BOOK REVIEWS 101 Shakespeare, to enable him to grasp exactly what Appia has in mind. Many of the roIling periods, which possibly roll more intelligibly, or at least more impressively , in the French and German versions, convey very little to the workaday lover of the theater. For all its patches of obscurity and cloud·touching rranscendentalism, this third -book of Appia's should take its place alongside the two earlier studies, and join the good company of studies by Craig, Fuchs, and others who rescued the theater from its smothering materialism and restored it to its high place among the arts. Since all of Appia's shorter pieces-he was rather prolific, writing more than thirty essays between 1923 and his death in 1928-are to be translated into English, the collected works of this Swiss theater insurgent will eventually occupy a substantial footage on the drama shelf. Richard A. Cordell Purdue University THEATRE: THE REDISCOVERY OF STYLE, by Michel Saint-Denis, Theatre Arts Books, New York, 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 SaintDenis 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. 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 his position and influence are impressive, and he i~ 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 reopened 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 Guiness 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 the second world war he formed the London Theatre Studio with Tyrone Guthrie and John Gielgud. After the war he founded the Old Vic Theatre Centre and the Old Vic School. In 1953 he participated in the establishment of the national 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-Denis. He has acted, directed, taught, and built as fully, in two major, disparate traditions as any man of the theater of our time. If his credentials have been stated at some length it was to show that his views are worth listening to. What he has to say about theater in general, the American theater in particular. and especially the 102 MODERN DRAMA May relationship of tradition and modern realism, are important correctives to present trends. Saint-Denis' position arises from his own past. The Vieux Colombier, where he began, was a reaction against the realism of Antoine and the Theatre Libre of the 1890's_ Coupeau and, after him, Dullin, are his acknowledged masters. He admires Jean-Louis Barrault and Jean Vilar, both part-disciples of Dullin. He knows that his own tradition is classical...