94 Comparative Drama Luis Oscar Arata. The Festive Play of Fernando Arrabal. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1982. Pp. 104. $9.50 Fernando Arrabal has been well served by American book-length stu dies of his work. Peter Podol’s Fernando Arrabal (Twayne, 1978) and Thomas John Donahue’s The Theater of Fernando Arrabal (New York University Press, 1980) both treat their subject in satisfying breadth. If Luis Oscar Arata’s slender volume at first glance seems unprepossessing by comparison, its worth is proved by a careful reading. The Festive Play of Fernando Arrabal has the advantage of narrowed focus (on Arrabal’s less “self-conscious” plays, those written before 1972) and the application of a critical construct that is highly appropriate to those plays under consideration. Arata’s Introduction places Arrabal’s early plays in the tradition of episodic theatre, a form he sees as “natural” for dramas that—like child’s play and festive celebration—attempt to assimilate as much as possible of the world, rather than accommodating that world through imitation. Episodic form, he says, neglects the restrictions of plot-oriented dramas and “permits an overaccumulation of dramatic materials” in “expansive juxtapositions.” To explore such works, a non-Aristotelian perspective is needed. Chapter 1, “The Form of Play,” elaborates those ideas in relation to the festive, all embracing spirit of the god Pan, from which Arrabal derived his vision of a Panic theatre. The Panic manifesto stresses memory, chance, and confusion, all of which give impetus to the act of playing or of creating. Nevertheless, some sort of “Apollonian constraint” must be applied to the Dionysian confusion of the playwright’s material if it is to be offered to a theatre public. Arrabal’s constraints or “unifying schemas” are discussed in Chapter 2, “Armatures.” Chapter 3, “The World in Pieces,” surveys what materials are assimi lated in the course of Arrabal’s playwriting/play, and examines the raw, “pre-ideological” form in which those materials are presented. Anyone who has wanted to appreciate Arrabal’s plays but been repelled or dis quieted by their scatology, eroticism, and blasphemy will find this key chapter valuable for the way its situates those elements in a comprehen sible perspective. It is often a mistake of judgment for literary critics to speculate about a play’s potential realization through performance. Arata does so in Chapter 4, and “Visions, Dreams, and Other Nightmares” is the only unevenly written chapter in the book. Strindberg, Appia, Gordon Craig, and Artaud are invoked in quick succession in order to validate by association Arrabal’s use of scenic space. Similarly, the discussion of the vocal “modulations” or “tonalities” with which Arrabal’s dialogue should be delivered is a muddy passage in Arata’s generally crystalline analytical style. This chapter is redeemed to a certain extent by some insightful observations about the unchanging character of Arrabal’s dreamer-pro tagonist in opposition to the continuous metamorphosis of all else in his dream-creations. Further ramifications of the oneiric dimension in Arrabal’s theatre are discussed in the excellent final chapter, “The Feast of Pan.” Sensory Reviews 95 images from Arrabal’s dream world are seen to be unleashed by the dramatist upon a theatre audience without any apparent rational shaping of that material. Communication is dependent upon the play’s awakening of a festive spirit in the spectator just as a festival participant must enter a world of “primordial chaos” in which normal prohibitions are trans gressed, until the return to order at the end of the festival. According to Arata, “Arrabal’s dramas perform the festive double gesture of decon struction and re-creation by presenting the world in pieces and holding the fragments within basic structures whose existence does not become totally evident until the end” (p. 81). Arata raises provocative questions about the potential audience for a theatre that functions as a festival but whose participants (spectators) come together without a common cause to celebrate. Like Arrabal’s end ings, which do not offer resolutions but “the possibility of new beginnings,” Arata’s book points the way to further work on the inexhaustibly rich creations of Arrabal. Arata does not pretend to tackle...