Book Reviews CHRISTOPHER INNES. Modern German Drama: A Study in Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1979. Pp. ix, 297, illustrated. Christopher Innes is best known for his earlier Cambridge University Press book: Erwin Piscator's Political Theatre: The Development 0/ Modern German Drama. In a real sense, the Piscator book is a very useful background reading before beginning Innes's new book on the German theatre after World War II. All talk of a "point zero" in the arts in Germany in 1945 Dotwithstanding , it is abundantly clear that in the postwar theatre the "new beginning" is rather heavily dependent on returning exiles such as Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht. It is very much to Professor Innes's credit that he is able to see both tbat which is radically new in postwar theatre and that which has deep roots in the pre-1933 German theatre. It is also important that Innes does not allow himself to be caught in the trap of choosing between the two Germanies. His study is a sane balance of the various German-speaking countries: Switzerland , Austria, the German Democratic RepubHc, and the German Federal Republic. The study is further enriched by the author's comparative approach to the German drama/theatre. The different productions of the different German-speaking nations are compared, and the study shows great sensitivity not only to the ways in which the modern German drama has been enriched by borrowings from other national traditions, but also to the ways in which these other traditions have been enriched by borrowings from the German drama. All this is a considerable achievement of synthesis, description, and analysis. but Innes goes further yet. Not content to describe his materials as literary artifacts, he insists on treating plays as performance texts with real actors and real audiences. As a result, his book is not just a study of modern German drama as the title erroneously suggests. The volume is a study both of the drama per se and of the modern German theatre as a complex cultural institu- 312 Book Reviews tion with state support and with all the benefits and nightmares that official "slipport" has involved in the long and checkered history of the German stage. We have in Innes's work not merely a history of the critical reception of texts but something much more complex: a history of how plays were chosen and rehearsed as well as a history of how they were then received by critics and the general public. All this material il) buttressed in Innes's study by the facts and figures of the box office. Though this book examines a great many data, it is neither turgid nor colorless . The data are presented in a lively style and with sensitive attention to major details of productions. What emerges is a composite picture of the modern German theatre with all of its liveliness, problems, and contradictions . Though priced in hard-cover beyond all reason, the book in paper will be of extraordinary benefit to anyone wishing to have a comprehensive and reliable overview of modern German theatre. JOHN FUEOJ, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND CHRISTOPHER INNES. Holy Theatre: Ritual and the Avant Garde. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981. Pp. xi. 283. illustrated. Christopher Innes has written a highly instructive and cogent volume on Holy Theatre, tying all the loose strings together, systematizing what had been askew, explaining what had remained moot. Antonin Artaud, who created the. expression "Holy Theatre," applied it to a "spiritual" performance in which drama could gain transcendence; he was not referring to a religious happening in the sense of organized religion, but rather using the Latin word religio, which means a linking back to a mythological or primitive past, to an iIIo tempore - a beginning. The theatre, then, is to be viewed as a laboratory in which mythical material is explored and the "naked actor," when inhabiting the stage, is to be viewed as an archaic being, in archetypal attitudes. Innes, therefore, concentrates on "imagistic and quasireligious plays or psychodramas" which do not emphasize verbal or rely exclusively upon cerebral means of communication, but, on the contrary, focus upon dreams, the unconscious as a way of arousing...