Drama from Ibsen to Brecht

This book is a fully revised and largely expanded successor to Mr Williams's widely read Drama from Ibsen to Eliot (1952). In it he argues that although plays are meant to be acted, any play in which the text is no more than an outline, to be filled in by acting, production and decor, must fall short of the purpose and full scope of drama. The naturalistic theatre is criticised because in spite of some great achievements, the devices it makes use of to express the depths of human experience are never really adequate substitutes for the traditional language of the theatre: poetry. Ibsen is examined from this point of view, and we are given chapters on Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw, Pirandello, Synge, as well as on the poetic dramatists, Yeats, Eliot, Auden and Isherwood, and Christopher Fry. For this revised edition new studies of Brecht, Beckett, O'Neill, Miller, Lorca, O'Casey, Biichner, and British dramatists such as Whiting, Arden, Pinter and Osborne, are included. Raymond Williams is no study-theorist: he is careful always to relate drama to the kind of theatre for which the dramatist was writing; and he has many pertinent observations to make on the acting and production of plays, on stage language and stage conventions. But perhaps his book's greatest virtue is that it makes us reconsider the aims and essential values of drama, and provides us with some objective standards by which to judge the theatre of our own day.