Doubles, Demons, and Dreamers: An International Collection of Symbolist Drama by DanielGerouldReview by: Marjorie L. HooverTheatre Journal, Vol. 38, No. 2, Con(Text) (May, 1986), pp. 244-245Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3208140 .

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244 / TI, May 1986

Balcony, four pages on A Midsummer Night's Dream, seven pages on the densely complex Marat/ Sade, - but, overall, he does satisfactorily convey the essence of a production, particularly the mise-en- scene, and Brook's directorial approach to it. Perhaps because he could observe them at first- hand, Jones is most successful and insightful in his fairly detailed descriptions and analyses of Brook's films, particularly in his comparisons of the theatri- cal and filmic treatment of Marat/Sade and King Lear.

"Pluralistic, inter-cultural, eclectic," as Jones calls him (p. 209), Brook, like two of his great directorial predecessors, Meyerhold and Reinhardt, defies easy categorization. An encompassing pattern or design in his work is not altogether clear. But Jones does succeed in identifying some of Brook's major in- spirations and interests. He traces, for example, Brook's connections to Jean-Louis Barrault, who in- vited him to head the ICTR, to Artaud, Brecht, and perhaps even more importantly Meyerhold, to the views and physical exercises of the mystic George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, and to the belief systems and techniques of non-Western culture and theatre. He summarizes Brook's continuing exploration of language in the theatre, especially non-verbal, gestural, tonal and visual language, and his con- comitant efforts to create an almost religious "holy" theatre which binds "in a special shared relation- ship... the watcher and the watched." The ex- perience of many of Brook's productions, Jones sug- gests, is not only profoundly immediate, but also persistent, often remaining in the memory of the watcher long after the meeting.

While Jones clearly admires Brook, he is careful to present a balanced view of both his achievements and shortcomings. Thus, he quotes not only from Brook enthusiasts, like Margaret Croyden, but also from Brook critics like Charles Marowitz, Robert Brustein, Kenneth Bernard, and the late Kenneth Tynan.

Jones's study is occasionally marred by a gratuitous, journalistic statement. At one point, for example, he compares Brook to "both Wallace Shawn and Andr6 Gregory combined from the popular cult film by Louis Malle 'My Dinner with Andr''... perhaps tempered with just a little other-worldliness of E.T." (p. 210). Although by no means a definitive study, Following Directions is a fair, thorough, and as such welcome overview and guide to Brook's career to date.

DANIEL J. WATERMEIER University of Toledo

DOUBLES, DEMONS, AND DREAMERS: AN INTERNATIONAL COLLECTION OF SYMBOLIST DRAMA. Ed. & introd. by Daniel Gerould. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1985; pp. 224. $21.95 cloth; $9.95 paper.

This noteworthy collection of plays from Per- forming Arts Journal Publications exemplifies the wealth of continental European dramatic literature that simply awaits the translator and publisher. Doubles, Demons, and Dreamers makes available in English some long-neglected short plays written be- tween 1890 and 1916 by dramatists ranging from August Strindberg to Rabindranath Tagore.

For this anthology, editor Daniel Gerould, has selected fifteen short plays to exemplify theatrical Symbolism, which he explicates in an illuminating introduction. Stalwarts of Symbolism like Strind- berg are represented along with others who are seldom recognized as playwrights, like Andrei Bely. Stanislaw Przybyszewski has long been considered out of fashion, while Tadeusz Micifiski is little known outside Poland. Ram6n del Valle-Inclin and Alexander Blok are more often named than read. Only two in this collection, William Butler Yeats and Wallace Stevens, originally wrote in English. Gerould translated more than half the list from three languages, French, German and Russian, and collab- orated with the translator of the two Polish plays. Another translator rendered Valle-Inclin's Spanish, and Tagore put his own Bengali verse into English prose. As a translator, Gerould felicitously vanishes behind an unobtrusively easy style. He might be faulted only for attempting to translate Hugo von Hofmannsthal into verse without achieving the gifted rhyme of the original, and sometimes pro- ducing an unpoetic result, i.e. an inadequate render- ing (like his "humid light" for feuchten Schmelz, for which "moist glitter" might be more accurate), or an occasionally awkward inversion or fill word to achieve unfailing iambic regularity. Finally, one may quarrel with his interpretation of Hofmann- sthal's play: Gerould writes of the hero's "passionate commitment to life" (p. 16). It would be closer to the mark to say that Claudio has failed to live; his over- refined intellect killed every feeling with super- conscious analysis. That the German title of The Fool and Death is misquoted (p. 17) and Hofmann- sthal's name misspelled in the table of contents must surely be laid at the series editors' door.

In a stimulating introduction, Gerould notes inter- national parallels, drawing upon his broad knowl- edge of several literatures as well as art and music.

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245 / BOOK REVIEW

His vast learning only rarely becomes mere cata- loguing or too broad to be meaningful. And it might have been handier to have Gerould's enlightening explication of each play placed immediately preceding each dramatic text rather than in a single long introduction.

Death could be a fourth unifying topic along with the three d's of the title. The heroes in several of these plays gladly choose death, as do Yeats's lovers. Micifiski's poet-hero frees himself through suicide from imprisonment in a mad-house. Valle-Inclin's robber captain abandons his followers to ride off in mad pursuit of the Princess Chimera he has unwit- tingly killed. Stevens's Carlos joyously leaps into the infinite blue of the night sky, and Tagore's Karna seeks death rather than desert his soldiers. Still, in most of these plays death is an inescapable evil presence, especially in the selections by Maeterlinck, Przybyszewski, and Andreyev. More than a pres- ence, death actively seizes its prey in the plays of Margueritte, Mme. Rachilde, Briusov, and Bely. Death in life occurs in Andreyev's Requiem, in which not living but dead actors inhabit the stage, and wooden puppets replace the audience. Simi- larly, Hofmannsthal's Fool finds the void within himself. Strindberg's Coram populo depicts a universe in which God is mad.

Gerould has here illuminated Symbolism in theory, as he and others have done before, but more than that, he allows the reader to experience it through this wide-ranging selection of brief plays.

MARJORIE L. HOOVER Emeritus Professor of German and Russian,

Oberlin College

MASKS IN MODERN DRAMA. By Susan Harris Smith. Berkeley: University of Califor- nia Press, 1984; pp. 237. $27.50.

It is rare to encounter a work of rigorous scholar- ship that at the same time offers so much to the theatre practitioner as does Susan Harris Smith's study, Masks in Modem Drama. Smith's approach is both literary and theatrical; she analyzes the mask as a metaphor within the text and as a device on the stage. She also traces the seminal influence of the mask in the theory and practice of many significant experimental artistic movements in the early decades of the century, including futurism, dadaism, sur- realism, and expressionism as well as opera and ballet. Finally, she relates her discussion of masks in

drama to important developments in the fields of psychology, sociology, anthropology, religion, and philosophy.

Smith divides her study into four broad categories of mask usage: satiric and grotesque; ritual, myth and spectacle; dream images and psychological pro- jections; and social roles assumed and imposed. The first two have their origins in traditional theatrical and non-theatrical applications of masks while the latter two are distinctly modern, deriving as much from the investigations of Freud and Jung as from developments within the field of theatre per se.

Satiric masking suggests that the masker is spiritually incomplete and less than human. Tracing its roots to Greek comedy, English folk mummery, Asian and African folk customs and theatre, Japanese gigakus and kyogen as well as commedia dell'arte, satiric masking tends to isolate and then distort the base instincts of man in order to hold them up to ridicule. Because there is no sympathetic bond between the masker and the spectator, the satirist's intention is that the spectator's response will be rational and analytical rather than emo- tional. Satiric masking in the modern theatre begins with Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi and its grotesque por- trait of the selfishness and hypocrisy lying at the core of individual and social struggle. Other modern dramatists like Brecht, Cocteau, Arden, Goll, and Genet deploy satiric masks so as to delineate the hor- rors of a condition in which, protected by his in- humanity, the masker is able to inflict pain while feeling none himself.

If the satiric mask represents diminished human- ity, then what might be called the heroic mask of myth, ritual and spectacle represents the quest of man for nobility and a god-like transendence. The heroic mask derives from four main traditions: primitive or African ritual, Christian ceremonies, the Japanese Noh theatre, and the antique Greek theatre. Each of these traditions involves dance, stylized gesture, song and chant, thus placing the masked figure within a highly theatricalized format. The modern effort to restore the heroic mask to the stage derives from Gordon Craig, with artists like Yeats, Reinhardt, O'Neill, Claudel, Artaud, Genet, Grotoswki, and Brook following in his footsteps as they have attempted to restore a ritualistic if not ac- tually religious significance to theatre.

The use of masks to make visible dream images and mental conflicts has its origin in the personifica- tions of medieval morality plays, but its modern manifestation is informed by the scientific discov- eries of Freud on the nature of unconscious mental

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