It is quite natural for us to wonder why a great poet such as Lorca should devote so much energy and interest to a form of drama which in English-speaking countries is limited almost exclusively to the amusement of children. The reasons are several but simple. In Spain, as in other Mediterranean countries, puppet theatre is still a popular form of drama. That is to say, it is performed at fairs, festivals, and even in its own well established theatres—and performed for a general audience. And this holds true for both the major puppet traditions in the Spanish theatre: the violent Punch and Judy-like drama in which plot, theme, even logic are sacrificed to the brouhaha, as well as the more complex, romantic, musical, and somewhat narrative genre. In the romantic genre one finds three general approaches to the action.

As Lorca's posthumous fame increases, the glint of political martyrdom, though still apparent, no longer dominates the picture. His plays are now performed almost everywhere, even recently in Spain itself. (There, for the first time since his murder in 1936, a dramatic work of his, Yerma, was produced in November, 1960.) He is required reading in hundreds of college courses. With Picasso's and Dali's his is one of the best-known of twentieth-century Spanish names. The new Aguilar edition of his complete works, a single leather-bound volume in the same format as Cervantes, Calderón de la Barca, and Lope de Vega, has made him a classic author. Perhaps the best sign that his reputation is secure is that some critics have begun to question his ascendancy over the five or six foremost Spanish writers of the period.

In his essay on “Emotional Memory” in TDR Summer 1962, and now, I believe, published as a pamphlet by Samuel French, Inc., Mr. Robert Lewis traces the phrase “emotional memory” back as far as 1925 and adds: “During the Group Theatre days, in the Thirties, we called it ‘Affective Memory’ (a term borrowed from an earlier French psychologist). But, by whatever name, it is accomplished, roughly as follows.”

The name is actually given in David Magarshack's Stanislavsky: A Life in these words:

To all appearances, August Strindberg would seem to be the most revolutionary spirit in the theatre of revolt. Actually, that distinction must go to Ibsen, but Strindberg is certainly the most restless and experimental. Perpetually dissatisfied, perpetually reaching after shifting truths, he seems like a latter-day Faust with the unconscious as his laboratory—seeking the miracle of transmutation in the crucible of his tormented intellect. The metaphor is precise, for transmutation—the conversion of existing material into something higher—is the goal of all his activity, whether he works in science, turning base metals into gold, or religious philosophy, turning matter into spirit, or in drama, turning literature into music. His entire career, in fact, is a search for the philosopher's stone of ultimate truth through the testing of varied commitments.

If one looks closely at the crotchety, constipated, hypercritical figure of Martin Luther in John Osborne's newest play, one is forcibly reminded of that fuming British malcontent, Jimmy Porter; a protestant who bitched against the Welfare State as vehemently as the theologian wrangled with the Pope. The similarities do not end there.

Despite the jump in time, the clerical context and the change of venue, the play is not (as has been charged here) a departure for Osborne. There is a clear link-up between Luther's sixteenth-century Germany and our time. In both, the sense of cosmic imminence is very strong. “The Last Judgement isn't to come. It's here and now,” says Luther, and the doomsday-mountain-squatters and the nuclear-psychotics echo his words.

Great acclamation for realism in the theatre tends to be cyclical. While the form itself may always be with us, every so often it becomes fashionable again, especially in England, and is praised a little more than it deserves. Recently it has been the playwrights who work in the idiom of the Royal Court and Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop who have been given rather more critical notice than their achievements warrant. Both the Royal Court and Miss Littlewood have followed, in their preoccupation with working-class life, all similar fashions before them. Real life always seems to live in a particularly unfashionable district. This can be an occasional welcome change from too much costumed romanticism; but apparent verisimilitude in speech or setting does not insure a genuine and perceptive authenticity.

Ever since John Osborne dropped his dramatic H-bomb on the complacent British middle-class theatregoer in April 1956 in the shape of Look Back in Anger, critics and public alike have been looking to London for a steady flow of new plays of revolt, plays that would be leavened with the yeast of a new social criticism and rooted in the new post-war realism. This new realism is, to my mind, best described as a compound of two elements. The first represents an involuntary and instinctive resistance to the irksome class structure of British society and the other, in one form or another, the universal dilemma which has split the world down the middle in an age of threatening nuclear destruction and exacerbated the rivalries inherent in class, in nation, or in industrial or commercial power. The technological complexities of our new era are hardly touched on in the new drama.

In the opening scene of Jack Gelber's The Apple an action painter is flicking large globs of pigment at a piece of celluloid, commenting as he works, “No design is a grand design,” and, “Art is precision.” He takes a rolling pin and smears the paint over the celluloid, creating an arresting pastiche of brilliant colors, chaotic patterns, intriguing textures, and—if you look at it in just the right way—some sort of artistic expression. Then Julian Beck enters and asks, “Whose wet dream is that?” This jarring punch-line sets the tone of the Living Theatre's preoccupation with illusion and reality, a theatrical pair of dice that are constantly tumbled about and spilled into the audience. And the audience pays for it: the night I was there, the painting was auctioned off for $6.50.