Behold the drive for purity in art as art is practised these days. Behold this writer striving for the purely poetic, another for the purely lyrical, the purely epic, the purely dramatic. The painter ardently seeks to create the pure painting, the musician pure music, and someone even told me, pure radio represents the synthesis between Dionysos and Logos. Even more remarkable for our time, not otherwise renowned for its purity, is that each and everyone believes he has found his unique and the only true purity. Each vestal of the arts has, if you think of it, her own kind of chastity. Likewise, too numerous to count, are all the theories of the theatre, of what is pure theatre, pure tragedy, pure comedy.

The returns are in. A Swiss playwright has been “discovered.” A year ago the name of Friedrich Duerrenmatt suddenly studded the hopeful theatrical gossip of the alert drinkers in the Salisbury, Cranbourne, and Arts Theatre. No director worthy of the name “Peter” was without curiosity. To acquire the production rights for The Visit of the Old Lady would be considered a virtual coup d'état for any ambitious directorial career. Travelers from the continent regaled us with stories: one had seen the play in Munich with Therese Giehse, a famous Mother Courage seen here in Benedek's film Kinder, Mutter, und Ein General; another had seen the great Kathe Dorsch as the Old Lady; yet another the Paris production (not a notable success) with that delicate, withered little bundle remembered from many French films, Mme. Sylvie.

There are certain characters of Shakespeare that assert their right to exist from the moment they come into view. They rear up and walk; they talk with unmistakable rhythm and inflection; they look you in the eye with the assurance of freedom, dignity, even defiance; they measure your worth against their own. They thrust and elbow and insinuate their way through the action, which they conduct in their own time; they are sometimes jeeringly aware of this characteristic tempo of theirs, as when crook-back Richard Gloster declares: “… and leave the world for me to bustle in.” The verb is precise in describing Richard's political energy, his impatience, his restless and gleeful egotism! You might even say, come Bosworth Field, that he has bustled himself to death. Or Juliet's nurse; it's not enough to say she lives, she gasps and heaves through the action; she sputters, rails, purrs and betrays.

The “society” I have tried to depict in The Bald Prima Donna is a society which is perfect, I mean where all social problems have been resolved. Unfortunately this has no effect upon life as it is lived. The play deals with a world where economic worries are a thing of the past, a universe without mystery, in which everything runs smoothly, for one section of humanity at least. I have no doubt that this is the world of tomorrow. In America, Russia, China, Africa, and so on, the march of science and industrialization must finally arrive at stability and social contentment.

In The Bald Prima Donna, which is a completely unserious play where I was most concerned with solving purely theatrical problems, some people have seen a satire on bourgeois society, a criticism of life in England, and heaven knows what.

It is only since the war that Eugène Ionesco has become known in Paris, where his name is linked with those of Samuel Beckett, Jean Genêt, Jean Vauthier and others. All these writers have come to be classed as avant-garde, because they are all in reaction against some aspects of our conventional drama. But their approach in each case is highly individual.

Ionesco is certainly one of the most original, stimulating and personal among them.

He tells us that he came to write for the theatre because he had grown to detest it, and he started writing mainly for his own enjoyment. He was tired of the mean little intrigues, the superficial values and the barren preoccupation with the problems of everyday life that he found in naturalistic drama. And he was disturbed at the sight of actors struggling to create the illusion that they were the counterparts of the members of the audience.

My anthology The Modern Theatre — five volumes in Anchor Books—is made up of plays written between 1830 and 1950. The première of Victor Hugo's Hernani in 1830 has always been considered a landmark, though closer to my own thoughts were Musset, Büchner, and Gogol, all of whom wrote plays in the early eighteen thirties.

That anthology, readers will agree, was not just another bundle of famous plays. On the contrary, justly famous items—and unjustly famous ones—were omitted. Famous authors like O'Casey and Anouilh were represented only by non-famous works. It was an anthology of protest—against the standardization of the repertoire. For our theatres limit their range even more than our orchestras and our museums do. My anthology was issued in the hope of persuading some of them to look at other things, other kinds of things. The volumes serve a purpose even if that hope is vain.

When my favorite drama critic, Brooks Atkinson, and my favorite playwright, Arthur Miller, make the same mistakes about politics and playwriting, I can conclude only that Atkinson and Miller, like most people, are very nice guys who don't always appreciate the appeal of evil. In an interview I had with Mr. Miller for the radio series “Ideas and the Theatre,” he stated that he would like to see more right-wingers and even fascists writing for the theatre, to keep the drama a true forum. Approaching the same error from another angle, Mr. Atkinson devotes more than a thousand words in his column of June 22nd (1958) answering the question “why don't you do something about the spate of depressing plays?” without ever seeing any political implications in the topic.