Here’s a few brief observations about Julia Roberts, now starring on Broadway in Richard Greenberg’s extremely slight 1997 Three Days of Rain. What Antonin Artaud has described as a “strange sun”—a light of abnormal intensity that illuminates everything in the theater—can be cruel and merciless....

Here’s a few brief observations about Julia Roberts, now starring on Broadway in Richard Greenberg’s extremely slight 1997 Three Days of Rain. What Antonin Artaud has described as a “strange sun”—a light of abnormal intensity that illuminates everything in the theater—can be cruel and...

The mortal danger of all the political theater I’ve seen this season is whether it preaches pointlessly to the choir—or takes an imaginative leap to exist in its own dynamic right. All propaganda plays date quickly—unless the play transcends the propaganda. Who today remembers Tim...

The mortal danger of all the political theater I’ve seen this season is whether it preaches pointlessly to the choir—or takes an imaginative leap to exist in its own dynamic right. All propaganda plays date quickly—unless the play transcends the propaganda. Who today remembers...

The latest book by Eric Bentley, The Theatre of Commitment, a collection of his essays on drama and theatre covering the period from 1956 to 1966, provides a convenient occasion for some thoughts on Bentley's work in recent years. Such an assessment will not do justice to what Bentley wrote before 1956, nor will it touch on a very interesting venture of his into theatre theory, The Life of the Drama (1964). However, the trajectory of a major critic during a dozen years is not only fascinating on its ...

I cannot say when I have been more provoked by a book than I was by The Life of the Drama. In both senses—I found it provoking and provocative, but more often the former. I can best indicate the ambivalence I feel toward the book by citing the conflicting reactions I had to it. Reading it was a chore. I found myself struggling through page after page, reading from a sense of duty only, and then coming suddenly on a section which caught my attention, absorbed me, made me think (for a moment) that this...

[In A Century of Hero-Worship] Mr. Bentley analyzes the theme of historical and aesthetic hero-worship in the works of Carlyle, Nietzsche, Wagner, Shaw, Spengler, Stefan George, and Lawrence. He shows that they left an ambiguous cultural heritage to the world and explains why they could be instructive and inspiring to democrats and why, at the same time, the fascists could exploit them for their own ends. What unites all the heroic vitalists is a repudiation of the ideals of democracy because of the degradi...