What Is Theatre?: Incorporating The Dramatic Event and Other Reviews, 1944-1967

by Eric Bentley

Introduction by Donald Lyons

What Is Theatre? , originally published in 1968, collects all of Eric Bentley's theater criticism. Bentley's most productive years as a reviewer coincided with some of the greatest years of twentieth-century drama. His essays cover the premieres of works by T. S. Eliot, Tennessee Williams, Jean Anouilh, and Arthur Miller, among others, as well as subjects as far-ranging as Charlie Chaplin and the Peking Opera--and each contains insights that are still relevant. What Is Theatre? is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding what our American theater has been, is now, and could become.

Genres: Plays, Nonfiction

528 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1968

About the author

Eric Russell Bentley was a British-born American theater critic, playwright, singer, editor, and translator whose work shaped twentieth-century theatrical discourse. Educated at University College, Oxford, and Yale University, where he earned his doctorate, he later taught at Black Mountain College and Columbia University and served as theatre critic for The New Republic. Known for his incisive and uncompromising criticism, he became one of the foremost English-language authorities on Bertolt Brecht, translating, editing, and performing Brecht’s work and recording landmark albums of Brecht songs. Bentley was also an accomplished playwright, with Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been, drawn from Un-American Activities Committee hearings, becoming his most produced play. He appeared for decades as a cabaret performer and was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame. An advocate for artistic and political freedom, he publicly opposed the Vietnam War and later spoke openly about his homosexuality and its influence on his work.

Reviews

[Sketchbook · Rating 5 out of 5]

America's finest theatre critic was Eric Bentley -- rightfully praised by Kenneth Tynan. His essays stimulate the mind. Having just read Graham Greene's "The Living Room," a Bwy flop, but a success in London and Paris, I was engaged when Bentley wrote, "An autopsy is justified." He finds the drama meaningful, yet disappointing; I recommend his essay to those interested in Greene and the theatre. On Tennessee Williams: "No one can outdo his dialogue at its best." On Christopher Fry's "The Dark Is Light Enough" : The production was "less that of a Dionysian revel than of parents' day at a private school."

What's this: Graham Greene, Christopher Fry plus Anouilh and Shaw on Broadway, 1954-55 ? It wouldn't happen today and it won't happen again. In this century Broadway is for dummies. Don't tell anyone; we need to prop up the biz.