One way is through creating lists backed up by quirky essays. I tried that myself in The 101 Greatest Plays, which is one reason why I’m in awe of Dominic Dromgoole who, in Time Frames extends the possibilities of the format and comes up with a book that is passionate, personal, informative and argumentative. It just seems unfair that a director should outperform most of us critics.
He starts with the advantage of a strong framework. His book covers the years from 1865 to 1965, when the proscenium theatre was dominant, and deals with more than 70 playwrights. Today we celebrate the limitless possibilities of theatre with open, apron, traverse and circular stages but Dromgoole enthuses over a time when plays were mainly enclosed behind a proscenium arch.
He describes the form as “liberatingly restrictive” like the 14-line sonnet or the 12-bar blues and he has a point. We associate the proscenium with the good-mannered, well-made play but it also gave birth to Chekhov’s work for the Moscow Art theatre, Brecht’s revolutionary ideas in East Berlin and, closer to home, Joan Littlewood’s radical populism at the Theatre Royal Stratford East and the explosion of energy at the Royal Court. Seizing on the closely crafted, socially critical plays of John Galsworthy, Dromgoole says they are perfect examples of the proscenium paradox: “entertainment encasing dysfunction”.
While charting the proscenium century Dromgoole also forces us to question existing assumptions. One of his great discoveries, initially unearthed in a book by Maggie Gale, is that between the wars 21% of West End plays were written by women: a considerably better ratio than later times. This leads Dromgoole to examine a whole host of neglected female writers.
He shows how Clemence Dane’s A Bill of Divorcement dealt seriously with the problem of men returning from war still saturated in violence. He makes a strong case for Dodie Smith whose Dear Octopus was recently revived at the National but whose Call It a Day, with its “shamelessness about unbridled female desire”, sounds even more fascinating. He suggests that sex was also at the heart of Daphne du Maurier’s achievement in rarely seen plays such as September Tide and The Years Between.
He also rediscovers Alice Childress, an American playwright who was a big influence on Lorraine Hansberry and whose 1955 play, Trouble in Mind, dealt with the tension between a black female actor and a white male director. Inevitably there are moments when one wants to argue with Dromgoole. For me that came when he attacks Ibsen for his lack of humour and, having trawled through the plays, says there is “a fatal lack of jokes”.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
