Résumés des Articles

Abstract

books of this sort, the Annual is happiest dealing with a literary text and is hard put to encapsulize the interesting experimental work carried on by ensembles. What the illustrations best illustrate is the sorry conditions of theatrical photography in the United States. Virtually every picture is a posed publicity shot, often using the traditional composition one large face in the foreground, two smaller figures at the back. The lighting is flat and garish. None of these pictures would answer Muriel St Clare Byrne's criterion, stated in Theatre Notebook many years ago, that a production photograph should accurately reproduce a moment that occurred on stage during a performance. Similarly, the critical obiter dicta, for the most part, tell us less about the play and its production than they do the lack of intellectual credentials of the critics and the shopworn cliches that daily reviewers fall back on. It becomes axiomatic that whatever Richard Eder liked, Clive Barnes did not, and vice-versa, John Simon's self-consciously snide wise-cracks are at least fun to read, however outrageous they must be for actors to endure. But, by and large, we get samples of ignorance, such as Walter Kerr chiding the director of The Inspector General for including a gag that appears in Gogol's own stage directions, or of grotesque puffery, overstrained in its reaching for superlatives, such as Douglas Watts' judgement of Bedroom Farce: 'A masterly comic construction, inventive enough to make Feydeau's cheeks burn in his grave.' The image is not one to dwell upon.