Class Act

“One of the privileges of my position as the drama critic of a liberal weekly,” writes Eric Bentley of his work at the New Republic, “is that I am not required to cover all the shows. Nor am I held to any ‘objective’ principle of selection--I select the ones that have most interested me. It is therefore not to be expected that my choices would seem the right ones to any other human being; in retrospect, they don’t all seem right even to me.”

All that chutzpah and free tickets too? There, in a nutshell, is the reason nobody likes a critic. Why, I ask you, should anyone have the right, by the sheer vagaries of employment, to take apart the work somebody else has (one assumes) lovingly put together and hold it up to such cold and unvarnished judgment? No wonder the insult “Cr-r-ritic!” hurled in Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” never fails to bring down the house.

Bentley gives free rein to these and other unapologetic thoughts in a new assemblage of old work that has reappeared under the title “What Is Theatre?” an expanded and now comprehensive reissue of essays and reviews written from 1944 to 1967 that had been first published in 1968. Age has not withered them, which is a testament to the superiority of Bentley’s acumen and, perhaps, to the scarcity of skilled criticism in the era of the sound byte.

The only excuse for such arrogance is to be so good at what you do that you are both believable and enjoyable. Claudia Cassidy, another critic not easily cowed by criticism, suggested that a critic’s work has the obligation to be art in its own right. Only a handful of scribblers in the last three centuries have succeeded in making criticism just that: literary work that stands alone and is interesting enough to read whether you had the opportunity to view the subject under discussion or not. Among them: William Hazlitt, Edmund Wilson, James Agee, Stark Young, George Jean Nathan, Brooks Atkinson and, of course, George Bernard Shaw (especially his music criticism, the tirades on Sir Henry Irving and the comparisons of Sylvie Drake, former theater critic of The Times, is an artistic associate of the Denver Center Theatre and director of media relations for the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. Eleonora Duse’s work with Sarah Bernhardt’s).

In his mid-80s now, Bentley can look back confidently on a prolific career as playwright, adapter (“Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been?”), director and translator (principally of Bertolt Brecht). But he will almost certainly be best remembered for his books on theater criticism, even though he was only briefly employed as a critic (from 1952-’56 by the New Republic). For the rest, he contributed to Harper’s magazine (1945-’48) and various literary periodicals (for a time he was a consulting editor for the Kenyon Review) and wrote several engaging books on theater. Between the books and the criticism, Bentley looms as a major presence in the analysis of American and European theater of the last 60 years, his prose lively, conversational, provocative, at once dry and jocular, while securely rooted in his knowledge of the art from both sides of the footlights--and on both sides of the Atlantic.

The essays in the current volume (for that is what they mostly are, essays masquerading as reviews) provide insight not only into his lengthy and productive life in the theater but also into an entire philosophy and history of American and other play-making during that period, expressed in highly idiosyncratic terms. The results are thoroughly engrossing for anyone with more than a passing interest in the subject. The fact that Bentley was born English (in Bolton, Lancashire) only broadens the base of his experience. He was a student of C.S. Lewis at Oxford who steeped himself in the London theater of the late 1930s and later in the European theater of the late 1940s (where he directed plays) before settling down in America. During a teaching stint at UCLA, he was introduced to the Southern California coterie of German emigres and, more significant, he met Brecht. The encounter blossomed into a lifelong literary as well as personal friendship. Brecht was a complex and difficult political animal who became a colleague and a man of whom Bentley was able candidly to write after the playwright’s death in 1956: “[T]here were times when I hated him, but there were no times when I did not love him.”

This kind of clarity and natural grace distinguish Bentley’s prose. If he thinks of himself primarily as a man of the theater, he is hardly the first critic to do so. This conviction enhances his analytical strengths, because it takes a passionate love of, and involvement with, an artistic discipline to successfully become its critic. It is the difference between chastising a child you love and merely punishing one you don’t. The latter often becomes an exercise in cruelty, while the former is an act of responsible affection.

“What Is Theatre?” is divided into three parts: “The Dramatic Event,” consisting of reviews written for the New Republic in the 1952-’53 and 1953-’54 seasons; “What Is Theatre?” which includes those written in the 1954-’55 and 1955-’56 seasons; and other musings and reviews generated between 1944 and 1967. He concludes with a humanizing bunch of “afterthoughts” dedicated to the proposition that we all have the right to change our minds over time; to report developments subsequent to an original writing that may require--or not--an amended opinion; and to discover in some later production an overlooked aspect of a piece of work. All such occasions are edifying and elegantly reported.

Because theater is so ephemeral, accounts of it tend to lose their relevance even more rapidly. Yet for the most part, Bentley’s reflections have withstood the test of time. He has his pets (Ibsen, Anouilh, Pirandello, Giraudoux) and pet peeves (O’Neill; Chaplin, whom he admires but dislikes; Arthur Miller, for whom the respect feels grudging; Kazan, for whose work his affection is effusive and overly generous). He can be wrong (as in his initial response to “Waiting for Godot”) or rigid (as in a lengthy cogitation about why American musical comedy should remain strictly rooted in comedy, which virtually dismisses at least half of Stephen Sondheim’s work).

When considering the Stanislavski-inspired Lee Strasberg acting method so popular in the ‘50s and ‘60s, he finds a valuable tool for unlocking an actor’s emotions but, unlike so many of his contemporaries, stops short of endorsing this guru-driven teaching as the be-all and end-all of modern American drama. And he hungers openly for a unified, central, subsidized American theater, a la Ireland’s Abbey or France’s Comedie Francaise, while ignoring the disadvantages of these organizations. Aside from the fact that they are cozy companies that tend to become repositories of dead wood, Bentley makes no mention of the societal and geographic differences that would make such a national theater difficult if not impossible to establish in our much larger country and free-market economy. We can’t even manage a stable National Endowment for the Arts, let alone that kind of full-blown government support.

On the other hand--and there is always an other hand--Bentley has that rare and essential ability to make extremely keen distinctions. “What is the interpretation of a role?” he asks, in a double-negative assessment of Katharine Hepburn’s performance in Shaw’s “The Millionairess.” “If it is not to discover what is in a role but to impose yourself upon it, if it is not to impose your true self upon it but a self you vamp up for the occasion, if it is not to find the accents and the climaxes but to accent everything and make a climax of every speech, if it is not to establish relationships with other characters and other actors but to inhibit all relationship with other characters and other actors, if it is not to seek the author’s meaning but to smother all meaning in rapid activity that is too mechanical or too neurasthenic to deserve the name of energy, Miss Hepburn is a great interpreter.”

Ouch. Painful, but . . . credible. Like most critics, Bentley is more penetrating in his dissensions than his enthusiasms, and you can forgive a writer who is as humorously deprecating of himself and his confreres as he is lucid about the ethics and limitations of his art. He has no love for the rush-to-judgment exacted by overnight reviewing and, in his chapter “Professional Playgoing,” offers one of the finest--and funniest--defenses for not reviewing at all.

Ultimately, “What Is Theatre?” is a bracing reminder that there is no substitute for clear thought, broad knowledge and sound writing. It is proof once more that a critic’s responsibility is fulfilled only when the discourse transcends the immediate and illuminates a broader canvas. Astuteness and good humor also help. So do eloquence and the talent to know the difference between trendiness and permanence, style and form and (to quote Bentley) “belles-lettrism” and rock-solid reasoning. “For the journalist critic,” writes Bentley, “the only alternative to a sharp tongue is a mealy mouth.” Bentley always avoids the latter, rarely indulges the former and still manages to stay the course.