The Life of the Drama

"Eric Bentley is a fascinating man. He was born in Bolton, Lancashire. He worked in English academic life for a while, then went to America, and is now a transplanted Brit – a Bolton wanderer, as someone called him. He’s now in his 80s. I think he’s one of the great critics and thinkers about theatre in the 20th century. What he did in The Life of the Drama is distil his thoughts into a series of chapters on the very basics – plot, dialogue, character, thought – and then different kinds of drama – melodrama, farce, comedy, tragedy etc. One of the very influential things about the book was that he made a case for despised forms. So farce, he describes, in a wonderful phrase, as the quintessence of theatre. And he analyses it brilliantly – the violence of farce, the sense of the household gods being disrupted, the feeling of life being speeded up in an almost insane way. He says that far from regarding it as a low form, we should see farce as a high form. Similarly with melodrama: he says we always use ‘melodrama’ as a pejorative, but actually the genre has enormous virtues. It’s just a book studded with common sense about theatre, and again, like Brook, dealing with fundamentals. He talks about King Lear , this play we wrestle with and see as the summit of tragedy. Bentley just pins down the confusion of King Lear. He quotes two key lines: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods/They kill us for their sport.’ And then later in the play: ‘The gods are just and of our pleasant vices make instruments to plague us.’ So in the one play you’ve got a view of anarchy, and a view of some kind of retribution and order. And Bentley takes that as a way into a play, to say that in the end you can’t pin down King Lear to any one reading. He talks about the way in the Restoration they rewrote King Lear and gave the play a happy ending, and he says the happy ending to King Lear makes sense: ‘Sense is exactly what it makes. Shakespeare’s play does not make sense. Sense is exactly what it does not make. It is an image of the nonsensical life we live, the nonsensical death we die.’ That seems to me a profound observation. Whenever I see King Lear now, I tend to judge it by its ability to show these irreconcilable elements. If I see a Lear that is utterly self-explanatory, then I think it’s less good. So I give that example to show Bentley’s ability not to deal with abstract theories but to relate ideas to specific plays. He’s a great critic and, again, I think everyone should read him. Bentley’s strength is that he’s been a director, and he even did a one-man show, which he performed at the Edinburgh Fringe. So he’s been director, actor, translator, critic and academic. You don’t get a much more comprehensive view of theatre than that. So if you want to understand the ingredients of theatre, read Life of the Drama."