(Applause Books). Including Antoin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, E. Gordon Craig, Luigi Pirandello, Konstantin Stanislavsky, W. B. Yeats, and Emile Zolaing.

In The Theory of the Modern Stage, leading drama critic, Eric Bentley, brings together landmark writings by dramatists, directors and thinkers who have had a profound effect on the theatre since the mid nineteenth century, from Adolphe Appia to Émile Zola. Here, Antonin Artaud sets out a manifesto for a Theatre of Cruelty, Bertolt Brecht discusses the tension between entertainment and instruction in experimental drama and Bernard Shaw defends himself as a realist, while W. B. Yeats describes the creation of a People’s Theatre. The ideas of theatre’s great makers are revealed by their best expositors, as Eric Bentley writes about Stanislavsky belief in the importance of emotional memory when creating a dramatic role and Arthur Symons considers Richard Wagner and the relationship between genius, art and nature.

Modern plays are strikingly diverse and, as a result, any attempt to locate an underlying unity between them encounters difficulties: to focus on what they have in common is often to overlook what is of primary importance in particular plays; to focus on their differences is to note the novelty of the plays without increasing their accessibility. In this study, first published in 1985, Austin E. Quigley takes as his paradigm case the relationship between the world of the stage and the world of the audience, and explores various modes of communication between domains. He asks how changes in the structure of the drama relate to changes in the structure of the theatre, and changes in the role of the audience. Detailed interpretations of plays by Pinero, Ibsen, Strindberg, Brecht, Ionesco, Beckett and Pinter question principles about the modern theatre and establish links between drama structure and theatre structure, theme, and performance space.