Volume 45, Number 18 · November 19, 1998
Mystic Scientist
By Fintan O'Toole
Threads of Time: Recollections
by Peter Brook
Counterpoint, 212 pp., $25.00
Twentieth-century theater has often been at its most innovative when it has been least modern, most contemporary when it has dreamed of connecting to some ancient or timeless truth. Poetry, fiction, music, dance, and the visual arts have all gone through phases of being attracted to the outlandish and the primitive. But in the theater, the urge to escape urban industrial life has been felt almost continuously throughout the century. Its avant-garde has often been in deliberate retreat, moving backward in time, searching for older, more apparently authentic forms. In John Millington Synge's and Federico Garcia Lorca's explorations of the west of Ireland and of Granada, it sought inspiration on the underdeveloped fringes of Europe.
Review, 6469 words
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