Over a quarter of a century has passed since The Theatre of Revolt was first published, years which constitute a period of considerable activity in the drama. Readers and students sometimes ask me if the intervening time has altered my estimation of the playwrights discussed or my perception of the movement they represented. I am asked even more often whom I would have included if the book were to be written today.
My answer to the first question is a qualified no. Revolt in its messianic, social, and existential manifestations still seems to me a highly useful way, though not the only way, to characterize the Romantic movement of modern drama. And virtually all the eight playwrights included have maintained their high status as the strongest influences on the direction of this movement in its form and substance. Samuel Beckett—among those I found it premature to include, having not yet completed “a sufficiently various body of writing”—is a significant omission. He is the great metaphysical playwright of our time and perhaps the most characteristic exponent of what I called existential revolt. I regret my failure to give him a chapter of his own.
I think, too, that if The Theatre of Revolt were to be written today, it would have to include a chapter on post-O’Neill American playwrights, notably David Mamet, Sam Shepard, and David Rabe, as well as on the visionary auteur/director Robert Wilson, who is beginning to restore to the drama some of its earlier messianic ambitions. Harold Pinter, David Hare, and Caryl Churchill merit attention as a manifestation of post-Shaw British revolt, though like the Americans none yet deserves a single chapter to him- or herself. The same is true of post-Brecht German drama (Handke, Kroetz, Mueller), post-Pirandello Italian (Dario Fo), and post-Chekhov Russian (Mayakovsky and Bulgakov). No single dramatist separates himself from the national pack in the manner of the eight seminal figures who form the substance of the book.
I think also that any new version of The Theatre of Revolt would have to pay considerably more attention to the production aspects of the theatre, especially directing. When I first wrote this book, I was a full-time critic, teacher, and scholar. Since then I have supplemented these interests with a much deeper involvement in practice. I hope that my book has proved helpful not just to students of modern drama in preparing for exams but also to practitioners in preparing for production. Still, plays are meant to be performed rather than read (or read about), and it would have been useful had I included more hints about how these plays can be fulfilled through staging.
It is true that I have discussed this, in desultory fashion, in subsequent writings. But if I ever get the chance to write a sequel to The Theatre of Revolt, I am pledged to pay it the attention it deserves.
Cambridge, 1990