CREATIVE PLAY DIRECTION.

By RobertCohen '60 and John Harrop. EnglewoodCliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1974. 308pp. $9.50.

This is a handbook, neither cut nor dried, on theater direction. Of the two authors, one. Robert Cohen, is a scholar-critic on the faculty of the University of California at Irvine; the other, John Harrop, is a British actor and author teaching at Santa Barbara. They are skillful collaborators; no stylistic seams show in their work, and one is never conscious of two voices talking at cross purposes. After a brief history (and prehistory) of directing and a statement of the director's function in the theater, the authors in the body of the book address themselves to the four chief concerns of the director: interpretation, composition, acting, and style. In each section their discussion is informed, lucid, and illuminating.

The pitfall into which most directors' handbooks fall is, of course, the trap of the cut and dried. Do's and don't's are prescribed, checklists constructed, terminology explained, and glib encouragement offered as if everything in the theater were simple. But nothing there is simple. The air over the stage is as full of unsettled controversy and unanswered riddles as it is of dust motes. Professors Cohen and Harrop know this and show it. They raise the hard questions instead of avoiding them: how creative is the director's role? what are his obligations to the text? how much room is there for the spontaniety of the actor? when is it valid to contemporize the classics? what is style on stage and how is it achieved? and all the others. And the; do not pretend that there are easy answers for these questions, or sometimes any answers at all. This admirable honesty makes for a book which is more interesting and challenging, and more useful, than all the checklists and blocking diagrams ever assembled.

The other chief strength of the book is its sophistication. Again, most directors' manuals are touchingly naive, dealing with the theater as if Artaud and Brecht, St. Denis and Guthrie. Grotowski and Brook had never flung their challenges at the established way of doing things. These authors, knowing better, write out of the true state of the contemporary theater They are as comfortable with game theory. alienation effects, or improvisational techniques as with box sets. If this sophistication of theirs makes for occasional contradictions, clashing precepts, and contrary practices, so be it. The theater these days is hardly an harmonious place. A book like this, which moves gracefully, through the conflct and maintains an admirabla sanity in the midst of violent -conflict, has immense value for all of us, be we on stage or in the audience.

John Finch, himself the author of several playsjoined the Dartmouth faculty in 1939. He iscurrently the William R. Kenan ProfessorDrama.