Looking Back

Abstract

Having removed these American dramatists from O’Neill’s shadow, the intrinsic value of their work seems more remarkable than it otherwise might. In their time, Americans usually recognised these writers’ merit, as did Europeans. Among the characteristics of modern drama is the withering away of national boundaries. A new play in one country pops up in another in a year or two, sometimes sooner: in 1921 Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author opened in Rome and Milan, in 1922 in London and New York, in 1923 in Paris; in 1923 Shaw’s Saint Joan opened in New York, in 1924 in London. After the First World War, when American drama came of age, dramatic traffic across the Atlantic went in both directions. In the late 1920s, Firmin Gémier, then director of the Odéon Theatre in Paris, told the American critic Joseph Wood Krutch that Moscow and New York were ‘the only two cities in the world where the stage is really interesting today’.¹ As the German critic Julius Bab observed in 1931, however, the Soviet stage was interesting because of its innovative stagecraft but its new plays were ‘only a naïve imitation of very old European forms’.