Page:Plays by Jacinto Benavente - Third series (IA playstranslatedf03benauoft).pdf/33

 take, "A Lady." Again, with "The City of Gaiety and Confidence," second part of "The Bonds of Interest"—itself the outgrowth of La canta de la primavera, or "Spring Song," published fifteen years previously—we enter the domain of the drama of ideas. What "The Bonds of Interest" does for the individual, "The City of Gaiety and Confidence" undertakes to do for the State, attempting to precipitate from that abstraction the vital principle which supports it, in which the being of the nation inheres. Neither a political satire nor a war play, this pageant of predigested ideas, tendencies, forces, assembled and marshalled under names, surrenders but partially to the spectator upon performance, reserving its message to be delivered up in the amplitude of leisure hours. Such creations, of course, have little relation to the commercial theatre, but are possible only to the master, who imposes his pleasure upon public and actors at will. Benavente, always versatile, comes at last to move with even greater facility, through a wider range of subject and style than before, touching new interests, reviving old, weaving into the most delicate patterns the threads of his phantasmagoric theatre. Insinuation replaces statement, revelation succeeds conflict, while the implication waits upon the approximations of thought. In the final estimate, the subjective drama, the drama of antitechnique, must be held to postulate an antitheatre, opposed in conduct and in content to all the canons which have hitherto accepted by theatrical art. Beside this most elusive of divinations, the experiments of the Expressionists and Monodramatists of the North, of the Futurists and other bizarre Italian cults, appear material and halting indeed.

Considered intelligently, with a mind unbiassed by preconceptions of the objective stage, these plays yield their own explanation, after much reflection and much love. During the next decade their study will repay the attention of all followers of the theatre.