{"id":338,"date":"2020-11-03T19:32:50","date_gmt":"2020-11-03T19:32:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/22\/?p=338"},"modified":"2026-06-22T10:22:24","modified_gmt":"2026-06-22T10:22:24","slug":"remembering-eric-bentley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/22\/remembering-eric-bentley\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Eric Bentley"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Don Rubin<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n

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Eric Bentley. Photo: Northwestern University Press<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Eric Bentley\u2014one of the world\u2019s great theatre thinkers\u2014was the first person to be honored by the International Association of Theatre Critics with its Thalia Prize in 2006 for \u201cContributions to Theatre.\u201d Bentley died this past September (2020), just short of his 104th birthday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He worked as a reviewer as such for only four years, mostly for the prestigious New Republic <\/em>magazine in the United States during the 1950s, but his reviews became essential reading for many who followed him into criticism as a profession, as did much of his subsequent theoretical writing, editing and translation work which profoundly influenced the study of theatre in the English-speaking world.

In the years he worked as a reviewer, his own early model was George Bernard Shaw: \u201cWe both wrote for a public that would never see the plays, mostly, for a weekly that circulated all over the country but whose readers were not lodged in the theatre capital.\u201d With a strong European background, he was not particularly impressed with 1950s Broadway, and his witty but often scathing reviews regularly challenged New York\u2019s commercial interests. As he later put it, he felt his role at that point was to uncover \u201cwhat is covered, demystifying the whole thing. Not just having enthusiasms, creating the hits and the flops, but subjecting the gods of the marketplace to real criticism\u2014measuring them against the best that has been written in theatre instead of just congratulating them on being better than the worst\u201d (qtd. in Itzin 7).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Always known for his ability to identify and synthesize\u2014sometimes with biting sarcasm\u2014core concepts and intellectual weaknesses, he maintained a profound belief in the possibilities of theatre to impact the wider world, and the power of words never seemed to fail him. I certainly grew up as a theatre critic on those words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For me, one of the most important things he ever said about criticism was that it had to be discussion before it could be anything else. He insisted that judgement\u2014something neophyte critics tend to rush to\u2014always faded in the wake of articulate discussion, a real conversation about the work being looked at. It was the Ideas behind any theatre piece which had to be identified and discussed before anything else. Discussion. As I understood the concept, if vanilla was the subject it was far more important to discuss \u201cvanilla-ness\u201d than to say one liked or disliked \u201cvanilla\u201d (Bentley, What Is Theatre<\/em> 237)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One misses discussion about art these days when it has been mostly replaced by a tendency to over-romanticize pedigrees, taxonomies and theorization, especially in academic examinations. Does a work of art conform or not conform to a particular set of previously established ideas? Proving a work is not Aristotelian ultimately says little about what a work really is. Identifying a work as post-dramatic may help to slot something in somewhere, but it rarely enlightens artists or audiences about the essence or specialness of a particular theatrical creator or a theatrical work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For too many, twenty-first-century criticism has marked an end to genuine theatrical discussion like Bentley\u2019s. How does one then sum up the life of this witty and profound theatrical conversationalist whose voice has now gone silent? A man who influenced so many in the theatre for so long? At least we still have his private conversations found in the dozens of volumes he left us, important running conversations that he had for so many decades with both the theatre world and the greater world beyond it. At least we have that very real part of Bentley to hang onto.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was honored to count Eric Bentley as a friend, perhaps not that close a friend as some but close enough that I always felt he would talk to me (mostly via telephone or in writing, but also in person when we could connect at his sumptuously messy 12-room apartment on New York\u2019s Riverside Drive, or in other strange places) about issues of theatre or life. He did not much care whether those conversations started in theatre or in life; both would soon be included. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To understand Bentley, it is probably necessary to know something of the arc of his life. Born in 1916, in Bolton, an industrial town in northern England, his parents were working class people\u2014father, Fred, a businessman; mother, Laura, a religious Baptist who really wanted him to be a missionary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His own earliest career instincts tended another way\u2014he wanted to be a professional pianist. He was both a talented and enthusiastic musician who loved an audience. Eventually, he earned a diploma from the Guildhall in London, but he looked around and realized that his musical talent would never be at the level he wanted. As he put it years later, he knew then he would \u201cnever be Rubinstein\u201d (Bertin, \u201cBentley Uncensored\u201d 39)<\/p>\n\n\n

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Determined to reach for the stars\u2014to get a quality degree in something\u2014he chose history and literature and started winning scholarships, first to a prestigious secondary school and then to Oxford, where he did his undergraduate work. At Oxford, he found a mentor\u2014C.S. Lewis, best-known today as the author of the Narnia series. Lewis changed his idea of what literature was (Nesmith 5)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though he also did some acting at Oxford, he was not much impressed with theatre art generally or his talent for it. Having studied German and German literature, he was drawn to Nietzsche and Kleist and Wagner, and he eventually accepted a major scholarship to Yale where he wound up doing a doctorate in comparative literature. His dissertation looked at the subject of hero worship in modern literature just as World War II was beginning to insinuate itself into his life. His dissertation became one of his first professionally published writings when he sold an excerpt from it to the Partisan Review<\/em> in 1942 and then, in 1944, published it on its own as A Century of Hero Worship<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The role of drama\u2014particularly its importance in German literature\u2014sparked a new interest for him in theatre art generally. He spent much of his time during this period in short-term teaching appointments at schools like Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he began to read, as he said, all the drama books on the shelves and taking his first steps into directing. \u201cMe educating Me in drama,\u201d as he later told Michael Bertin (qtd. in \u201cBentley Uncensored\u201d 39)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His reading was obviously deep and challenging. The result appeared in 1946 when he wrote an extraordinary book taking the ideas of Western dramatists more seriously than almost any other English writer had to that time. That book, The Playwright as Thinker<\/em>, influenced more than one post-war generation to take dramatic literature seriously and many young critics and scholars\u2014me among them\u2014began to follow the roadmap that he was almost single-handedly providing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That book was ultimately used for more than 40 years as a text for understanding and recognizing the intellectual aspects of modern theatre. Reissued in 1987 in a 40th anniversary edition, it made the study of drama \u201cintellectually respectable,\u201d as critic Jonathan Kalb put it in the New York Times<\/em> in 2006. Yet at least one critic reviewing the original 1946 volume was not totally convinced despite Bentley\u2019s rapidly growing academic reputation. Stark Young\u2014one of the deans of American theatre criticism at that time\u2014observed that though Bentley\u2019s knowledge of dramatic literature was certainly impressive, he was showing much less of an understanding of theatre per se. That review by Young, Bentley later admitted, \u201cturned my attention to theatre.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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After Black Mountain College, Bentley moved to California for a teaching position at UCLA. A student in one of his classes there told him about an expatriate German writer she knew living not far from the university, who was looking for someone to help him with translation of some of his poetry. It was 1945, and the writer turned out to be Bertolt Brecht, some 20 years Bentley\u2019s senior and relatively unknown in the English-speaking world. Bentley himself did not know much about Brecht other than the fact that he had written a few plays that had success in Germany before the war. He agreed to meet with Brecht, read some of his poems and was drawn into Brecht\u2019s circle, ultimately agreeing to translate some of the poetry. Brecht then offered Bentley scenes to translate from the play of his\u2014ultimately called in English\u2014The<\/em> Private Life of the Master Race<\/em> which, when staged later in New York, was a disaster, with Brecht, an observer at rehearsals, shouting at the actors that they were doing it all wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n

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The contact, however, had been made and was real. Brecht continued through this period to ask Bentley for help with his English\/American career. And Bentley became, as he himself put it, \u201ca sort of one-man, self-appointed propaganda committee\u201d for Brecht, though, at the time, the English-speaking world \u201ccouldn\u2019t have been less impressed\u201d (qtd. in Itzin 6)<\/p>\n\n\n

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Bentley wrote about his Brechtian years in the 1980s in a volume called The Brecht Memoir<\/em>. The Irish critic Fintan O\u2019Toole wrote in a review of that volume for the Irish Times<\/em> that Bentley was clearly Brecht\u2019s \u201cfirst champion in America, and the man who did more than anyone else to establish Brecht\u2019s reputation in the English-speaking world. But he was also, by his own account, always at a distance from Brecht\u2019s politics, a leftish liberal drawn into Communist circles but never at home in them. . . . Bentley needed Brecht as father figure, a cause to champion. . . . Brecht needed Bentley, particularly in the days of the American exile. . . . Whether anything that could be genuinely called friendship ever passed between them is unclear.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After the war, Bentley taught at the University of Minnesota, occasionally wrote for Harper\u2019s <\/em>magazine and completed his Playwright as Thinker <\/em>and Bernard Shaw <\/em>(1947).But the theatre bug was truly in him by this time, and he was anxious to explore the art itself. In 1948, he used a Guggenheim Fellowship and a major grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to do research on European dramatic trends but mostly to try and connect to theatres as an observer or\u2014his real hope\u2014as an assistant director. He remained in Europe for the next three years contributing occasional pieces to Theatre Arts <\/em>and Kenyon Review<\/em> but, more crucial to him, assisting and  directing at the Abbey in Dublin, the Shauspielhaus in Zurich, the Teatro Universitario in Padua and at Max Reinhardt\u2019s Leopoldskron in Salzburg. Among the plays he worked on during this period were e.e. cummings\u2019 Him<\/em>, with Kenneth Tynan in the leading role and the German premiere of The Iceman Cometh<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Utilizing his friendship with Brecht\u2014now back in Germany\u2014Bentley, in 1950, became Brecht\u2019s assistant for his production of Mother Courage <\/em>in Munich. With some impressive assistant directing credits now in his arsenal, he ultimately staged seven plays for the Young Ireland Theatre company and then helped to arrange the group\u2019s subsequent tour to the U.S. Back home, he took on almost any directing job offered, and he wound up testing his new wings at a range of small theatres, including the Brattle in Boston and the Westport Country Playhouse, a venerable summer theatre located just outside of New York City.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Now feeling he needed more experience seeing American<\/em> theatre, he applied for a freelance position as theatre critic for The<\/em> New Republic<\/em>, a left-leaning weekly political magazine, and was hired to replace their retiring critic, director Harold Clurman. Bentley remained as The<\/em> New Republic\u2019s <\/em>critic for four years, the only period of his life when he regularly reviewed theatre. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three collections of his published theatre reviews from this period would appear as books in the 1950s\u2014In Search of Theatre<\/em> (1953), The Dramatic Event<\/em> (1954) and What Is Theatre<\/em> (1956). Also published during this period were a series of modern and classical play anthologies aimed at students, and an important anthology of theories of the modern drama. Together, as Richard Gilman said in 1986, these volumes helped rescue Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Brecht, Pirandello and Shaw from irrelevancy and obscurity, and they brought new import to the ideas of Adolph Appia, Edward Gordon Craig, Andre Antoine and critics like Stark Young, Shaw and Max Beerbohm.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Looking back at Bentley\u2019s years as a working critic, Gilman described him as \u201can explorer, a pioneer. . . . [American theatre\u2019s] \u2018tireless, learned policeman.\u2019\u201d Noting that \u201csuch people by definition don\u2019t have accurate maps and precise instruments but must work their way through the terrain partly by touch, a feel for what is there, an openness to what may surprisingly be discovered, a sense of the relation of things happened upon to the previously  known.\u201d Gilman asked \u201chas there ever been journalistic reviewing in America so supple, witty, deep and unaccommodating?\u201d (25)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an interview and assessment of Bentley\u2019s long career in American Theatre<\/em> magazine in 2016, critic and editor Rob Weinert-Kendt said that Bentley \u201cbrought a sharp, systematic mind and wide-ranging but exacting taste to a task few had taken up before him. . . . He fashioned outside the halls of academia . . . a long-viewed, fine-grained critical history of Western drama.\u201d In short, Bentley was seen as a \u201ccontrarian\u201d with a \u201csniffy temperament . . . an anti-Soviet socialist with roughly equal disdain for hardline Marxists and softheaded Western liberals. . . .  [H]e quite literally made enemies right and left\u2014but mostly left\u201d (40).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Did Brecht\u2019s ideas influence him as a critic or would-be director at this point in his life? Did he ever write with a particular theatre, an ideal theatre in mind? Bentley later admitted that he \u201choped that the Brechtian theatre would be that. . . . But it wasn\u2019t . . . it was political and it died with the death of a whole country, East Germany. So my interest in Brecht was connected with my idea of a better theatre, and not just for his plays. That looks pretty unreal now. . . . Socialism introduced the idea that the state might create this theatre. . . .\u201d (qtd. in Weinert-Kendt 41).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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