In support of the fourth wall: proscenium arch theatre’s surprisingly radical history

How do you make theatre history come alive? One way is through creating lists backed up by quirky essays. I tried that myself in The 101 Greatest Plays, which is one reason why I’m in awe of Dominic Dromgoole who, in Time Frames extends the possibilities of the format and comes up with a book that is passionate, personal, informative and argumentative. It just seems unfair that a director should outperform most of us critics.

He starts with the advantage of a strong framework. His book covers the years from 1865 to 1965, when the proscenium theatre was dominant, and deals with more than 70 playwrights. Today we celebrate the limitless possibilities of theatre with open, apron, traverse and circular stages but Dromgoole enthuses over a time when plays were mainly enclosed behind a proscenium arch. He describes the form as “liberatingly restrictive” like the 14-line sonnet or the 12-bar blues and he has a point.

We associate the proscenium with the good-mannered, well-made play but it also gave birth to Chekhov’s work for the Moscow Art theatre, Brecht’s revolutionary ideas in East Berlin and, closer to home, Joan Littlewood’s radical populism at the Theatre Royal Stratford East and the explosion of energy at the Royal Court. Seizing on the closely crafted, socially critical plays of John Galsworthy, Dromgoole says they are perfect examples of the proscenium paradox: “entertainment encasing dysfunction”.

While charting the proscenium century Dromgoole also forces us to question existing assumptions. One of his great discoveries, initially unearthed in a book by Maggie Gale, is that between the wars 21% of West End plays were written by women: a considerably better ratio than later times. This leads Dromgoole to examine a whole host of neglected female writers. He shows how Clemence Dane’s A Bill of Divorcement dealt seriously with the problem of men returning from war still saturated in violence. He makes a strong case for Dodie Smith whose Dear Octopus was recently revived at the National but whose Call It a Day, with its “shamelessness about unbridled female desire”, sounds even more fascinating. He suggests that sex was also at the heart of Daphne du Maurier’s achievement in rarely seen plays such as September Tide and The Years Between. He also rediscovers Alice Childress, an American playwright who was a big influence on Lorraine Hansberry and whose 1955 play, Trouble in Mind, dealt with the tension between a black female actor and a white male director.

Inevitably there are moments when one wants to argue with Dromgoole. For me that came when he attacks Ibsen for his lack of humour and, having trawled through the plays, says there is “a fatal lack of jokes”. I agree there are few one-line zingers in Ibsen but his plays are permeated by comic irony. I even laugh aloud towards the end of The Wild Duck when Hjalmar says he can’t stay a moment longer in a house poisoned by lies but is persuaded by his wife to have some breakfast before he goes. What of Pastor Manders in Ghosts whose unworldly naivety provokes the giggles in Mrs Alving? And even though An Enemy of the People is about the fatal compromises in a spa town whose wealth depends on toxic water, there is something comic about Dr Stockmann’s advice about what trousers to wear before addressing a public meeting. If modern Ibsen productions have shown us anything it is that he is one of theatre’s hidden humorists.

But I don’t want to cavil at a book that re-assesses the work of familiar writers such as Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and Brendan Behan, draws attention to neglected ones including Gerhart Hauptmann, Arthur Schnitzler and Susan Glaspell and makes use of Dromgoole’s experience as a director. There is a particularly poignant passage where he sees Harold Pinter downing a quiet, solitary pint at the Bush theatre in the 1990s before being forced to resume his public persona. But, although Dromgoole is by profession a director he is passionate in his advocacy of the dramatist. When he says of devised texts “there remains something flavourless without a writer, some lack of texture and the music of heard life” I wanted to fling my hat in the air and cheer.