Posted: 31 Mar 2010 09:58 PM PDT

Peer review ... what would Tom Stoppard (pictured) make of David Hare? Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

My Cassandra-ish warnings about the decline of authoritative theatre criticism and the pro-blogger backlash notwithstanding, here's another nail in the coffin of theatre critics: let playwrights review. I don't mean bitter, failed dramatists (as most reviewers are assumed to be), but working playwrights with a professional knowledge of the scene and what it takes to write, revise, rehearse and produce a show.

Anyone leafing through the London Review of Books will see the bylines of published novelists or non-fiction authors. So why don't we read Stoppard on Hare? Ravenhill on Prebble? Churchill on Butterworth? You would enjoy a whole new level of technical perception and aesthetic empathy, not more middle-of-the-road consumer reporting which is virtually indistinguishable from telly or film reviewing. Of course, this raises a perennial question: must theatre critics have firsthand knowledge of the craft?

There's no easy answer, but I can honestly say that here in New York I'd rather have had experimental playwright Mac Wellman's thoughts about the avant-garde company Radiohole's recent show, Whatever, Heaven Allows than the fatuous cocktail chatter that Ben Brantley passed off as a review last month. Brantley, the chief theatre critic for the New York Times, had never before reviewed these daring makers of multimedia devised theatre. He didn't disclose the salient fact in his coy, condescending notice, which fails to place Radiohole in the context of New York's experimental scene. Imagine the chief art critic of the Guardian finally coming to grips with Damien Hirst in 2010.

Now, Wellman may have friends in common with Radiohole, but as a reader, I'd be willing to take that risk with the expectation that Wellman knows what the hell he's talking about. That's not to say that your average critic can't be insightful. We read plays in addition to seeing them realised, and can judge them as literary objects as well as blueprints for action. But the artist who reviews fellow artists has a chance to occupy that vital public role of critic-advocate.

Not to undermine my own argument, but artists often do review. The aforementioned Ravenhill has written columns here (admittedly, not the same as reviewing). Michael Feingold of the Village Voice has translated several works by Bertolt Brecht and has plays of his own. Bloggers or freelancers review when they're not making it themselves. I myself am an extremely emerging playwright and opera librettist. But perhaps the main reason playwrights don't review their peers is simple: politics. Whether you live in England, America or someplace else, resources are too scanty to be an artist with a perceived conflict of interest. Even if your only true interest is increased excellence.

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Book Review: the Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro - Associated Content

Posted: 31 Mar 2010 05:19 PM PDT

At the end of his three decades of service at Darlington Hall, Mr. Stevens embarks on a country drive, during which he looks back over his career to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving "a great gentleman." But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington's "greatness" and graver doubts still about his own faith in the man he served.

What an absolute treasure of a book. Here is one piece of literature that will make you revaluate your life. Have you ever looked back and wondered "what if" or "was that really the right thing to do" or "did I do the best I could"? This story is one man searching for those answers as he looks back on his life. Mr. Stevens, throughout the course of this short novel, comes to terms with his inability to have any sort of relationship outside of the professional kind, his utterly blind faith in a man who was not a great as Stevens believed, and the real definition of "dignity". Dignity is not knowing your place. Is it not serving your employer well. Dignity is knowing you made a mistake and being able to own up to it. It is knowing that no, your life may not have turned out how you wanted it to, but still making the best of it. Stevens, a man unable to allow himself any sort of pleasure without somehow relating it to his job as a butler, realizes that his life is a lonely one and the man he served, once assuring himself that he was helping a great man change the world for the better in the only way he could, was in fact a supporter of the Nazis who was one of the biggest players in allowing Hitler to come into as much power as he eventually did.

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Delmore Schwartz: Diminished Responsibility and ... - Forward

Posted: 31 Mar 2010 10:05 PM PDT

Delmore Schwartz: Diminished Responsibility and Literary Genius

'In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories'

By Joshua Lambert

In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories
Delmore Schwartz
New Directions, 1978. 202 pages.

Delmore Schwartz was a poet first and foremost, and an important one, but his short stories—a valuable selection of which are collected in In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories—aren't too shabby themselves. Concerned for the most part with sensitive young men at odds with their families, these pieces often hark back to the 1930s, to the Great Depression as it was experienced in New York City, and to the philosophical struggle between left-wing ideologies and the desire to earn a solid living that characterized Jewish communities of that era. That conflict has long been more or less resolved, but in Schwartz's telling, it retains a kind of freshness and poignant humor: in a representative moment, one of Schwartz's young intellectuals introduces his mother to a brilliant scholar and tells her, "You have just seen a genius"; without missing a beat, she answers him, "How much money does he make?"

The most famous story here is the title piece, originally printed in Partisan Review in 1937, which also, confusingly enough, provided the title for Schwartz's first collection of prose and poetry the following year. In it, a young man in a movie theater watches a film of his parents' courtship, feeling more and more uncomfortable, until at the moment his father proposes marriage, he cries out: "Don't do it… . Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous." The concern with familial dysfunction and the autobiographical impulse are both typical of Schwartz's fiction. The other stories range from surreal and absurd fables ("The Track Meet" and "The Commencement Day Address") to detailed fictionalized accounts of Schwartz's circles (for example, "The World Is a Wedding"; "New Year's Eve" is based on a party thrown by the Partisan Review crowd). They are almost always anchored by a sensitive avatar for the author, sometimes called Shenandoah Fish. Among the strongest of the pieces is "America! America!," which describes a gregarious but troubled immigrant family who find the United States enthralling, if often tragic, and hold tight to their high hopes for it; the mother of this tribe, while spoiling her youngest son, "hoped and expected her grandchildren would be millionaires and grandsons, rabbis, or philosophers like Bergson."

Schwartz received acclaim—he was praised by luminaries from T. S. Eliot to Vladimir Nabokov, and he was handed a plum assistant professorship at Harvard without having finished a Ph.D.—but he was also haunted, paranoid, and dissatisfied in his personal life, in part, at least, because of the failure of his parents' marriage during his childhood. His fiction, an irreplaceable body of work, reflects his extraordinary sensitivity, humor, and insight.

Further reading: Selected Poems (1967) provides an introduction to Schwartz's verse. Readers interested in the poet's personal life have a tough choice, between James Atlas's splendid biography (1977) and Saul Bellow's fictionalized treatment, Humboldt's Gift (1975). Additionally, two collections of the poet's letters have been published (1984, 1993), as well as selections from his notebooks and journals (1986

Josh Lambert contributes book reviews and essays to the Forward and other publications, and is the author of "American Jewish Fiction: A JPS Guide" (Jewish Publication Society) from which this essay was taken.

Read Ken Gordon's Talmudic take on Delmore Schwartz