One measure of a revolution is the change in faces. At Edinburgh in the fall of 1963, Kenneth Tynan made himself host to ninety gentlemen and ladies of the theatre from several corners of the narrowing globe. The delegation from the United States was led by Harold Clurman and Lillian Hellman, spirits from our vital thirties, still active, and still representative of our theatre's leadership. (Leadership is a word chosen out of courtesy: taken against the delegates of other countries, the singular message of the conference was that America had no theatre leaders. As always, a visual image told the most chilling tale: every day, three ladies took seats next to one another on the platform, each hatted and veiled like three weird sisters at a club luncheon. They were Miss Hellman, Agnes Moorhead, and Judith Anderson.

Right now, the East European theatre is the most exciting in the world. (When I say East Europe, I refer to the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, East Germany, and Yugoslavia.) This theatre is not necessarily the most accomplished, although that is a defensible claim. I mean that theatrical creativity is blooming there, and that, in the theatre, encouragements and incitements outweigh efforts to keep creative people in check.

The most important single element is the existence of a cheap, subsidized theatre that has mass appeal. Of course, subsidies encourage the continued popularity of a great deal of junk, but they protect quality as well, and sometimes theatre of the highest standards is popular, too. If subsidy is one secret, the other is the relative absence of competition. Television is generally confined to a single channel and only to certain hours of the day.

The big question is whether there is an unbridgeable division, even opposition, between the two arts. Is there something genuinely “theatrical,” different in kind from what is genuinely “cinematic”?

Almost all opinion holds that there is. A commonplace of discussion has it that film and theatre are distinct and even antithetical arts, each giving rise to its own standards of judgment and canons of form. Thus Erwin Panofsky argues, in his celebrated essay “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures” (1934, rewritten in 1946), that one of the criteria for evaluating a movie is its freedom from the impurities of theatricality. To talk about film, one must first define “the basic nature of the medium.” Those who think prescriptively about the nature of live drama, less confident in the future of their art than the cinéphiles in theirs, rarely take a comparably exclusivist line.

“An object of art is artistic only insofar as it is not real,” Ortega y Gasset once wrote, and meant something much broader than an attack upon naturalism. Until we are able to think of drama, for all its physical contingencies and aesthetic impurities, as existing in a different realm from the “real”—the way we are mostly able to think of poetry, painting, music—we will go on disputing over everything that is peripheral and secondary in the work of a playwright like Arden, in the effort to establish its “validity,” unconscious that this validity has already been established by the play's own internal processes and conquests.

There is something dispiriting about Arden's own vacillations between apology and peevish resentment. The prefaces to his plays are full of protests against his critics, but also of weakly enunciated and what can only be called supererogatory statements of his dramatic intentions.

It is imperative that we quickly find some way for the level of world understanding to rise to a new human scale. This scale is the world. The risks are the life or death of this world. Man is running the machines of his own invention, while the machine that is man runs the risk of running wild.

I am a bit impatient when asked, “What is the origin of your experimental theatre productions?” The assumption seems to be that “experimental” work is tangential (toying with some “new” technique each time) and tributary. The result is supposed to be a contribution to modern staging—scenography using current sculptural or electronic ideas, contemporary music, actors independently projecting clownish or cabaret stereotypes. I know that scene: I used to be part of it. Our Theatre Lab productions are going in another direction. In the first place, we are trying to avoid eclecticism, trying to resist thinking of theatre as a composite of disciplines. We are seeking to define what is distinctively theatre, what separates this activity from other categories of performance and spectacle. Secondly, our productions are detailed investigations of the actor-audience relationship. That is, we consider the spiritual and scenic technique of the actor as the core of theatre art.