Brief Chronicles [antikvár]

Foreword To be faced widi a collection of one's more or less fugitive pieces is, of necessity, a daunting experience. Articles written to meet a casual request, lectures transcribed from tapes, essays written as contributions to a controversy, introductions to volumes of plays, records of interviews with playwrights— how can they add up to a meaningful whole ? And yet there is a case for collecting at least a proportion of this work: there are, for one, the repeated requests for reprints in other people's anthologies, so tiiere must be a case for keeping the material in a readily available, accessible form. Moreover, the very spontaneity and casualness of these writings might, at times, be an advantage. They reflect one's thought and, in the case of a critic, one's immediate reactions in the very process of formation and, as such, may acquire some value simply as a record of that process. Much of the material in this volume, for example, consists of footnotes, or second thoughts, or changes of mind, about subjects dealt with in my more deliberately composed books. To make these available is only fair to those readers who have treated the books themselves with sufficient respect to take what they said seriously. Inevitably the confrontation with so much of one's work that camc into being without deliberation as the by-product of one's natural working process also raises the fundamental question: Why should one be so concerned with the theatre, with drama at all ? Is it worth while in an age of great and tragic happenings to take so seriously what might well be reprded as a mere pastime, and a pastime of a dwindling minority at tiiat!