The Vital Lie

Reality and Illusion in Modern Darama

The Vital Lie explores reality and illusion as a central theme in modern drama from Ibsen to the present. Taking its point of departure from Dr. Relling's use of the term in Ibsen's The Wild Duck, the book asks why vital lies, lies necessary for life itself, are such an obessive concern for playwrights of the last hundred years. Do modern playwrights treat illusions as helpful or necessary to life? Or do they see illusions as dangerous, as sicknessess from which human beings need to be cured? What happens to characters when they are forced to face the truth about themselves and their worlds without the help of illusions? Is God ultimate truth, or the ultimate illusion? What about the theater itself as a form of illusion? Do playwrights try to force audiences to remember that plays themselves and the acting out of roles may be just another form of game playing?

The Vital Lie examines these questions with a three-part historical analysis. Part One, "The Hegelians," looks at Ibsen, Strindberg, Checkhov, Shaw, and Synge, playwrights whose work was largely completed before World War I, as believers in the possiblity that human beings beings can break through to a deeper sense of reality underneath the social institutions and customs that pass for truth in their worlds. Part Two, "Lost and Found," discusses Pirandello, Brecht, Eliot, O'Neill, Miller and Williams, writers whose major work was done between 1914 and 1950, whose protagonists are smaller and more helpless figures than those of the first group. These "fog people," as O'Neill calls them, seem more dependent on vital lies than their larger predecessors. Among them only Eliot's 'saints" seem able to face life without the comfort of illusions. The final section, "Absurdism and After," considers Beckett, Ionesco, Albee, Pinter, Genet, Weiss, and Handke, who remind us that the terms reality and illusion must themselves be continually redefined and that the theater itself is part of the process. What began in Ibsen as a metaphysical search ends in Pinter and Genet as an elaborate theatrical game.

The Vital Lie is the first book to examine the reality-illusion conflict in modern drama from Isben to present-day playwrights. The book asks why vital lies are such an obessive concern for playwrights of the last hundred years. The author develops a three-part historical analysis of the use of the reality-illusion theme, from its origins as a metaphysical search to its current elaborations as a threatical game.

"The Vital Lie is the most thought-provoking sustained discussion of the illusion and reality theme in the modern drama that I've entountered."

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