Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1993. [Vol. 1.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 21)
STUDIES - Péter Egri: From the British Grotesque To the American Absurd: the Dramatist's Dilemma
after a deflector hidden away in the Welsh mountains (and guarding the beacon well after the end of the war). His characteristic sinister-comic mode has subsequently been seen to advantage in such fantasies as Unman , Wittering and Zigo (1958), an obsessive tale of a teacher's persecution by his pupils; Part of the View, in which a Nigerian governess takes a roundabout revenge on her English employers for their condescension and ironically thereby saves their marriage; Before the Monday (1961), in which an innocent and a would-be suicide gradually change places; Without the Grail (1961), about mysterious happenings in the Assam hills, and The Return of General Forefinger, ; in which the desire of a general's widow to recover all the statues of her husband scattered round the world is met by a sculptor who secretly makes them himself. 4 4 Thus the tangible solidity of theme and the actable narrativity of plot witnessed in Cooper's Everything in the Garden can be viewed as the results of an accumulating experience and a tentative development achieved in a prolific though short career (1918—1966). By contrast, in Albee's case it is the plays of his early period written before his Americanized version of Everything in the Garden (The Zoo Story, The Death of Bessie Smith, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or A Delicate Balancé) which are characterized by a marked theme and a firm plot, and it is the later plays composed after Everything in the Garden (All Over, Listening, Counting the Ways or The Lady from Dubuque ) in which patterned variation and stylistic orchestration seem to carry more of the sense and significance of the drama than stating and developing a theme do. Hence is derived the importance of Cooper's Everything in the Garden for Albee: the Anglo-Irish playwright provided the American dramatist with a grotesque theme which was sufficiently compact and weighty to survive its own relativization in Albee's absurd treatment and to support its American 4 4 J. R. Taylor, Anger and After: A Guide to New British Drama (Harmondsworth, 1963), pp. 26—7. 45
