There was a time when it was possible to regret the failure of criticism to address American drama with true seriousness. There were exceptions, of course, but for the most part critics looked elsewhere, to the novel or to literary theory. Such peripheral vision is not something one will accuse Marc Robinson of. His book has a decidedly misleading title encouraging the reader to expect a survey of more than two hundred years of American plays. What is on offer is not that but a highly selective account in service of a central thesis, or rather a series of theses. There are close readings of individual works, some canonical, some decidedly not. For a book in part interested in absences there are surprising omissions if comprehensiveness were the objective. It is not. His book, he confesses, is a hybrid. At one moment the camera pulls back to take in the whole scene. At the next he is dissecting not just individual texts but individual words, stage directions which reveal a current not always flowing in the same direction as the play they serve.

Robinson is interested in the permeable membrane between the arts, which perhaps explains his emphasis, as the book proceeds, on modernism in its various guises. Thus Gertrude Stein emerges as a major figure, along with e. e. cummings, Djuna Barnes, Jane Bowles, Frank O'Hara. Some of these writers command the kind of attention they have seldom received in previous studies of the American theatre. The result is simultaneously refreshing and disturbing: as if a magnifying glass were suddenly and momentarily passed across a text. The insignificant suddenly gains significance, though whether that is a result of method rather than of judgement is not always clear. When the author deals with major texts he tends to see them slant. With Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, for example, he is interested in their use of clothes, what he takes to be their fascination with surfaces. To some degree, one suspects, plays are of interest in so far as they can be seen to serve his central ideas, but of whom is that not true?

The most significant moment in post-Second World War American drama thus becomes the production of Genet's The Blacks. After a series of articles after the 1961 premiere, he insists, ‘the ground gives way beneath the American theatre’. Nor is this simply a provocation, though I suspect provocation was part of the motive for this book as much as for this remark. Personally, I do not follow him down many of the paths he takes but I am intrigued to observe his journey and grateful to him for undertaking it.