The Evolving Comedy

In the preface Anday candidly explains how the book came about: the critic Memet Fuat urged him to gather his scattered writings on theatre into one volume. Anday openly calls it «a simple book» and admits intellectuals will find nothing new here — his audience is young people newly in love with the stage who «keep searching for books». He closes with a bigger ambition: a full history of theatre grounded in sources and strong contemporary interpretation. This modest framing matters for judging the book fairly: it is not a textbook but a poet's reading list.

The first section is the strongest. In Socrates' dialogue with Adeimantus, Plato divides poetry into «simple narration», «imitation» and a mixture of both, then demands that tragedy and comedy be banished from the ideal state because they feed our «weakest part» — the urge to weep and to laugh. Anday's commentary comes alive here: he argues that Plato's division remains indispensable for explaining the «epic theatre» everyone in 1960s Turkey was talking about, and that the split between «good» and «bad» imitation props up modern writers who ask art only for «positive heroes». His sharpest point is an irony: Plato condemns imitation yet writes his own philosophy by making characters speak — that is, through imitation.

Next come selections from Aristotle's Poetics: the arts of imitation distinguished by medium, object and manner, the parts of tragedy, the thesis that «plot is the soul of tragedy». Anday sets these against Plato's stance and stresses that the clash of the two thinkers yields «progressive conclusions». Then Francis Fergusson's essay — translated by Anday himself — shows the difference between «action» and «plot» through Oedipus the King: the play's action is «to find the killer of Laius», and Sophocles builds events, characters and language around that search. The mention of the Moscow Art Theatre's rule — sum up each role's action in a single sentence — is especially useful for anyone interested in acting.

Introducing the comedy section, Anday names the book's main thread: in Plato, comedy had «no respectable place at all», and Molière and Gogol lived with the same «sorrow of disrepute». After the excerpt from The Critique of The School for Wives, Anday boils Molière's view of comedy down to seven points: there is no special seat in the theatre for thinking correctly, the taste of the pit matters, and comedy is not easier than tragedy but harder, because it must depict living people. His short note on Gogol adds a telling detail: the actor Shchepkin refused to perform the first supplement because he saw the officials of The Government Inspector not as «symbols of the vices within us», as Gogol now claimed, but simply as crooked bureaucrats.

The book ends with Wylie Sypher's essay «Our Sense of Comedy», genuinely the most modern text here. Sypher argues that nineteenth-century theorists like Bergson and Meredith confined comedy to «the drawing room», whereas after the bombs, camps and «big lies» of the twentieth century the comic and the tragic can no longer be kept apart. Kafka becomes a modern Jeremiah writing «terrible comedies of manners», and the figures of Klee and Giacometti portray the laughable suffering of modern man. Placing this theory of the comic-tragic crossover last gives the whole selection a clear direction.

The weaknesses are plain. Anday's own text runs to about ten pages, and the commentaries often just summarise the excerpts. The translations are full of dated terms, the excerpts are abridged, and translators and source editions are not always named. Still, drawing a line from Plato to Kafka in 96 pages is no small feat.

• Abridged excerpts from classic texts, each followed by the author's summary
• Three thematic sections: ancient debate, tragedy to drama, comedy
• Some essays translated by Anday himself (signed M.C.A.)