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| The Dramatic Review | |
|---|---|
| Title | The Dramatic Review |
| Founded | 1921 |
| Founder | Harold Bloomfield |
| Country | United States |
| Based | New York City |
| Language | English |
| Frequency | Monthly |
| Category | Theatre, Art, Criticism |
The Dramatic Review is a 20th-century periodical devoted to theatre criticism, playwriting, performance studies, and dramatic arts. Founded in the early 1920s in New York City, it became a central forum for reviews, essays, and debates connecting Broadway, regional theatre, and international stages. The magazine’s pages featured critical exchanges among critics, playwrights, directors, and actors, shaping mid-century discussions about realism, modernism, and avant-garde practice.
The periodical emerged amid post-World War I cultural ferment alongside publications like The New Republic, Harper's Magazine, The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, and Vanity Fair. Its founders, influenced by figures such as Eugene O'Neill, Bertolt Brecht, Konstantin Stanislavski, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Edward Gordon Craig, sought to bridge American, British, and continental debates. During the 1920s and 1930s the Review covered productions at venues including Broadway, The Old Vic, Moscow Art Theatre, Comédie-Française, and Bristol Old Vic, connecting transatlantic practices and debates over realism, symbolism, and expressionism. The magazine’s editorial line shifted through the Depression and wartime years, intersecting with figures linked to Federal Theatre Project, Works Progress Administration, Royal Shakespeare Company, Group Theatre (New York), and later postwar movements surrounding Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Harold Pinter, and Arthur Miller.
The Review was governed by an editorial board modeled on contemporaneous review journals such as The Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator, The Listener, New Statesman, and Partisan Review. Editors included critics associated with institutions like Columbia University, Yale School of Drama, Juilliard School, Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and museums such as Museum of Modern Art and Victoria and Albert Museum. Regular contributors encompassed playwrights, directors, historians, and theorists—names who appeared alongside T. S. Eliot, Harold Clurman, Kenneth Tynan, Graham Greene, W. H. Auden, Langston Hughes, and Susan Sontag—as well as practitioners like Lee Strasberg, Peter Brook, Elia Kazan, Lee J. Cobb, and Marta Graham. International correspondents reported from cities including London, Paris, Moscow, Berlin, Rome, Tokyo, and Sydney, often writing about festivals such as Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Avignon Festival, Cannes Film Festival (in relation to film-theatre crossover), and Venice Biennale.
The magazine published a mixture of reviews, long-form essays, play texts, production photographs, interviews, and manifestos. Prominent thematic threads included debates about realism versus anti-realism, techniques associated with Stanislavski and Brecht, staging innovations linked to Grotowski, Artaud, and Peter Brook, and discussions of adaptation from works by Shakespeare, Molière, Ibsen, Chekhov, and Sophocles. Other recurring topics were dramaturgy, actor training, scenography, and criticism of commercial trends on Broadway versus experimental work at venues like The Public Theater and La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. The Review engaged with cross-disciplinary intersections involving choreographers and composers such as Igor Stravinsky, Jerome Robbins, Merce Cunningham, and commentators on film and television including Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ingmar Bergman.
Published monthly from its New York offices, the Review circulated in North America, Europe, and parts of Asia and Australasia through subscription, bookstore sales, and institutional distribution to libraries and universities such as Harvard University, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, University of California, Berkeley, and The New School. Special issues were printed for major events—festival dossiers on Edinburgh Festival Fringe, retrospectives tied to the Royal Shakespeare Company, and commemorative editions for anniversaries of Eugene O'Neill and Anton Chekhov. The magazine maintained partnerships with cultural organizations including Lincoln Center, British Council, Alliance Française, and Goethe-Institut to broaden its international reportage and co-sponsor symposia.
Critics in rival outlets such as The New York Times, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and Daily Telegraph debated the Review’s positions, while academic reception in journals like Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, Comparative Drama, and PMLA acknowledged its role in shaping pedagogical curricula at conservatories and drama schools. The Review influenced programming at institutions like Guthrie Theater, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Royal Court Theatre, and inspired anthologies and textbooks used at Yale School of Drama and Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Playwrights and directors cited its reviews and essays in memoirs and collected letters alongside figures such as Arthur Miller and Tom Stoppard.
Controversial issues provoked strong responses: polemics over censorship and morality involving cases like The Lord Chamberlain's Office's historic licensing in Britain; debates about representation that referenced productions involving Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker, Augusto Boal, and works about colonialism (coverage intersecting with anti-colonial movements and critiques related to Kwame Nkrumah and Frantz Fanon); and disputes over commercialism on Broadway versus subsidized theatre tied to policy debates in bodies such as National Endowment for the Arts and Arts Council England. Editorial decisions—such as republication of manifestos by Bertolt Brecht or staging polemic interviews with Jean-Paul Sartre—occasionally led to libel claims, protests at preview nights, and heated exchanges with theaters like The Old Vic and companies like Group Theatre (New York).
Category:Theatre magazines