This is a book which readers are likely to find either intriguingly enigmatic or irritating – perhaps at times both. Confessedly ‘unconventional in length, shape and content’, it consists of ten short pieces containing reflections on a number of topics and texts held together by force of rhetoric rather than by natural or logical association.

On Drama is an interesting book, written by an intelligent, imaginative and persuasive reader of drama, which offers sensitive and perceptive comments on a number of dramatic texts, including principally Euripides’ Bacchae, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Samuel Beckett’s Ohio Impromptu and Peter Handke’s The Ride across Lake Constance. It also offers an overarching argument about the nature and function of drama as a field in which the intrapersonal may become transpersonally recognizable. In constructing this argument Goldman establishes several clear points of reference – most importantly, the concept of ‘flow’, borrowed from Victor Turner and Emanuel Lévinas’ concept of the pre-linguistic ‘infinity’ implied by the human face (Totality and Infinity, 1969,202). Drama, in the view given here, is essentially about recognition and identification, about negotiating consciousness of the fragile inescapability of self and community.

The view is at times compelling, but its self conscious unconventionality collapses too often into eccentricity. Goldman’s method of procedure is through rhetorical elision rather than rational articulation. Passages from Nietzsche and Wittgenstein float to the surface of the text, acquiring arbitrary values, isolated from their original contexts. Concepts like recognitions, revelation, identification, slide into relationships which are never articulated. The treatment of idea of genre itself, the starting point of the reflections incorporated in the book, exemplifies the author’s method. In effect a stalking horse for a consideration of drama in general, by virtue of the fact that it involves recognition, genre becomes a point of entry into a circular process of association: genre involves recognition, so does acting, so does theatre – identification is the basis of acting – identification and revelation in theatre lead us to recognize the fragility of self, just as the apparent exclusiveness of genre in practice heightens our awareness of the fragility of categorisations – genre, in fact, may be a face, making possible painful mutualities of the personal and the communal.

In the final analysis this seems to be a book addressed as much by the author to himself as to any academic audience. It consists, he admits, in an attempt to compensate for a certain imbalance in his previous work, between the intimate experience of the individual reader/spectator and the public inflection of theatrical experience. That in itself, however, might well be taken as indicating the most fundamental elision involved in the author’s method – that between drama and theatre. One is never clear anywhere in On Drama which of those concepts is actually in play from moment to moment – or whether what is being negotiated is the existential experience of the isolated reader or the communal awareness involved in social play.