Eric Bentley obituary

The first half of the life of Eric Bentley, who has died aged 103, constituted a classic success story for a migrant to the US from suburban Lancashire. He became a celebrated theatre critic, translator and academic, but then changed tack to creating rather than commentating.

Having gained a BLitt at Oxford, in 1939 he left for America, his Yale doctoral thesis (1941) providing the basis for a well-received book, A Century of Hero Worship: A Study of the Idea of Heroism in Carlyle and Nietzsche (1944).

In 1942 he started teaching at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, and met the exiled Bertolt Brecht in Los Angeles, seizing the chance to bring the dramatist’s work to the attention of the English-speaking world by translating and editing it for the Grove Press. His book The Playwright As Thinker (1946) mapped the peaks of modern drama, culminating in Brecht’s “epic theatre”, encouraging the spectator towards a critical perspective rather than emotional identification with the action.

The following year came Bentley’s study Bernard Shaw, which remains unique in cutting through Shaw’s dizzying prolixity to reveal his core values and blueprints for a better world. Its subject said it was the best book written about him.

Bentley became a naturalised US citizen in 1948, though returned to Europe to direct plays on a three-year Guggenheim fellowship. This included assisting Brecht with a production of Mother Courage and Her Children in Munich (1950). On his return to the US he started teaching at Columbia University, New York, in 1952, with a year at Harvard (1960-61) and in Berlin (1964-65).

The paperback revolution enabled Bentley to spread the word on European playwrights through a series of cheap, well-translated collections of classic and modern play texts. His theatre criticism in The New Republic (1952-56) proved so lively and contentious that it was promptly republished in hard covers and drew threats of legal action from such victims as Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams.

As a critic, Bentley picked up from where Shaw had left off in the 1890s. He stood for reason, fearless assertion, and for a theatre that adds something to the spectator’s life. His declarations often had a Shavian finality: “To say one was moved is not criticism. It is data for a fever chart.”

He took the adjectives out of criticism and replaced salesmanship with argument. Unlike Shaw, he reported widely on the international stage in books such as In Search of Theater (1953), and kept one eye on the rest of the world when reviewing the local scene. His disdain for entertainment theatre earned him enemies, but it set the bar for later critics on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Life of the Drama (1964) provided a re-examination of the basic theatrical elements – comedy, tragedy, melodrama and farce – which released a torrent of fresh insights from those supposedly familiar topics, and became widely regarded as his best book.

However, he then gave up criticism in favour of being a playwright himself. In 1969 he resigned his professorship at Columbia, separated from his wife and family, and came out as bisexual. But while he created the circumstances in which he felt he could be true to himself, professionally at least he had to abandon the framework in which he could flourish most easily.

Born in Bolton, now in Greater Manchester, Eric was the second son of Fred Bentley, who ran a furniture removal company, and Laura (nee Evelyn), a devout Baptist. From Bolton school, where he was a keen actor and pianist, he went to University College and then New College at Oxford University, where he studied English, and was taught by CS Lewis.

In his autobiographical postscript to The Brecht Memoir (1985), Bentley declared that his motive for emigrating to the US was to escape his engulfingly religious mother. This may also help to account for the importance of authority figures in his later life. He was prone to hero-worship, but, he once told me, incapable of political commitment.

In the words of one of his song lyrics: Take a look at the Hudson River / as it flows from Poughkeepsie to the sea. / Could you swim against that current? Never. / Who’d have a crack at it? Not me.

But, equally, much of his later work was prompted by a fascination with those who had the will to swim against the current. One monumental outcome was Thirty Years of Treason (1971), a 950-page compilation of the House Committee on Un-American Activities’ anti-communism hearings, which provided the basis for Are You Now or Have You Ever Been? (1972), by far the most performed of the plays he began writing in the 1960s.

While he gave up criticism to write plays, most of them were an extension of his critical life – reworkings of Heinrich von Kleist, Arthur Schnitzler and Carl Sternheim. His principle, he said, was to take on only texts he considered imperfect. He would not lay a finger on a masterpiece such as Kleist’s Der Prinz von Homburg, but felt free to take liberties with Das Kätchen von Heilbronn (The Little Girl from Heilbronn). Under the title of Wannsee, it was one of three plays published as The Kleist Variations (1990).

Not that these scruples cut much ice at the box office. When his plays were done it was by groups such as the New World Repertory Company and the Alleyway Theatre of Buffalo, which came together for a Bentley festival in Miami in 1992.

As a performer, Bentley launched himself with solo programmes from the European cabaret repertory, accompanying himself on the harmonium. Musically, he made a lasting contribution by publishing a collection of songs by Hanns Eisler, The Brecht-Eisler Song Book (1967), with recordings in the Smithsonian Folk Ways series, and so brought another committed artist, like Brecht a leading light of what had become communist East Germany, to the attention of a wider public.

Other stage work included Lord Alfred’s Lover (1979), an examination of Oscar Wilde in the light of Bentley’s own views on posing and commitment; and the co-founding of a political cabaret, the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone), which pointed to his immersion in Brecht and the Weimar Republic no less than its response to the Vietnam war.

Leaving Columbia did not mark a complete break with the university world. He returned to it as professor of theatre at the State University of New York, Buffalo (1974-82), and later taught at the University of Maryland, College Park.

His first marriage, to Maja Tschernjakow, ended in divorce. In 1953 he married Joanne Davis. They separated but did not divorce, and she survives him, along with their twin sons, Philip and Eric, and four grandchildren.

• Eric Bentley, critic, born 14 September 1916; died 5 August 2020