To the audience which has received Nightwood with admiration, Miss Barnes' long play in verse [The Antiphon] seems a strange concoction: in subject it is wholly modern, but in conception and execution no more modern than Maxwell Anderson's period pieces in verse.

The Antiphon is set in 1939 (during the war) in the English ancestral halls of the Burley family, and the exterior reminders of a world at war become a metaphor for the interior war within the characters as well as between the sexes and between generations. The play seems to owe a strong debt to W. B. Yeats' Purgatory in particular and to many of Yeats' other plays in general (e.g., The Player Queen). As in Purgatory, the scene of Barnes' play is a compelled if somewhat unwilling return to the ancestral home, the place where many of the difficulties of the present were begot. And...