Presences—the achieved works, the "intensely concrete, intensely exhibitional" plays, as James prophesied them to be—are by no means the masterpiece of Taylor's long and still-looming career. They are too ready to settle for indication ("Louis and Janet enter … both are fashionably dressed"), when it was—and is—Taylor's genius to enact precisely the rituals of dressing and of fashion otherwise. Those rituals, perhaps correctly elided here, have not been replaced…. Taylor is working out for himself, and for us, what had been merely implicit in his stories; and in the presentation of his presences he is a little intimidated by his trouvaille, by the ease of his own certainty about these people, and he forgoes that strangeness, that heightening (by ceremony, poetry, organized violence) which we thirst for. (pp. 45-6)

The presences in Peter Taylor's theatre are, certainly, the missing parts of the context from which...