'In dreams begins responsibility,' used by Yeats as the epigraph to his 1914 volume, could stand also at the head of all Dannie Abse's published plays. From the first performance of House of Cowards in 1960 to that of Gone in January in 1977, their dramatic images have been concerned with the making of choices and with the recognition of moral imperatives. Though differing considerably in setting, technique and achievement, the plays are obviously linked, obviously the products of the same imagination.

These plays are aloof from the main currents moving through English theatre in the sixties and seventies, which in itself awakens sympathetic curiosity. If they have an affinity to anything outside themselves it is perhaps to the radio play, that underestimated form in which reliance upon language is often virtually complete. That is not to say that Abse's plays lack theatricality, as we shall see, but it is an indication of how much his language achieves in this context. A reader of his poetry will know that Dannie Abse has an ear for the rhythms of the speaking voice, and this link between his poetry and his plays is at once evident. The people who inhabit these dramas, whatever their status as characters, whatever the nature of their interests, are people whose lines are eminently speakable. They are, to that extent, convincing. (p. 85)

Pythagoras gives us the parodox of the sanity of the insane with a lightness of touch and a poise which guard it from accusations of speciousness. There is an obvious controlling intelligence in command of the play, avoiding any heavy polemicising from a too-simple stance, and fragmenting the humdrum into glittering fragments and surreal episodes. Pythagoras, the central figure, is both patient and healer, both subject and ruler, both mental case and magician. In his person he closes the dichotomies. Compared with others around him he has an enviable wholeness, or at least is aware of and striving for such wholeness. Presenting himself as a reincarnation of the Greek philosopher, he claims a status between mortal and divine. In the reality of the hospital he is a second-rate stage magician with delusions, but this level of reality is continually brought into question. His magic works, and though rational explanations are readily available, there is always the possibility, the subtly induced hope, that he really has access to dark and pristine powers.

The dramatic form triumphs here; the audience which lives and must live in scientific reality, aligned with the superintendent, is prevailed upon to want more, to wish to believe in the dimension inhabited by Pythagoras. To court irrationality is dangerous; it is to tread the edge of the abyss. Yet the abyss itself—'we are all dreaming of the abyss'—is made to seem something that must be braved, a necessary reminder of the incompleteness of rationality. Just as In the Cage touched explicitly on the possibility of evil, so Pythagoras will not allow a one-dimensional view of humanity but trails the possibility of magic as an enticement to follow and explore. (p. 94)

In this play also there are two finely managed set-pieces, the demonstration to students and the patients' concert, in which the rational and the irrational confront each other in a highly dramatic way, with thunder and lightning, collapses, coincidences, climaxes and anti-climaxes. There is always a 'normal' explanation available, but the stagecraft ensures that this would be a disappointment in theatrical terms, and the other dimension of magic and darkness becomes something we feel, as an audience, that we need. When the play ends, Pythagoras has reverted to simply Tony Smith, shorn of his powers and his mystery. Yet, as was the case with Mr Nott, the ambiguity is still there. For Mr Nott there is always tomorrow at the Sunshine Hall, for Pythagoras, the possibility that he can cause telephones to ring by pointing at them. The telephone bell is the last image of the play. Tony Smith is shaken—'I'll be all right in a sec.' The audience, like him, needs time to adjust. After a play so dense with suggestion, with echoes of Eliot in its language and wild improbabilities in its staging, the central enigma remains an enigma. Outside the theatre, rationality must remain sovereign, and coincidence must explain all; but within the world of the play we hope for something other, and welcome a power that seems to subvert the authority of the orthodox.

The conventions of the more ordinary kind of radio play, like those seen in House of Cowards with its near-cliché characters and non-specificity, have disappeared by the time we reach the later plays. But some of the characteristics of the best radio dramas remain, and Pythagoras had an especially fine production on Radio 3. Something of the play's visual impact was preserved, or rather transformed into aural terms, by the realisable context which was established as the broadcast progressed. The wild reminiscences of the patients, the jargon of the doctors and the bewildering fluency of Pythagoras intermingled in the sound equivalent of a light-show. And out of this swam the big questions.

There is … considerable variety amongst these [Abse's] plays. Their settings and situations range from the somewhat contrived to a sui generis inevitability, the characters from people we have met before in dramas to those who stand foursquare in their own being. In all the plays, though, in the characters, the action and the tone of the dialogue, there is a clear engagement with certain moral preoccupations; with the extent to which people are, or must be, aware of one another and therefore of obligations to one another; with a need, amounting to a duty, to reconcile the scientific attitude with the artist's vision; with the making of properly informed choices—informed, that is, with sympathy and understanding. In Dannie Abse's theatre, to be fully human is a responsible task. (pp. 95-6)