[In the following review, Lapenta criticizes the inflated writing of Harrison's Square Rounds but admires the imaginative staging of the production.]

The dividing line between stimulating political theatre and self-indulgent preaching is a fine one. Poet/director Tony Harrison's new theatre piece Square Rounds totters precariously on this thin border, threatening at any moment to topple into pretentiousness. Driven by a simplistic anti-war theme with a form which sometimes resembles an informative lecture more than a play, Square Rounds is often repetitive and frustrating. But just when Harrison the playwright can be dismissed for his inflated sense of the piece's importance, Harrison the director rescues it with striking, imaginative staging.

The corruption of beneficial scientific developments into weapons of mass destruction is the subject of Square Rounds. Harrison's vehicle for this theme is several scientists and inventors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who generated humanitarian advances as well as World War I's most fearsome weapons. The principal characters represent these two warring factions. American Sir Hiriam Walker invented both his self-styled “pipe of peace,” a medicinal inhaler which provided temporary relief for people with damaged lungs （such as himself and workers at munitions factories）, and a “world standard” machine gun which he felt could “save many men from the grave by getting this war quickly won.” Opposing him is Fritz Haber, who developed a methane gas alarm for coal mines and the process of extracting nitrogen from the atmosphere for fertilizers. This nitrogen fixation process also permitted the development of TNT, and Haber himself used it to create the ultimate weapon of his time, poison gas. As with Walker, Haber's motivations are divided, and he, too, sees his achievements as a means to shorten the war. In general, the exposition is direct; the arguments, even with occasional ironic twists （Haber is told by the ghost of his wife that he will “never live to see his fellow Germans use his form of killing on his fellow Jews”）, are not subtle.

While the message is blunt and didactic, the theatrical style and devices which Harrison employs are much more engaging. To capture the near miraculous nature of scientific advances, he uses magic as a most appropriate production metaphor. Handkerchiefs that change color, magic wands, actors who disappear and suddenly reappear, instant costume changes, and a whole array of pyrotechnics are all utilized. The dramatic form is further theatricalized when Harrison has the Haber character, evidently an amateur poet, establish the conceit that all dialogue has to be performed in rhyming couplets or quatrains. While there is no logic to this “rule,” such artificiality does—along with the magic, music, and choreographic blocking—serve an important Brechtian alienation function. The overall style is reminiscent of Joan Littlewood's Oh, What A Lovely War, although that play's music hall format delivers a stronger antiwar message with its balance of humor and irony. Harrison and most of his performers （with the possible exception of Jenny Galloway who struts and cackles as the cigar-chomping Hudson Maxim, Hiriam's brother） don't seem to trust the artificial style and humor enough, often taking themselves far too seriously. When the piece loses its sense of humor, didacticism strikes with the deadening impact of a heavy sledge.

The large cast of twenty-one women and two men works as an ensemble, with women playing all of the scientists. Harrison's rationale for this cross-gender casting is unclear. While his choice does add to the theatricality, it also seems to send the message that women are as much to blame as men for the excesses of war. Adding to this perception is a program note which lists nineteen different military inventions patented by women in the years of World War I. Misogynistic blame-casting may well not be Harrison's point, but this reading can be derived from the production.

The frustrating and fascinating nature of Harrison's efforts is best summarized in the title of the piece. “Square Rounds” is used throughout the play with a variety of meanings. The first is when Sweeper Mawes, a “wheezing old geezer” who serves as a narrator, responds to Haber's challenge to speak in verse:

No Bosch defeats heirs of Byron and Keats
Shakespeare makes us all Prosperos
So square up for rounds of metrical sounds
How about that? That's not prose!

A second use occurs after the introduction of gas warfare, as Hudson Maxim cries:

The Hun's got gas devices, so my advice is we'd
better act quick and get ours!
If you poison their air then You'll be square but
make sure that you win the next round.

A third reference to “Square Rounds,” concerns the creation of ammunition for an early version of the machine gun patented in 1718. James Puckle developed two kinds of bullets: round, more “humane” bullets for use against Christian enemies, and the horribly destructive and painful square bullets （rounds） for use against the Turks.

Finally, this piece confronts the impossibility of making a square circle—a metaphor of the need to free scientific development from its darker consequences—which is, nevertheless, achieved through magic. Round metal hoops, like the sides of a spring-form cake pan, are suddenly flattened into squares; perhaps the impossible can be achieved! “Square Rounds” and its multi-faceted meanings are clever and interesting, but are the stuff of program notes rather than captivating theatre. At times Harrison rises above the pedantic and does engage his audience in an active political experience, but too often he is undone, like the characters in the play, by his own invention—one that turns back upon itself to destructive effect.