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310 BOOK REVIEWS sion where properties assume their own dimensions. Blin explains that '~in Japanese theatre a small piece fifty centimetres high can represent a small mountain" (p. 31), and that the spectator will believe that he is actually looking at a mountain . Jorge Lavelli, in his famous mise en scene of The Council ofLove, speaks of mixing on the stage actors and musicians so that you cannot tell one from the other. A smaller group of writers in this volume is interested in exploring social problems. Georges Michel claims Sartre as his literary ancestor, as well as Jean Jacques Rousseau and Flaubert. In his play, Aggression, Georges Michel tried to dramatize the way "one group manipulates another" (p. 228). He would like to transform what he calls "the actor-play" into a single unit of consciousness. Gabriel Cousin dreams of contributing to "the destruction of man's alienation" (p. 240). Cousin sees the function of the dramatist as tied to the search for new heroes , those who embody the ideals of life today. Armand Gatti rejects dreams for the greater intensity of reality. He claims: "The object, the thing, the workaday world act as a stimulant to me. I believe in poetry but not the dream" (p. 208). Absurdist or political plays, poetic dream images, stage rituals, the modern drama is a quest for a deeper and wider investigation of man's potential. The "off-stage voices" echo and re-echo, contradict one another, rise and fall, confess in a whisper, or clamor for attention. How can we forget that Genet told his director Blin that The Screens is "an homage to death through beauty" (p. 40), or Vauthier's summary of the trajectory of his entire life since he first wrote The Character Against Himself: At that time I still had some family left, a house in which my paralyzed brother lived, a garden, my dog, an old servant. Many years had been lost, but pathetically so, in a kind of glory .... I no longer possess what upheld me at the time: the places of martyrdom no longer exist for me, the lair and the love, the great mass of difficulties. My mother is dead. My brother also ... the servant ... the dog ... (pp. 118-119). Beyond analysis, aesthetic theory, the interviewer has captured the inner voice sketching the destiny of one man, the condition of mankind. This is a book to study, to teach from, to savor in solitude. ROSETTE C. LAMONT City University of New York BECKETT AND BROADCASTING: A STUDY OF THE WORKS OF SAMUEL BECKETT FOR AND IN RADIO AND TELEVISION by Clas Zilliacus. (Acta Academiae Aboensis, Ser. A, Vol. 51, no. 2) Abo: Abo Akademi, 1976.223 pp. Frk 40. Samuel Beckett considers fiction his main work. He has called his drama "a relaxation" and his radio plays "very minor affairs." On these minor affairs Clas Zilliacus has written a major work of Beckett scholarship. Despite the lengthy, painstakingly accurate subtitle "A Study of the Works of Samuel Beckett for and in Radio and Television," Zilliacus delves most deeply into the work designed for broadcast and actually broadcast (in several languages) - four radio plays and a single television play. This work is analyzed in the context of Beckett's oeuvre, as is mandatory. This work is analyzed also in BOOK REVIEWS 311 the context of the medium for which it was intended. More consistently and scrupulously than any previous critic, Zilliacus traces the manuscript stages of each play in order to elucidate the final creation. But the book never degenerates into literary scholarship. Like the author he studies, Zilliacus is always aware that the plays are directed at listener or viewer, and only obliquely at reader. ZiIIiacus accords lengthiest attention to AII That Fall, Beckett's first radio play and one of his first returns to the English language after some ten years of composition in French. "The incidents written into the play serve as staves for a threnody on the theme of decay and meaningless death" - This is the fine description by ZiIIiacus. Like other critics, he analyzes the physical itinerary of Maddy Rooney, the aural modes of motion, the biblical references, the...

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