Conversations With (and About) Beckett by Mel Gussow (review)

720 Book Reviews This book provides a useful introduction to theater in Israel and will, no doubt, achieve its editor's purpose of introducing the foreign reader into what has up .to now been largely hidden from his view by linguistic and cultural barriers. HANNA SCOLNICOV, TEL-AVIV UNIVERSITY MEL GUSSOw. Conversations With (and About) Beckett. London: Nick Hem Books 1996. Pp. 192. £ 13·99· Mel Gussow's book, Conversations With (and About) Beckett, is a refreshing treatment of Samuel Beckett' s life and work. A longtime drama critic for the New York Times, a writer for Newsweek Magazine, and a past-president of the New York Drama Critics Circle, Gussow approaches his subject from a journalistic perspective. This book is not a scholarly treatise on Beckert, although it does have many insightful interpretations useful to the expert, but the chronicle of a writer who has spent more than thirly years attending and reviewing Beckett's theater and more than a decade visiting the playwright at the Cafe Fran~ai s in Paris. Apart from its interest to the general theatergoer, I think this book would be useful as a text in an undergraduate course on Beckett. As the title indicates, Gussow's book contains conversations, not interviews, with Beckett, which run from 1978 to just before Beckett's death in 1989. It also includes interviews with actors and directors who were closely associated with Beckett's work, as well as Beckett's New York Times obituary which was wrinen by Gussow, and a selection of Gussow's reviews, which appeared from the years 1969 to 1995 and cover virtually all of Beckett'S plays. In the Introduction, Gussow begins with a brief description of Beckett's early career as a playwright (a topic he brings up to date in the obiluary), his own introduction to Waiting for Godot in the 1950S, and his subsequent meetings with the playwright. Although Gussow warns that Beckett was always reluctant to discuss his work, especially the writing process or interpretations, the conversations reveal that Beckert was willing to talk about productions, actors and directors, and the theater itself. Beckett refers to the problem of women playing male roles in Krapp's Last Tape, Waiting for Godot, and Endgame, and in the chapter, "Directing is an excuse not to write," describes his own experience of directing Billie Whitelaw in Happy Days. The conver· sations indicale that Beckett had a wide variety of interests, especially in sports which he watched av idly on television. It is nice to discover thaI Becken lived in the world and not in a box. One of the most interesting parts of the book is the section which includes interviews with Billie Whitelaw, Mike Nichols, and Deborah Warner. Each represents a different approach to dirccting or acting in.Beckett's plays. The most faithful to Ihe text and playwright, Whitelaw describes being directed or coached by Beckctt in Play, Footfalls. and Not I . Nichols defends his departures from the text in the 1988 New York production of Godot as an attempt by American aclors to present the playwright's Book Reviews 721 ideas (96). And Warner. the least faithful to the text. discusses her controversial 1994 production of Footfalls. which the Beckett estate closed down. An interview with Edward Beckett, nephew and executor to the playwright, ends the section by giving the estate's point of view on the viewing issue of how to play Becke.lt after his death. Interestingly, in his review of the Mabou Mines' stage adaptations of Beckett's prose, Gussow points to a reasonas to why Beckett, and now the estate. was so sharply critical of departures from the te.xts of the plays. Gussow claims that the most successful adaptations permitted by Beckett are those that discover a strong visual image such as the narrator standing knee-deep in his grave in Frederick Neumann's perfonnance of Worsrward Ho. Such vivid visual imagery corresponds to the rocking chair in Rockaby and the corona of while hair in That Time (164). Is it the case that to Beckett changing the visual semiotics of the scene, as Nichols and Warner did, would have the same damaging...