Beckett in performance by Jonathan Kalb (review)

Book Reviews 58r But before Wright can trace Brecht's post-modem trajectory and legacy, she delineates his place in critical modernity. The book's fine fourth chapter, "Placing the theory: Brecht and Modernity," explicates the Brecht-Lukacs dispute, the Brecht-Benjamin partnership, and the case of Adorno against Brecht. Wright concludes: Both Brecht and Benjamin were theoretically right in believing that the new technology would radically alter the production and reception of art, but they were over optimistic in hoping for the desired political effect. ." It was Adorno and Lukacs who proved to be historically right: technology increased rather than decreased art's vulnerability to commidification. In shon, "technology turned culture into kitsch." Along with Jean-Franr;ois Lyotard, Wright believes that "a work can become modem only if it is first postmodern." She explores the aesthetics ofearly Brecht in Baal and In The Jungle of the Cities and finds the "unrepresentable" as well as the " unsayable" theatricalized with even greater spectator complicity, for the "pressure is put on the audience to co-produce.'~ Such post-modern Brechtian presentations without representational significance eventually pave the way for the "phenomenon called performance; a theatre of shocks calling upon a new kind of spectator." In performance art, Wright uncovers Brecht's techniques used more radically than they are in his own plays. "The Brechtian Postmodem," the book's last chapter, examines the re-functioning of the Brechtian theatre through performances of recent work by Pina Bausch, Heiner Muller, and Robert Wilson. Here, of course, dialogue yields to discourse in a nonrepresentational theatre where "speech competes with music. sound effects, sets, props, lights, mime, mask, and costume." Wright ordains Muller the obvious successor to Brecht since Muller's Mauser, "a deconstruction of Brecht's The Measures Taken," goes further than most performances and recognizes the "terroristic nature of the revolutionary position." Wright also realizes that "where Brechtthought he was teaching the teachable, MUller teaches of the unteachable, getting the spectator to confront the uncompromising nature of contingency in history and the body....Furthermore. Wright suggests that post-modernism's greatest contribution resides in "the come-back of illusion.... and the only hope lies in having illusions that are replaceable, exchangeable. and adaptable." Once again. yet more fashionably this time, pipe dreams iiber alles. EILEEN FISCHER, NEW YORK CITY TECHNICAL COLLEGE OF CUNY JONATHAN KALB. Beckett in peiformallce. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989. pp.277. illustrated. $34.50. This interesting and very readable book begins from the premise that Beckett's plays can be profitably studied by examining performance rather than text fIrst. Citing the "dozens 582 Book Reviews of exceptional Beckett perfonnances within the past twenty·five years." Kalb addresses basic dramaturgical (in contradistinction to literary) questions: what effects do Beckett plays produce in the audience, and how are these effects created by actors and directors? Since Beckett was so vigorously opposed to directorial licence, and so adamant about his instructions for staging. these are great questions indeed, made all the greater by Beckett's recent death. The actors and directors who had been so dependent on and deeply allegiant to Beckett's help in production (Schneider, Whitelaw, and Warrilow, for examples) had advantages in achieving purist perfonnances faithful to the author's intention which no other actors and directors ever will. Thus Kalb's book, bolstered by (unrecorded) conversations with Beckett, may provide a unique contribution to theatre history as well as to our understanding of the plays. As Kalb inquires into whether there are great Beckett practitioners, and, if so, how their techniques differ from those ofother great actors and directors, he investigates vivid questions, and his answers are based, in part, on extensive conversations with those most intimately and famously connected to Beckett's work, as well as on his own assessment of productions (he teUs us he has seen "some seventy productions ... both live and on video, between 1978 and 1987"). He treats individual performances "with a critical seriousness [and close reading] usually reserved for texts." Since video-taping may now preserve performance, the problem of the "ephemerality of the theatre event" is obviated. This last assumption, that video recording provides an adequate theatrical experience to judge by...