Peter Brook by Albert Hunt and Geoffrey Reeves (review)

722 Book Reviews "addenda" which places them in their classical categories, something the "accomplished rhetorician" omitted to do (though he would surely have known, when declaiming, for instance, "Personally of course I regret all. All, all, ali," that he was indulging in "anadipiosis, with epizeuxis"), Contributors weave some elaborate thought patterns of their own around Beckett's texts with a confidence such as Wanda Balzano shows in "remythologising" How It Is. She is refreshingly candid about the arbitrary element in the process: "Voice and writing (or, let me say, Echo and Narcissus)." Most of the writers aim to enter what Eliza- -beth Klaver calls Beckett's "postrnodem space," Indetenninacy reigns there, though as David J. Gordon points out, even Beckettians can only tolerate a certain amount of it when the question "what text?" arises. He gives a masterly account both of the general issue - the concept of "authority" in texts - and of the special problems posed by Beckett's bilingualism and his revisions. Indeterminacy of another kind dominates discussion of gender identity, a recurring theme. Leslie Hill ingeniously erodes the femininity of W in Rockaby to the point where the play becomes a piece of "savage deanthropomorphisation ." Not a view likely to appeal to Hersh Zeifman, whose study of "closure" in the late plays opens with a tribute to Billie Whitelaw as W (undeniably feminine) and an evocation of his dying grandmother, a poignant personal note in a volume more given to the impersonal. Feeling within the oeuvre itself receives attention from, among others, Frank Matton , in a subtle study of the conscious interplay of autobiography and fiction in the trilogy , and Mary Bryden who focuses on Beckeu's use of music to refine crude sexual stereotypes and to penetrate reserve (as when Murphy contemplates Celia in romantic terms of "serenade, nocturne, albada). Music figures again when Johanneke Van Siooten pursues the Irish rhythm in Beckett's "polyphony": her essay undermines itself by covering too much ground and failing to distinguish between the well-trodden and the new, but it has lively sequences - on the Irish ballads and the strange Irish step dance, for instance - which make one wish for more along that line. Unifying threads run through the diverse mass. Robert Scanlan's ardent defence of the "purist" approach to directing Beckett's plays receives surprise backing from Mariko Hori Tanaka's fascinating account of their production history in Japan, the country where, as she says, Beckett's eye did not reach. Audacious freedoms have been taken there, at first to make the plays more comprehensible, but now, she suggests , simply 10 entertain. Her plea for more rigour echoes Scanlan's and strikes what might be called the p'rcvailing note of an interestingly varied collection. KATHARINE WORTH, ROYAL HOLLOWAY and KING'S COLLEGE, LONDON ALBERT HUNT and GEOFFREY REEVES. Peter'Brook. Directors in Perspective. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. 288, illustrated. $59·95; $17.95 (PR). Peter Brook's activity in theatre now spans over fifty years. We have his own two Book Reviews books, a "theatrical casebook," an account of perfonnances while travelling across West Africa, and at least three studies of particular productions (A Midsummer Night's Dream, Orghast, The Mahabharata). No overview of his work, however, has been attempted since that by J.e. Trewin twenty-five years ago. I had hoped that Hunt and Reeves would provide this. They divide Brook's career, rightly, into three phases: 1946-63, largely in the commercial field; 1964- 70, with the big subsidized companies; and 1970 on, through his Centre International de Crealions Theatrales in Paris. The authors give careful descriptions of shows ranging from the strangeness of The Ik to the mainstream of the 1978 Antony and Cleopatra, with reports of rehearsal methods for a few works, such as the National Theatre Oedipus (these records are full for the years 1966-71, when Reeves was an eyewitness). They argue forcefully that Brook imposed his own meaning on his 1963 Paris Serjeant Musgrave 's Dance. Orghast"':' with its language invented by Ted Hughes, lasting all night in a quarry - continues to sound pretentious. The study sometimes disappoints. The early years arc treated sketchily: the 1946 Love...