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Book Reviews 291 vided renewed stimuli for scholarship and for the theatre worldwide. The internationalism and the variety are impressive. And yet: what we still need, dismally, are the texts themselves, and the freedom not just to talk about but to work with the texts we have. The year 1998 saw the completion of a much fuller thirty-volume Gennan edition of Brecht's works, with many new fragments and new insights. We urgently need a fuller English edition too. But here the interests of publishers, and above all of the heirs, stand in the way. As Simon McBurney of Theatre de Complicite observes in drive b: , "Brecht can live in a number of different fonns and can be done in a multitude of different ways. When the copyright laws are over, Brecht will return to the theater more strongly than he has done since his death." That must be the message: down with bourgeois intellectual property rights, up with Brecht! TOM KUHN, ST HUG H 'S CO LLEGE , OXFO RD JONATHAN KALB. The Theater of Heiner Muller. Cambridge and New York: Cambridgc University Press [998. Pp. 255, illustrated. $59.95. Until now, there has not been a comprehensive study of the Gennan playwright Heiner MUller available in English, though for more than twenty years MUller has been acknowledged as the most eminent playwright in his language since Brecht. Now we have Jonathan Kalb's book. It represents the result of more than ten years of research that encompassed the viewing of numerous productions of Milller's plays, a thorough study of the substantial body of critical writing on his work and of the political/cultural history of post- World War II Gennany, and -last but not least - Kalb's on-site observations during the final period of the now defunct East Gennan republic. The book is inspired by the author's high esteem for MUller and his work. Yet, at times it reads like the complaint of a disenchanted admirer. The ambiguous views Jonathan Kalb professes to hold of MUlier's life and writings have led him to noteworthy insights, but also to myopic misreadings and implausible conclusions. The guiding principle of his inquiry is the hypothesis that MUller invariably elected the persona of other writers to use them as masks or to inhabit them, vampire-like. Kalb analyzes thirteen plays and assigns to each a "mask" of another author, in chapters on MUller as Shakespeare, von Kleist, Wagner, Mayakovski, Artaud, Brecht, and Genet. The mask he examines last is Beckett's, presumably assumed by MUlier in his text Description of a Picture . (An intriguing if farfetched claim: there isn't the space here to debate it.) Kalb is well known for his scholarly work on Bcckett, and in concluding the chapter he states: "The author ... seems to have set himself the challenge of building on Beckett without being seduced by his humanism." He suggests here, as elsewhere in the book, that MUller's ethics - or what Kalb perceives BOOK REVIEWS as them - were flawed and thus failed to live up to a paradigm of integrity that Beckett established. In an apt summation, Kalb ends with a chapter on "MUlier as Proteus," which explores the strikingly different interpretations the author discovered in nine productions of Quartet, a play about the assumption of masks and the inhabitation/exploitation of others. It is there that Kalb is at his best: His incisive analysis of performance, teasing out the details of acting and directorial choices, captures the essence of each of these productions. Whenever the author attempts to second-guess what motivated MUlier in making particular artistic choices, readers unfamiliar with the events that shaped cultural and political life in post-World War" Germany will easily arrive at erroneous conclusions. Kalb seems guided by a perception that the divided Gennany he visited before and during reunification was more or less still representative of the country's society and culture throughout the long years of the Cold War. His deductions often betray a lack of historical awareness that is unfortunately quite pervasive in academic theatre studies. Mtil1er's writings responded in intricate fashion to the twists and turns of history, at least as...

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