Eastern European Theater after the Iron Curtain ed. by Kalina Stefanova (review)

116 REVIEWS ous facets of the "life journey": one relates the playwright's preoccupation with forgetting to the focus on its counterpart in remembrance, an obsession that is quite remarkable, I would add, insofar as Beckett himself had an extraordinarily visual memory. I could not help but wonder, though, why Worth, and others before her, have not considered the reasons for this anomaly . (Indeed, its lack of investigation led me, most recently, to devote a long essay to this very question.) Another chapter explores the intertextuality, both verbal and visual allusions, endemic to Beckett's play with "the common stock," the "sharing" of words that is uniquely Beckettian in its underlying emphasis on camaraderie. In yet another, the rhythms of Yeats, Synge, and O'Casey, on the one hand, and of music, on the other, are as resonant as the "magnetic" draw of Beckett's work (for actors, directors, painters, and others) is shown to be in the chapter that follows. The final chapter is aptly named: "Company" deals at once with relationships - the movement away from the solitary dimension of the journey through life - and the adaptation of Beckett 's novella to the stage. Here, a number of considerations come into play, from the fundamental question of whether or not the text should be brought to the stage to matters of production (Worth's own and others) on both stage and screen. Worth's critical journey is thus complete when the "material reality" of Beckett's biographical oeuvre is exposed and the imaginary journey into which it is woven extends beyond the horizon of the individual to the universality of life's journey itself. KALINA STEFANOVA, ed. Eastern European Theater after the Iron Curtain. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Press, 2000. Pp. 267, illus. $52.00 (Hb); $27.00 (Pb). Reviewed by Michal Kobialka, University ofMinnesota A quick perusal of recent book catalogues unequivocally indicates that the number of publications on Eastern European theatre is steadily growing. Noteworthy is that these books often carry a promise of expanding one's knowledge of the theatre in Eastern Europe above and beyond the names of Liviu Ciulei, Oleg Efremov, Jerzy Grotowski, Yaelav Havel, Tadeusz Kantor, Yury Lyubirnov, Eimuntas Nekrosius, and Andrei Serban - theatre artists whose work has been seen or staged in the West. Understandably, a book with an effective title like Eastem European Theater after the Iron Curtain and the dedication "To the theatre-makers of Eastern Europe who work under very difficult economic conditions and still work wonders" led me to believe that it would address some of the issues that have been glossed over in the euphoria that accompanied the fall of the Berlin Wall in October 1989. Kalina Stefanova, the editor of the volume, defines the scope Reviews 11 7 and nature of the book in the opening line of the acknowledgments: "This book was conceived in Chicago, one OC lober evening in 1994, at a Young Critics Scminar of the [nternational Association of Theater Critics. Representatives from six Eastern European coumries were in attendance. [... J I suggested [...J that we should create a book not only about theater criticism but about the whole theatrical process in Eastern Europe following the lifting of the [ron Curtain" (n. pag.). Indeed, the primary focus of the volume is a "theatrical process" in Eastern Europe, as represented here by Albania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldavia, Poland, Romania, the Russian Republic, Slovenia, and Ukraine. Whereas information about theatres in some of these countries is easily available in the West, one of the salient contributions of this book is an inclusion of essays that deal with. for example, Albanian, Moldavian, and Ukrainian theatres. The essays are primarily written by theatre/drama critics who have firsthand experience of the theatre in a given country. They are proceeded by forewords by what could be referred to as notable people whose names might be recognizable in the West: Vaclav Havel, Arpad Goncz, Eimuntas Nekrosius, Andrei Serban, Yury Lyubimov, and Les Tanyuk, for example. It is difficult to escape the feeling that these forewords provide legitimacy to the essays - a feeling that is even stronger after having read a one-and-a-half-page introduction...