Theatre of Shadows: Samuel Beckett's Drama, 1956-76 by Rosemary Pountney (review)

588 Book Reviews and minorities, and that, seen in light even of this 20-year-old definition, Streetcar is an extremely political play. Although I must agree with Kirby that lhe potential of theatre to effect quantifiable, practical political change is limited, his defmition of political theatre is excessively circumscribed and perhaps even regressive. In Part III of A Formalist Theatre , which describes several perfonnance activities produced by Kirby's structuralist workshop, he returns to issues raised earlier in the chapter on anti-semiotic, or non-referential, theatre. A quotation from The Theatre and Its Double embodies my experience of this section: "And if there is one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with fonns. instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames" (13). Although I must give Kirby credit for stating quite straightforwardly that his intention was not to build performances around feelings or ideas but around "an idea about theatrica1 structure," (llO) and although I found the descriptions of the performances (especially The Marilyn Project) mildly interesting, I was left wondering what the point was. Does Kirby really believe that fonn is independent of content and that content is entirely subjective? He mentions a connection between his work and Meyerhold's formalism - but even given the latter's fatal defense of the artist's right to experiment with the purely fonna1 aspects of production, Meyerhold was an intensely politica1 man whose major work was accomplished in a period of extreme social and political distress. Although MeyerhoJd died for his intransigent insistence on the right to experiment with form, rarely in his work do you find deliberate attempts to divorce form from content and create, in Kirby's terms, the theatricaJ equivalent of a Rorschach ink blot. Finally, although I found certain sections of A Formalist Theatre useful from a pedagogicaJ perspective, it was Kirby's very "dallying with forms" that left me unsatisfied with the book. He did not convince me that, in a world crying out for meaning. a theatrical ink blot, in which the only meaning is in the mind of the spectator, is necessary or even desirable. Only in the white maJe academic ivory to,:,,",er could experiments with pure fonn - Kirby's anti-semiotic theatre - be justified. DR. CATHERINE SCHULER, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND ROSEMARY POUNI'NEY. Theatre of Shadows: Samuel Becken's Drama. 1956-76. Totawa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble Books 1988. pp. xxi, 309. $36.50. Despite its suggestively embracing title, Theatre of Shadows comes across as a book, like Olivier's Hamlet, that could not make up its mind. Staking as her territory what she calls the " middle period" of Samuel Beckett's drama (1956-76, from All That Fall through Foot/ails), Rosemary Pountney sets out to analyze these plays from "three separate, yet complementary angles: structure, ambiguity and stagecraft" (p. xii). The book's first section includes two chapters on cyclicaJ patterning in Beckett's drama and a structuraJ anaJysis of the prose piece Lesslless. Its study of "ambiguity." by far the largest section of the book, comprises five chapters on the EngliSh drafts Book Reviews of Beckeu's plays, tracing imagistic clarification and narrative "vaguening" in the playwright's methods of composition and revision. A chapter discussing general principles of Beckettian stagecraft is followed by an epilogue surveying the plays from Ghost Trio (written 1975) through What Where (1983). The problem of multiple focus is evident in the reading: each a potential book in its own right, these sections lack integration, and Pountney's auempts to justify their mutual inclusion fail to hide the obvious seams. The author's choice of audience is equally uneasy: though the heart of Theatre ofShadows involves highly specialized draft analysis, its primary audience remains. as Pountney states, " srudents at both [the] undergraduate and postgraduate level" (p. xii). These divided loyalties confuse the book's argument and subvert its real and potential strengths. Pountney's separation of the book's interpretive strategies into three "angles" results in a discussion at once artificial and repetitive. Issues of structure are divorced from discussions of stagecraft, and both stand uncomfortably apart from the intensive manuscript...