The Cambridge Companion to Brecht ed. by Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks (review)

Book Reviews 349 directing. Similarly. even if "many audience members experience Beckett's work ... as an opaque nonsense," SeanJan reminds us that no director should feel legitimized in using this "opaque experience ... as a rationale for 'expressing obscurity' " (153). The very centrality of language in Beckett resists interpretive dogmatism, even the dogmas of negativity with which Beckeu's work is often but wrongly associated. The appendixes in this volume include letters from Beckett to Roger Blio (the first director of his works), a remarkable and previously unpublished interview with Slin by Joan Stevens (1975), and a previously unpublished lecture by Alan Schneider "On Play and Other Plays," where he confesses to having "actually betrayed the author's stated intention" (316) in his direction of the play in 1976. Beckett's letters indicate the texts (or scripts) themselves as ultimate source of authority in the determination of setting and costumes, and Blin's interview enumerates basic principles for directing Beckett, foregrounding the chronological background of actual performances which he directed, from Godar to Happy Days. Blin's synthetic definition of Beckett's "personal vision" underscored the presence of "a sudden abstract element, or a geometric element. that is repetitive ..." (306). It is interesting to find here (at the end of the book) the list of basic tenets that have inspired a lot of post-Blin directing: formal abstraction and repetition are acknowledged by most of the directors interviewed as the distinctive features of Beckett's scripts. It is obviouSly impossible to summarize here the wealth of information this book provides with its critical insights and additions to what is already known about Beckett 's directing and directing Beckett. Only a detailed reading of the volume itself will prove fully rewarding. CARLA LOCATELLI, UNIVERSITY OF TRENTO, ITALY PETER THOMSON and GLENDYR SACKS, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Brecht. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994. Pp. xxxii, 302, illustrated. $59.95; $16.95 (PS). This collection of essays is designed to offer scholars, students, and the general reader a comprehensive view of the life and literary development of Bertoh Brecht. It is a handsome book, generously produced and carefully illustrated, with nineteen contributing essays, a chronology of Brecht's life, and a bibliography. The Companion looks and feels good, but the book, on the whole is uneven; some essays are lucid and welldocumented , but many are vague and disparate. The flaws vary: some,essayists grind their axes, some rake over familiar ground, while others merely apply standard contemporary theories to Brecht. In Part I , Eva Rosenhaft analyzes "Brecht's Germany" from the playwright's birth in 1898 to (he Nazi takeover in 1933. and Peter Thompson divides "Brecht's Lives" into various stages. Missing in Rosenhaft's essay are references to the Vienna Circle, the Positivism of Russell and Wittgenstein, Freudian psychoanalysis, Einstein's physics, 350 Book Reviews and Husserl's phenomenology - all dominant intellectual influences in Gennany during Brecht's time. Rosenhaft makes several unsubstantiated claims: for example, that the American film industry was "fascinating" to the left-wing intellectuals as a manifestation of "sheer power" to control "people's imagination" (13). The right, in fact, understood the manipulative power of film equally, if not better, than the left. Thompson's essay is significantly better. He moves clearly through Brecht's life with precision and a self-conscious awareness of what is relevant. One caveat: while Brecht's sexual manipulations of women 3fC described, Thompson avoids any mention of Brecht's possible homosexuality. Such indifference calls the work's thoroughness into question. Part 2, "The Plays," begins with three murky essays. Tony Meech's analysis of Brecht's early plays suggests that the playwright was a Naturalist in the Buchnerian mode, mocking expressionism through irony. However, Meech offers no serious characterization of ~rechtian irony. A similar criticism develops upon Stephen McNeff's failure to tell us why Gay's opera was so compelling to Weill and Brecht. Missing also is an analysis of Weill in relation to his immediate predecessor, Gustav Mahler and Albert Berg. Joel Schechter strains for relevancy by trying to envision Man is Man along Marxist lines, maintaining that "Marx was less comic than Brecht" (69). Was Marx supposed to...