Directing Beckett ed. by Lois Oppenheim (review)

Book Reviews Jitical, Beckett believed he had powerful moral obligations to those who were persecuted by the Nazi regime. This phase of Beckett's life is intensely dramatic and purposeful. His biographer's conclusion here that he was not "fragile and reclusive" but "sensitive and courageous" is persuasive. For any evaluation of Beckett's temperament and achievement, The World of Samuel Beckett provides invaluable information and balance. It covers his formative years and focuses on his life rather than on extensive critical analyses of his major works (many of which had not been written'by the end of the period covered). Nevertheless, Gordon has provided a "missing link" in the saga of one of the West's greatest writers. KIMBALL KING, UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL LOIS OPPENHEIM, ed. Directing Beckett. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1994. Pp. 320, illuSIr'led. $42.50. Drama critics and Beckett scholars will benefit from this contribution to the critical debate on "directing Beckett" because it addresses both exquisitely dramatic and performative issues and specifically Beckeuian themes. From the very beginning of her work, Oppenheim points to the irreducible duplicity of art as "a mediated presentation of unmediated experience," and from there she articulates a book-project that addresses with simultaneous attention "the experiential and aesthetic" (p. I) relevant to both Beckett's work and Beckett directing. The book is divided into two parts. The whole is preceded by an Introduction and selections from the sound tapes for the film Rockaby in which Alan Schneider directs Billie Whitelaw ("Alan Schneider Directs Rockaby," 1981). Each of the two pans is preceeded by additional commentary by Oppenheim. The fIrst consists of ten interviews conducted by Oppenheim; the second includes ten essays contributed by eminent critic-directors who come to Beckett with very different methodological presuppositions and from very different cultural contexts. A number of interesting appendixes , including two Beckett letters, concludes the volume. Oppenheim's dialogue with ten of the most established Beckett directors at work from the Sixties to the Nineties valorizes primarily the "actualizing" of a script, seen as "what otherwise is but frozen on the page" (I). The major recurring themes and points she reaches through her interviews focus on directing and, more specifically, on the preservation of authorial intent and interpretive fidelity; interpretive innovation; the translatability of Beckett's prose works and radio plays into plays for the theater; the particular skills required to direct Beckettian plays; and definitions of directorial function. Differences in direction, particularly in relation to Beckett's own previous directing of the same plays, constitute either an overt or an implied question to all the directors Oppenheim interviews, from Frederick Neumann to Walter Asmus; from Herbert Blau to Pierre Chabert; from Edward Albee to Jan Jonson; from Antoni Libera to Joseph Book Reviews 347 Chaikin; from Gregory Mosher to JoAnne Akalaitis. Predictably, their answers differ greatly in tone and substance, developing a vast number of issues ranging from clearly cechllico-hermeneutical ones (see, for example, Libera's marvellous interview, highly technical and also highly suggestive, but also Chabert's, Albee's, Mosher's, and Akalaitis 's), to historical and documentary ones (Asmus, Neuman. Slau, )60500 ), and to specifically textual ones (Schneider's tapes on Rockaby, Chaikin on Texts for Nothing), One major difference between this work and previous ones that have dealt with similar issues regards the modality of author-implication in the text Enoch Brater in Beyond Minimalism (1987), DougaJd McMillan and Martha Fehsenferld in Beckert in the Theater (1988), and Jonathan Kalb in Beckett in Performance (1989) assume their authorship as a specific critical voice, unlike Oppenheim, who seems to construct her authorship as the assembling of a bricolage, fonned by the tesseras directors provide in answering her questions. However, behind this sort of.impersonality, the reader can discern the voice of a learned Beckett critic whose set task is the "exploration of the reasons for certain of the decisions made" by the directors interviewed. These "reasons " are many, and a great many are the different decisions described in response to Oppenheim's cogent questions: both the interviewed directors and the authors of the critical essays are very generous in their suggestions and...