Beckett on Screen: The Television Plays (review)

Ambiguous achievements are difficult to evaluate. Reviewers, like essay markers, pray for knowledge, wit, and grace. If those qualities are not forthcoming, as they rarely are, then something truly appalling may set us dancing amidst despair: I think of my Lost One, who affirmed that "Henry VIII's girlfriend was Amber Lynn"; or the Unteachable who bemused his Master with "anus crimes." Most books are maculate manifestations of an imperfect world, perhaps to be treated like the curate's egg ("Parts of it are very good, m'lord"); the problem is finding the right measures of reservation and praise.

Jonathan Bignell's Beckett on Screen, his discussion of Beckett's works for British television, from Eh Joe (1966) to Quad (1982), is solid and informed, offering insights into a creative collaboration that, if not a popular success (ratings were always poor), marked the reception of Beckett's later work within one milieu ("Getting Known"). He is excellent on the production environment of British broadcasting and meticulous in documenting Beckett's work in this arena. Yet other matters intrude: Film (1964) is pertinent but the RTE Beckett on Film adaptations less so, for unlike the television plays analysed in relation to production practices and broadcasting contexts, their treatment is fragmentary and their cultural dynamics ill-defined. This is because (as Bignell might have said) they contribute relatively little to the historiography of Beckett's oeuvre or that of British television.

Bignell implies that relatively little has been written about Beckett's television productions. This may be true in the narrower sense of specifically British programming (his focus), but that is a small part of their history. He ignores French productions, and the pioneering work of Süddeutscher Rundfunk, though acknowledged, is not analysed minutely. His discussion of What Where (Beckett's most sophisticated television adaptation) is perfunctory, probably because its one British screening was a direct rendition of a Stuttgart performance.

If, as Bignell argues (2), academic analysis of television drama has largely excluded Beckett's productions, it does not follow that this work has been ignored. The German versions have been discussed frequently by British, American, and European critics. In 2009, a double issue of the Journal oféBeckett Studies, edited by Ulrika Maude and David Pattie, was dedicated to it. Bignell cannot be censured for ignoring work published after his book was in press; yet, he must have known that this volume was imminent. Erik Tonning's Abstraction in Samuel Beckett's Late Work for Stage andéScreen (2007) was out, and Stan Gontarski's various entries on the television drama in the Grove Companion (2004) were available. Bignell praises Graley Herren's Samuel Beckett's Plays on Film and Television (2007), but calling it "recent" (2) when contemporaneous studies are ignored is confusing; nor is his own bibliography of "recent" vintage (saving some 2007 studies also published by MUP). This does not invalidate the work, but Bignell should have affirmed his book's genuine strength: its focus on Beckett's British television productions.

Bignell's writing is uneven (the uncharitable might say dull). Like other nags in the Palgrave-Macmillan stable, it should have been groomed before given its head. The syntax often runs wild, and there are too many tumbles into shallow ditches. Awkward repetitions, agreement problems, abused prepositions, missing apostrophes, and related stylistic infelicities abound. One can forgive the odd irritant ("Gontarsky" 19), but not clangers of truly "Amber Lynn" proportions. Bignell identifies one of the "intertexts" that "might explain the title" of Ghost Trio as Schubert's "Ghost Sonata" (48), the error repeated (154). It should be, of course, Beethoven's "Geistertrio" (Op. 70, No. 1), the haunting music that plunges the piece into Macbeth's spirit world, with flickering arpeggios, piano tremolos, and descending chromatic scales that conjure an uncanny deathly realm. This is not "intertext" (brrrr!), but a complex aesthetic arising from the auditory imagination as much as the visual; it is not, as Bignell says, a "mechanism" for...