Beckett's Creatures: Art of Failure after the Holocaust by Joseph Anderton and: Staging Beckett in Great Britain ed. by David Tucker and Trish McTighe (review)

That Samuel Beckett is a writer who has been considered from a range of disciplinary perspectives is reflected by these two very different studies. The edited collection Staging Beckett in Great Britain offers a detailed performance history of Beckett's drama which embraces performers, directors, venues, contracts, funding and other such practicalities of theatrical production. The monograph Beckett's Creatures, by contrast, in considering selected examples of Beckett's drama alongside his novels and other prose works offers a wealth of theoretically informed critical analysis which centres on language and themes rather than theatricality. Each approach has its strengths, but it is striking how little crossover there is between the two.

As a collection Staging Beckett in Great Britain emerges from an arts and Humanities Research Council funded collaboration between the universities of Reading and Chester and the Victoria and Albert Museum. A companion volume, Staging Beckett in Ireland and Northern Ireland, has been published simultaneously, and the editors hope that in the future further studies will focus on Beckett's Us and continental Europe performance histories. While the volume is not completely comprehensive (Wales is not considered, for instance), contributions range widely from discussion of familiar collaborators such as George Devine, Peter Hall and Harold Pinter to consideration of hitherto neglected topics such as productions of Beckett in Scotland, Yorkshire, and the commercial West End, and the UK's first all-black Waiting for Godot, co-produced by Talawa Theatre company in 2012.

The nature of the volume necessitates a certain degree of description, much of which is interesting in itself and enlivened by telling detail and original research, but most contributors use the historical accounts they give as a means of engaging with wider critical or social issues. David Pattie, in his chapter "The Arrival of Godot", draws on the work of Astrid Erll to consider the play's UK premiere as "premediated", arguing that its extraordinary impact depended at least partly on the way it related to already existing debates about the state of the British theatre and especially its deficiencies. Mark Taylor-Batty considers Jude Kelly's staging of Beckett's work at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in the 1990s both in terms of the challenge of presenting potentially alienating high art to a provincial audience and in relation to how "the adoption of Beckett's work . . . can be read as participating in an articulation of cultural worth and development in a city that was rebranding itself" (57). Kene igweonu, discussing the Talawa Godot, focuses on the question of whether the show should be taken as evidence that Great Britain now enjoys a "post-racial" cultural climate or whether, as he argues, the meaning and significance of the production at least partly stemmed from "its articulation of blackness" (154).

Other valuable contributions include John Stokes's nuanced and sophisticated discussion of West End Beckett, Graham Saunders's meticulously researched reassessment of how Beckett's Breath came to be included in– and then withdrawn from–Kenneth Tynan's erotic revue Oh! Calcutta!, and Andrew Head's survey of British productions of Krapp's Last Tape, which demonstrates how the sheer portability of this one-man show helped Beckett's work to become part of the developing ecosystem of British theatre, introducing it to regional audiences and eliciting highly varied responses. As a whole this volume is a credit to its editors as a significant contribution both to Beckett studies and to scholarship on the history of post-war British theatre.

Joseph Anderton's Beckett's Creatures situates Beckett's writing firmly in the context of the aftermath of the Holocaust thus reflecting a trend in 21st-century Beckett studies which engages with historical specificity rather...