All for Hecuba: An Irish Theatrical Autobiography by Michéal MacLiammóir (review)

1968 BOOK REVIEWS 339 The Birthday Party is an industrial section of North London; Sidcup in The Caretaker is a Southwestern suburb of London.) Of particular interest~ too, in a book intended for the German reader, is Esslin's suggestion that Pinter's intense feelings of menace originated in his childhood as an East London Jew during periods of fascism and war. If Kafka and Beckett are the major influences on Pinter, his existential situation rendered him receptive to such influence. Nearly half Esslin's book is devoted to consideration of the separate plays, and although the first paragraph is often a translation of the English of his Theatre of the Absurd (recently updated in a Penguin edition), Esslin offers wider possibilities of interpretation. In his attention to detail, Esslin has no match. I found no errors in his navigation through Pinter's cryptic plots (though he and Taylor disagree as to whether The Birthday Party precedes or follows The Dumbwaiter). If I sometimes balk at Esslin's interpretations (Riley as Death in The Room, Stanley'S coming to maturity in The Birthday Party, The Caretaker as Oedipal situation), he backs them with the "facts" of the play. Esslin is highly sensitive to Pinter's gift for language, and though Esslin's linguistic-one might say philological-comments are intended for a German audience, they are useful too for Americans, to whose ears "bloody" is not necessarily sacrilegious, nor "ballcock" distinctly obscene. In the chapter on translation, Esslin soundly spanks Pinter's unnamed translators , and in the ,chapter on production (divided into England, Germany, and the United States) Esslin soundly spanks the German directors who early produced Pinter with inadequate translations that made for inadequate performance. If I have a fault to find with the book, it is the disproportionate importance given to New York in the American section. My own acquaintance with Pinter's work began in 1960, at the Actor's Workshop in San Francisco, and their productions attained a coherence within Pinter's incoherence that remains unmatched off and on Broadway, which, according to New York's most powerful reviewer, has now arrived at "the moment of Pinter," long after our university theaters. Esslin gives a brief nod to Pinter as movie-script writer, and closes with a perfunctory bibliography, since he confines himself to German criticism of Pinter. (Even in the revised edition of The Theatre of the Absurd, Esslin provides no bibliography of Pinter criticism.) The fifteen photographs are exceptionally well chosen to compare English and German productions of the plays, though French Pierre Brasseur somehow sneaked into that company; as the French say, "Lucky Pierre...." And Lucky Pinter, still at the beginning of his career, to have found such a knowledgeable and conscientious interpreter. RUBY COHN San Francisco State College ALL FOR HECUBA: AN IRISH THEATRICAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY, by Micheal MacLiamm6ir, Branden Press, Boston, Mass., 1967, 356 pp. Price $6.95. An American edition of MacLiamm6ir's autobiography has long been needed, for it is one of those rare books which is as delightful as it is indispensable. It is delightful because it is written with panache and brio and wit; it is indispensable because its author is an eminent actor, a brilliant stage designer, an accomplished dramatist, and the co-founder of one of the least appreciated and most distinguished theaters of modern times. MacLiamm6ir is a remarkable personality. He began his career as a child actor in Peter Pan and with Beerbohm Tree, and he still seems to belong spirit- 340 MODERN DRAMA December ually more to the Yellow Nineties or at least to the Edwardian period than to the world of nuclear fall-out and student sit-in. There seems to be something in Dublin, that most caustic of cities, that impels both its great artists and its pseudo-artists to assume a defensive role-mystic or misanthrope, proletarian or pundit, bard or buffoon. And certainly if MacLiammoir had less talent, he would be an absurd figure, a caricature that is part popinjay, part dandy, part anachronism , and part ham actor. Yet while the Dubliner dissects the crotchets of the poseur with a delighted derision, the manner of MacLiamm6ir evokes a warmly...