Just Play: Beckett's Theater by Ruby Cohn (review)

Book Reviews RUBY COHN, Just Play: Beckeu's Theater. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1980. PP· 313· In her new title, Ruby Cohn's "just" has the same ironic ring as in Beckett's original phrase: "I know now all that was just ... play." Like Beckett, Professor Cohn impresses us with the boundlessness of"just" in her analyses ofsome twenty-six stage, radio, TV, film, and mime plays written, jettisoned, and/or directed by Beckett or "invented" by others in adaptations of his nondramatic texts. This is a book for cognoscenti who already know the theater textsand will admire Cohn's detailed readings and synthesizing leaps. It is also a book for scholars who will appreciate the unearthing of the aborted Human Wishes (of which the unfinished first act appears in the appendix) and the elucidation of the unavailable Eleutheria. It is finally and uniquely a book for theater people, actors and directors, whose imagination and skills will be fired by the approacbes to Beckett's texts, rehearsals and productions so carefully and enthusiastically described. It is, in fact, several potential books, united not by a prevailing thesis or a specific methodology, but by a centralizing tone - intelligent appraisal based on a nearly nonduplicatable familiarity with Beckett's works - and a centralizing philosophy - Beckett's theater is about something (rather than "nothing") and that something is the pain of lived life. This notion ofan underlying (ifirreducible) content infuses Part I ofJust Play, entitled "Througb Views." In each chapter, Cohn concentrates on a different functional device: place, time, soliloquy, fictionalizers, and repetitions. Ofplace Cohn traces the evolution from more or less referential locations (the enclosed room of Endgame) to the abstract word space ofBeckett's verbal compositions (Words and Music). Oftime, "the shadow protagonist of his plays," she notes the gradual shift from unending present (Godot) to a blend of past, future, and imaginary time (Not I); and she analyzes how Beckett makes time felt through repetition, solo insets, wordplay, and voiced doubts. In the first of the three remarkable chapters on language patterns, Professor Cobn distinguishes between textures of soliloquy: inadvertent as in Krapp, regressive as in Happy Days, intercalated first narratively then meditatively in Play, and, as Enoch Brater indicates, "matterized" as in Not I . She also emphasizes the link between more extensive soliloquy and the increased emotional bonding between audience and actors in Beckett's later plays. To avoid soliloquy, Cohn points out in Chapter V, Beckett's characters take refuge in fiction. While Hamm in Endgame is the first to "attempt to ground himself' through fiction, Opener, Voice, and Music of Cascando dramatize the fictionalizing process. Chapter VI, a model oftextual analysis, demonstrates Beckett's use of repetitions. To deal with his most "pervasive verbal device," Cohn creates a series of useful tenns: "simple doublet," "interrupted doublet," "pounders," "volleys." She expands the definition of "refrain" to include the audience's awareness of meaningful words and opposes the "qualitative warp" of phrases such as "what do we do" to the "quantitative woof' of the doublets. Part II puts aside the diachronic approach to examine the "singulars," studies for which Cohn's personal and professional rapport with Beckett uniquely equips her. Whetherdiscussing the genesis of Human Wishes (1937; the never completedplay about Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale), the simultaneous decors of Eleutheria (1947) or the Book Reviews overstuffed quality of two earlier versions (1954- 1956) of Endgame, Cohn deftly points to the themes and techniques which were honed or discarded in later plays. She also directs attention to Beckett's ability to reject the limited historical realism of Human Wishes and the bulging dramatic exercise that is Eleutheria in his effort to develop balance and concentration. The third section of Professor Cohn's study, necessarily more anecdotal because based in part on interviews with practitioners of Beckett, is also the most fascinating. In it, Cohn'sown observations ofBeckett at work as well as those ofher witnesses - Roger Blin, Alan Schneider, Patrick Magee, Billie Whitelaw, rehabilitated convict Rick Cluchey - give the lie to accusa'tions of Beckett's directorial tyranny . Billie Whitelaw describes his compassion as well as herdifficulty in performing Not 1:"1would fall over at rehearsals; my jaw felt...