Le feu sacré: Souvenirs d'une vie de théâtre by Youri Lioubimov (review)

444 Book Reviews and to Orton's literary talent. It is Halliwell who introduced him to the classics, encouraged him to steep himself in the work of the Restoration wits. who taught him what he knew ofliterary tradition and myth. Halliwell recognized, perhaps before Orton did himself, that the playwright had produced a Golden Bough subtext in What the Butler Saw, and Orton followed all his suggestions in revising the play. Halliwell had titled Loot and thought up another that Orton never lived to use, Prick Up Your Ears, a title borrowed by Lahr in his definitive study of Orton's life, a life illuminated for so brief a time by a meteoric celebrity. John Lahr's contribution to the publication ofthe diaries (to which are appended some highly amusing indignant letters written to corporations and newspapers in the persona ofEdoa Welthorpe), consists ofan enlightening introduction which places the diaries in perspective as well as the editing out of some of the repetition in Orton's account of his two-month stay in Tangier. Enough remains, however, to give readers more than they may care to know about Orton's sexual cavortings there. Lahr's one misjudgement in a valuable book. that together with Prick Up Your Ears may be the last word on the life and works of Joe Orton, is the editor's irritating and inconsistent manner of identifying persons named in the diaries in tbe footnotes at the bottom of each page. Actress Coral Browne is identified at the second mention of her name rather than the first, while Winston Churchill and John Gielgud are identified as, respectively, "British prime minister and war leader" and "Distinguished actor and director." surely unnecessary information for anyone reading The Orton Diaries, even for those who pick it up solely for its pornographic content. ALBERT E. KALSON, PURDUE UNIVERSITY YOURl LIOUBIMOV , avec la collaboration de MARC DONDEY. Le feu satre: Souvenirs d' une vie de thetitre. Postface et annexes de Beatrice Picon-Vallin. Paris: Fayard 1985. Pp. 246, iIIus. 120.ooFF. In a recent article for the New York Times Book Review (27 July 1986). Robert Brustein discussed the role and the nature of the auteur director. Although he did not, he could wen have included Yuri Liubimov as another of the important directors of modern times who has taken to actively creating new works for the stage rather than seeking to rediscover in a printed text a somehow mysteriously pre-existing work. The reasons for Brustein's omission are understandable. But for a few celebrated guest appearances outside the Soviet Union between the late 1960s and early 1980s, opportunities to gain ftrst·hand knowledge ofLiubimov's work have been restricted to those fortunate enough to see one of his productions before he was sacked as director of the Taganka Theater in Moscow in 1984. After being deprived of his So.viet citizenship in July of that year he has been busy staging plays and operas primarily in Europe and Israel. He only recently brought his work to the American continent with a staging of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment in Washington, D.C. Book Reviews 445 Liubimov's eclectic and readable memoirs should serve as another manner of introduction to his work. Thematically the book can be separated into three basic parts: his stories of run-ins with the Soviet government. wittily studded with anecdotes, should be of great interest to anyone interested in recent Soviet culrural affairs; his reminiscences about friendships with theattical figures, especially his numerous references to Vladimir Vysotsky and the underrated playwright Nikolai Erdman (whose The Suicide has known limited success in the West), are of considerable interest to students of literature and drama; and, interspersed throughout the narrative, his thoughts about what makes good theater should be of profound interest to everyone interested in the subject. Like Meyerhold, Liubimov became a director by rebelling against what he perceived to be a stagnant, primarily Stanislavskian, theater and it is typical of his work that traditional dramatic texts play only a small role in it (though this is naturally Jess true of his operatic productions). The index lists just eight such texts produced by Liubimov between 1964...