Samuel Beckett in the New Century

Samuel Beckett in the New Century PEGGY PHELAN HERBERT BLAU. Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett. Theater: Theory (Text!Performanee. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Pp. x + 2t4, illustrated. $50.00 (Hb). RUBY COHN. A Beckett Canon. Theater: Theory(Text!performance. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Pp. xii + 4"7. $65.00 (Hb). LES ESSIF. Empty Figure on an Empty Stage: The Theatre of Samuel Beckett and His Generation. Drama and Performance Studies 13. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001. Pp. X + 254, illustrated. $47.95 (Hb). JOHN LEELAND KUNDERT-GIBBS. No-Thing is Left 10 Tell: Zen/Chaos Theory ill the Dramatic Art ofSamuel Beckett. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999: Pp. 236, illustraled. $41.50 (Hb). LOiS OPPENHEIM. The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett's Dialogue with Art. Theater: Theory(Text/Performance. Ann Arbor, Ml : University of Michigan Press, 2000. Pp. vii + 238, illustrated. $55.50 (Hb). DAVID PATTIE. The Complete Critical Guide to Samuel Beckett. The Complete Critical Guide to English Literature. London: Routledge, 2000. Pp. xii + 220. $19.95 (Pb). The title of the Samuel Beckeu Symposium, "After Becken/Apres Beckeu," held in Sydney, Australia from 6-9 January 2003, nicely captures Beckeu's bilingualism. More subtly, the title also raises the specter of the future of Beckeu's work now that he and the theatre for which he wrote are indeed Modern Drama, 45:4 (Winter 2002) 663 PEGGY PHELAN specters. His work offered us an idea of theatre that has now been drowned by the hubbub of capitalist work and its malignancies; rare is the theatre today not dedicated to maintaining or increasing subscription bases, managing finances, and negotiating (union) contracts. While this can be said for any .number of playwrights, ranging in style from Shakespeare to Ntozake Shange, the after-effects of Beckett's work are especially haunting. Beckett has a reputation for being notoriously strict about productions of his dramas - every action, every pause has to coincide with his stage directions, the argument goes. (This reputation is fiercer than his actual practice - when he directed his own work, he would sometimes change the script to respond to a performance issue.) But these stage directions presupposed a mode of working that very few (if any) contemporary theatre companies practice, which has made the question of future productions of Beckett's plays an exceptionally tense affair, involving both a history of threatened litigation and a quite robust international resistance to the demands of the Beckett estate. Jerome Lindon's death last year has left Edward Beckett, Sam's nephew, the sole executor and arbiter of production rights. The Sydney conference organizer, Anthony Uhlmann of the University of New South Wales, invited Edward Beckett to be an honorary guest of the conference . A risky decision under any circumstances, Uhlmann might weB have felt some regret about this invitation when, at the Sydney-based Company Belvoir's premiere of Waiting for Godot, Edward threatened to revoke the rights and shut down the production. Intended to celebrate the fifty-year anniversary of the first production in Paris, this Godat was not ready to be the standard-bearer for a legal brawl with the Beckett estate. The performance, directed by Neil Armfield and starring John Gaden and Max Cullen, was basically an extremely faithful rendition of Beckett's script. But it also included music and the boy was given four Latin words to sing, thereby adding words and music to what is a famously quiet play. (The additional words were all but inaudible and the music, a percussive drone that primarily accompanied the entrances and exits of Pozzo and Lucky, was annoying - worse when it drowned out Lucky's astonishing monologue. But beyond these not-so-huge details, I was amused that the fight would be about "Words and Music," the title of Beckett's 1962 radio play.) In the end, a compromise was worked out; the music was allowed to continue (more softly), but the words were dropped. The whole battle clouded the conference proceedings, however, and during a relatively slow news cycle, the threatened legal action garnered front-page attention in both The Sydney Morning Herald and The...