Volume 47, Number 1 · January 20, 2000
Game Without End
By Fintan O'Toole
The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: Volume IV: The Shorter Plays
edited by S.E. Gontarski
Grove Press, 512 pp., $125.00 (paper)
No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider
edited by Maurice Harmon
Harvard University Press, 512 pp., $35.00
In his autobiography, the American director Alan Schneider recalled his attendance with Samuel Beckett at the first run of Waiting for Godot in London in 1955. Whenever a line was misinterpreted or an extra piece of stage business was added, Beckett would clutch Schneider's arm and exclaim, in a clearly audible stage whisper, 'It's ahl wrahng! He's doing it ahl wrahng!'[1] That loud whisper still sounds in the ears of those who stage Beckett's plays now. No other dead dramatist remains such a daunting admonitory presence for his directors and performers. Where most great playwrights were content to write the text of a play, Beckett wrote the entire theatrical event. He specified, not just the words, but the rhythms and tones, the sets and the lighting plots, and these specifications are preserved in the remarkable series of notebooks whose publication by Faber and Faber is now completed with S.E. Gontarski's exemplary edition of Beckett's ledgers for productions of his short late plays.
Review, 3787 words
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