Beckett in Performance [Paperback]

A critical look at the work of one of the twentieth century's most influential playwrights emerges from the viewpoint of numerous Beckett actors and directors and includes the author's personal experiences as well.A critical look at the work of one of the twentieth century's most influential playwrights emerges from the viewpoint of numerous Beckett actors and directors and includes the author's personal experiences as well.This book takes a critical look at the work of one of the twentieth century's most influential playwrights from the viewpoint of those whose job it is to give the work life on stage. From personal experience of over seventy productions, from interviews with numerous Beckett actors and directors, and in rare conversations with the playwright himself, Kalb addresses such fundamental questions as: Is the task of performing Beckett categorically different from that of performing other forms of theater? Is the audience's role different, and if so, how? The result is a new insight into particular problems of producing Beckett's early and late works, television plays, and prose works adapted for the stage.List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; 1. Introduction; Part I. Acting: 2. Rockaby and the art of inadvertent interpretation; 3. Considerations of acting in the early plays; 4. Considerations of acting in the late plays; Part II. Directing: 5. Underground staging in perspective; 6. Eh Joe, Dis Joe, He Joe: toward a television icon; 7. The gamble of staging prose fiction; 8. Conclusion: the question of context; Part III. Conservations: Notes; Bibliography; Index. This perceptive, personal history of viewing Beckett's plays in production, supplemented by interviews with those artists who acted in and directed them, aims at articulating a poetics of Beckett performance. Choice ...the breadth and depth of [Kalb's] survey of a good-sized sample of those who have devoted themselves to realizing Beckett upon the stage (and screen and radio) give his bookl³ƒ