Ben Brown
Three Days in May
Trafalgar Studios, London, until 3rd March

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What if, instead of prolonging England’s involvement in World War II, Winston Churchill and his war-cabinet had quietly met with Hitler to negotiate a quasi peace treaty brokered by Mussolini? This sounds like the set-up to a bad joke one hears at a cocktail party (“a rabbi, a priest, and a minister walk into a bar…”), yet the plausibility of just such a meeting is the crux of Ben Brown’s play Three Days In May.

After an opening scene in which the war cabinet members are shown literally on bended knee at Westminster Abbey on May 26th, 1940 (The National Day of Prayer), the play introduces a nerve-wracked French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud (Timothy Knightley), who tries to coax Churchill (Warren Clarke) to negotiate with Hitler. What ensues is a dovetailing of research and imagination, as Brown explores the three days Churchill and his cabinet supposedly “wobbled”, to use the phrase of the play’s narrator, Cabinet Secretary Jock Colville (James Alper).

However, rather than portraying a wobbling Churchill, Brown depicts a skilled politician who cajoles, appeases and sways an adamant Lord Halifax (Jeremy Clyde) who is threatening resignation. So too, we observe an ailing Neville Chamberlain (Robert Demeger), recently resigned from his role as Prime Minister but still inhabiting 10 Downing Street, and suffering under the pressure of a looming catastrophe (namely the 250,000 English soldiers stranded at Dunkirk). Director Alan Strachan explores the nuances of men who quite literally held the weight of the world in their hands.

The play is an observation of the politics of relationships as well as a dramatized history lesson. A private scene between Chamberlain and Churchill focuses on their personal war – a heated exchange in which each man alternately upstages the other – but one that concludes with the pair uniting, centre stage; Chamberlain shows regret for his Munich Pact and acknowledges his faults, while Churchill forfeits his own pride to ask Chamberlain for support. Whether this is staged humility or not, the scene is poignant at the very least for illustrating the “dance” of two men setting their hubris and political differences aside to unite in a common cause.

Seventy-two years after the event it seems absurd to even imagine England negotiating with Hitler. But on May 27th, 1940, Lord Halifax viewed parley as the way to spare countless men’s lives, and somehow the audience is led to sympathise with him in the first act. Halifax is initially rational, not a cowardly capitulator. The play introduces a silent, tormented and emotional Churchill as counter to the composed and resolute Halifax, whose courageous tranquility in a time of imminent disaster, momentarily lures the audience into considering the outrageous plea bargain. Years after the fact, would an audience think Halifax’s plea bargain is smart? Can we, when we know the outcome of the war and the evil of Hitler, momentarily suspend disbelief and see sense in the negotiations?

Brown’s play is an exploration of human character in the face of fear. Perhaps the audience initially supports Halifax because they are tempted by his calm dominance over Churchill’s distraught ambivalence, which could also be read as a sly manipulative tactic later. Thus, the play skillfully forces individuals to question their own rational ability to make decisions in times of conflict – does one respond to emotion or to facts? How does one know he is making a sound choice?

If we divorce the play from a specific war, and view it as an observation of those who make the final call, it is strikingly relevant. In 2012, in the wake of the Arab Spring and the recent Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, events engineered via Twitter-feeds and Facebook postings, Churchill’s three days of deliberation seem an eternity. Social media has arguably transferred power from the individual to the masses in the click of a mouse. At the end of Three Days In May, Stalin’s famous words about Churchill are quoted: “The courage of one man changed the history of the world”, and this raises the central question: could there be one leader in today’s world who could change the course of history in three days? Or is the legacy of Churchill a marker of a time and clime that will never exist again? Ben Brown’s smartly-crafted play, chronicles this suggestion with dramatic ingenuity, and we the viewers are left to make the answer.

Leah Novak is reading English Literature at Worcester College. She is visiting from Trinity College, Connecticut.

Margaret Litvin
Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost
Princeton University Press, 2011
280 pages.
£24.95
ISBN: 9780691137803

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“Hamlet is an Arab, despite his European clothing, and he is a contemporary despite the swords and castles and ghosts.” This sentence, from the programme notes to a 1973 Syrian adaptation of Hamlet, summarises the phenomenon Margaret Litvin sets out to address. Since the 1960s Shakespeare’s hero has captivated the political as well as the theatrical imagination of the Arab world, as he no longer captivates the English-speaking world. He has come to seem a figure perhaps uniquely suited to express the fraught predicament of the Arab people, whose very existence has often seemed to be under threat, as disasters from the 1948 and 1967 defeats by Israel to the 2003 invasion of Iraq “raised the spectre of national fragmentation or extinction”, in Edward Said’s words. Quoted by liberals, nationalists and Islamists, TV pundits and literary essayists, Hamlet’s most famous line, “to be or not to be”, resonates across the Arab world as a call to arms, a crisis, a dilemma, an opportunity finally and belatedly to be.

No respecter of the boundaries of academic disciplines, Litvin succeeds in describing the Arab Hamlet as a political and sociological phenomenon, without ever losing her grasp on the aesthetic. She is also refreshingly free from literary theory orthodoxies: her explanatory metaphors remain metaphors rather than becoming a strict theoretical framework. Rather, in engaging and lucid prose, she tells a story, and it is a compelling one. The tale of the Arab Hamlet, properly speaking, begins in the mid-1960s, at the height of Nasserism, when the eyes of the world were on Egypt. Influences from across the world—French-influenced adaptations, Kozintsev’s Soviet film version, Olivier’s English one, and the opinions of German, French, Russian, as well as English critics—provided the context for al-Sayyid Bidayr’s grand, classical production of Hamlet, designed to show that the Arabs could do Shakespeare. Thereafter, the Arab Hamlet tradition became more resolutely local. Through a series of original adaptations and rewritings, the play became part of an Arab tradition of political and “post-political” drama, drawing on global references but concerned with Arab dramas and dilemmas far more than Western ones. This, as Litvin reads it, was not a case of “writing back” to the dominant metropolis—in classic post-colonial theory fashion—but of Hamlet going native, becoming spliced into an Arab dramatic tradition and giving it a series of new twists.

Thus allegorical adaptations of Hamlet in the 1960s and early 1970s cast the prince as a revolutionary in a corrupt world: “the time is out of joint” and Hamlet is “born to set it right”. Litvin draws an apt parallel with the play-within-a-play that Hamlet stages before usurping his uncle Claudius. Like Hamlet’s ”The Mousetrap“, allegorical Hamlets were designed to “catch the conscience” of Arab rulers, for in the heyday of Arab nationalism there was a belief that leaders like Nasser, tyrannical enough to censor plays, were also sensitive enough to understand criticism. After the defeat by Israel in 1967, a huge blow to the status and self-confidence of Arab governments, and the death of Nasser in 1970, political plays tried increasingly to “catch the conscience” of public opinion by exposing their rulers’ injustice. The dead father, calling the Arab hero Hamlet to action, was now reminiscent of the ghost of Nasser and his dreams of an Arab nation unified and strong.

But from the mid-1970s the mood grew altogether darker. There was a growing sense of a political order deaf to irony, intractable to moral pleas, and yet utterly secure in its position. Moreover, especially in Egypt under Sadat, the theatre (and art in general) was becoming reduced despite itself to a form of entertainment—dumbed down for a mass commercial public or made postmodern for a blasé cultural elite. The response from the Hamlet tradition was a host of ironic rewritings. The ghostly father receded into the background or became an unheroic figure; the young prince became powerless and incoherent; and Claudius the tyrant grew to almost godlike proportions. Denmark was rottener than ever. In one play (Mamduh Adwan’s Hamlet Wakes Up Late) Ophelia becomes a whore and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern police informers; in another (Hakim Marzougi’s Ismail/Hamlet) Hamlet himself seems set merely to replace his uncle as tyrant; in a third (Khazal al-Majidi’s “Hamlet” Without Hamlet) he is shipwrecked and drowns on his way to his father’s funeral, leaving the other characters to “muddle along without him”.

As Litvin describes these rewritings we draw closer to the grim heart of the “Arab predicament” of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. They reshuffle and parody the Shakespearean text, with Hamlet himself tongue-tied or emptily bombastic, and his lines quoted back at him by other characters. They offer not the old heroic challenge of “to be or not to be”, but a gloomy hopelessness, a sense that Hamlet has come too late to be anything at all. Here Litvin deftly incorporates a political argument drawn from Lisa Wedeen: the productions’ portrayal of the tyranny of Claudius and his spymaster Polonius in fact confirms the political status quo by showing just how unassailable Arab regimes had become. Far from being vulnerable to exposure by satire, a regime may be all-powerful because it is transparent, as Wedeen argued for the Syrian Ba‘th Party (Ambiguities of Domination, 1999).

In the face of the haplessness of all potential actors and the sheer absurdity of the situation, Litvin detects a move toward “post-political” laughter in Sulayman al-Bassam’s The Al-Hamlet Summit. This English-language rewriting of 2002 offers a pastiche of the world media’s Middle East: al-Jazeera, an Arab League summit; Hamlet an Islamist revolutionary locked in conflict with the tyrant Claudius. The Arab nations are placed firmly within a global context, for even Claudius is subordinated to a shadowy arms trader, missionary of the Western-capitalist God to whom he prays: “I want your pimp ridden plutocracies; I want your world shafting bank; I want it shafting me now….” The last version Litvin describes, Hani Afifi’s I Am Hamlet (first staged in 2009 and due in London for the 2012 Olympics festival), casts George W. Bush as Fortinbras.

One aspect that Litvin notes but does not explore in detail is that even within these “dark meditations” on powerlessness before domestic and international tyranny, one can hear echoes of the old intransigent hero. In Jawad al-Assadi’s Forget Hamlet (1994) these come not from the prince himself but from others. Ophelia is thrust into activism against Claudius’s tyranny despite herself, by the uselessness of all potential male heroes. Laertes, another dissident, before being imprisoned and killed, cries: “Claudius killed the just king! Which of us does not know that! And Hamlet responds to his father’s murder with ‘to be or not to be.’ Be, just for once be, you rat!” From a scene of “post-political” paralysis and despair a line or two thus seems to be directed outwards, a challenge to the sloganeering political world.

One wonders if that world has begun to provide some kind of response in the last year. Since the Arab Spring, Hamlet’s slogan has moved from columns and chat shows to election posters, graffiti, and placards (see Margaret Litvin’s blog for some examples). What might a post-2011 Arab Hamlet look like? The state of Denmark perhaps a little less rotten than it was; the ghosts of past heroes still haunting the stage; tyrant Claudius reduced from monstrous to human stature, but far from dead; secret policeman Polonius up to his tricks again; a shadowy (American?) Fortinbras waiting in the wings; Prince Hamlet regaining something of the aura of a hero, revolutionary, and martyr, but still divided against himself, uncertain of his role. Will he rise to the challenge? Might others, like Ophelia or Laertes, not cast as the hero, defy the scriptwriters and rise to it instead? Will they succumb to paralysis, leaving an omnipotent Claudius to rule on, or to be replaced merely by a Hamlet corrupted into the likeness of his uncle? The scenes play out before not only an Arab but a world audience; the curtain is up, and the ending undecided.

Peter Hill is reading for a MSt in Oriental Studies at St John’s College, Oxford.

Jennifer Homans
Apollo’s Angels
Random House, 2010
672 Pages
$35.00
ISBN 978-1400060603

Darren Aronofsky
Black Swan
Fox Searchlight, 2010

Ballet is dying, according to Jennifer Homans. Her Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet “is, alas, a eulogy, an eloquent and lasting elegy to an unlasting art”, according to Toni Bentley of the New York Times. Of course the book has been called “magisterial” and “epic”, words that signify that a reviewer has managed to keep reading for over 600 pages. But why do that when we can read the reviews, or, better still, go to the cinema? Bentley’s review itself, alongside Aronofsky’s Black Swan, reveals something about this strange and scary world.

Like Homans, Bentley is an insider, an ex-ballerina. Her passion for this “most impossibly fantastic art form”, and the tome that will become its tomb, is manic from the start. It reads like satire:

The tale of the tutu is indeed the story of a bunch of crazy dreamers, dancers, warriors of anatomy who have worked ludicrously hard to formulate, shape and perfect the highest form of the human physique, and the result is a glorious paradox: the manifestation of morality in muscle, truly Whitman’s body electric. What a noble and superb cause! What folly in the face of guaranteed evanescence!

Affecting, clearly—particularly, it seems, to girls. In Black Swan, female adolescence is delayed and restricted by an authoritarian presence—at home as well as in ballet. Watching Nina lace herself up recalls Chinese foot-binding. To invoke love and freedom amongst all that, which is surely the whole point, seems like a tragic joke, like starving wolves before they are sent on patrol.

The film refines emotion from pure, tortured physicality. But can ballet itself do that? Perhaps, but only for the minority who have acquired the taste. Because watching Black Swan is nothing like watching a ballet. In almost every dancing scene the camera takes part in the dance, swinging and swooping among the swans. It gives us the dancers’, not the audience’s, point of view. Those who really appreciate ballet seem to be those who have “taken flight” themselves, who have experienced that paradox of freedom and restriction from the inside. It means something more for them: an intensity that the film gives us, which ballet itself cannot.

An intensity found in revealing, disturbing passage from Bentley’s review of Apollo’s Angels:

Homans even risks some close truths when she points out the reasons for the ‘unusual physical luminosity’ of his [the director Balanchine’s] dancers, who had ‘more dimension, more depth, more range’ than other dancers. ‘Foremost among them was love,’ she writes. ‘Not love for dancing, although that was part of it, but Balanchine’s love.’

It is this theme that drives Black Swan to its own self-destructive climax. And maybe that is the answer, however we take it. Love connects freedom and restriction. Ballet is not dying: it is a succession of unlasting little deaths.

Tom Cutterham is reading for a DPhil in American History at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. He is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

The Habit of Art
Written by Alan Bennett
Directed by Nicholas Hytner
National Theatre until May 2010

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By now, Alan Bennett has written enough great plays to have set himself up for a proverbial fall from greatness. At this time in his career, certain responses are to be expected, chief among them the dismissive and worn out: “His earlier stuff is better.” It’s true that the author of Talking Heads and The History Boys invites unreal expectations, and so whatever came next would be an audience’s chance to dislike something, to balance the record, to relax in the knowledge that a national treasure is as fallible as the rest of us: a mixed bag, only human. We’d forgive him, of course. We’d say “nobody’s perfect”. Hearing that Alan Bennett was writing a play about the life of W.H. Auden, we would be forgiven for thinking this is it. This is the one that lets the side down. But even with these great expectations—the difficult 39th album—The Habit of Art, now showing at the National Theatre, reconfirms Bennett’s status as one of our finest playwrights.

When finding their seats, audiences would be forgiven for thinking they had wandered into the wrong side of the theatre. The stage looks authentically backstage: a half-made set of MDF doorframes and unpainted cupboards, stray chairs and loose papers, an Oxford gown limp on a coat hook and enough clutter to make the flat in Bottom look minimalist. This mess can be partially explained by the play’s rather complicated structure. From beginning to end, it is a play-within-a-play. A group of actors have been left to their own devices, abandoned by their director and given the task of rehearsing for a new drama showing at the National Theatre.

The scenes they rehearse focus on the lives of W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten. Auden has returned from New York and faces a lonely retirement in his Christ Church lodging when Britten comes to discuss a new opera he’s working on—what will later become Death in Venice. Richard Griffiths plays the actor called Fitz, who is playing Auden, and Alex Jennings plays an actor called Henry, who plays Britten. It’s all very meta.

There is much in-character dialogue between Auden and Britten, but also much disruption of the rehearsal. For a third of the play, actors play actors, or writers, and the whole piece remains concerned with acting itself, writing itself—that is, with the habit of art. As a result, this is a play to “get” or “not get”; one with those terribly taxing things—layers—and one which will turn-off a good many theatre-goers merely for being too elaborate.

Still, Auden and Britten are, as most would agree, what the play is about. Bennett has bookended, at least for the moment, what has been almost ten years of successful and successive biographical films. And no subjects have been more to the public’s taste than great artists. There’s the Jackson Pollock film and the Shakespeare film, the Jane Austen film; Beatrix Potter, Truman Capote, and now Keats. Biographical plays are fewer, certainly, but perhaps only because plays are fewer. Shadowlands and The Invention of Love come to mind. And now we have The Habit of Art.

Yet this is a biographical play with a difference. As the writer of the play-within-the-play makes clear, the portrait of Auden offered to us will leave any audience asking, “Where is the poetry?”. There’s no sign of it. Not in the script, not in Griffiths’s portrayal, nowhere. It’s not what we would expect from a play about a poet. Consider the Keats film: when Ben Wishaw isn’t quoting or being quoted to, he stares wistfully into the middle-distance with a poetical glint in his eye; nightingales can be heard in the air and at any moment you expect a butler to walk in and announce,”‘You got a place where I can put this urn?’

Instead, Bennett’s Auden is an intellectual curmudgeon—so far beyond the concerns of the material world that it’s difficult to tell where the mess in his room ends and his clothes begin. Griffiths plays him droll, tired, a year from death, with the faintest suggestion that behind the Oxford man, the homosexual, and the lonely soul, there is a poet struggling to see the worth in his art. But he is lonely before he is a poet, and he is a homosexual before he is a poet. Griffiths’s performance is truly exceptional in its subtlety, and is wonderfully matched by Jennings, in whose Benjamin Britten there is more of the artist on display. He is passionate, erudite, plays the stage piano freely but without excess, and is in full danger of earning himself the title of Quintessential Englishman 1972. However, the dynamic (which seems the only word for it) between poet and composer is not given any serious attention until the second half of the play.

The meta-narrative of The Habit of Art, with its almost ridiculous complexity (comical complexity, certainly), is fulfilling enough to sustain the first hour. But full as it is with Bennett’s signature wit and ear for dialogue, we begin to ask where it’s all going. Particularly, where is our Auden? We know the man was a genius, so where is his profundity? Interruptions to the rehearsal are as frustrating as waiting for Godot as we desperately want the actors to get on with it and show us Auden being a poet.

Yet he never recites a line. Instead, with half an hour to go, Bennett gives us permission to forget about the rehearsal. Forget the layers, he says. For a long scene Britten and Auden converse without interruption, and we are given a heavyweight debate which is both surprising and moving. The men discuss their art, their habit, and what they reveal about their artistic processes satisfies every layer concerned. We realise that all this time we have been watching the pursuit of great art—the unconfident poet, the uncertain composer, but also the struggling actors playing them. The Habit of Art itself is a struggle, yet behind its barefaced devices is a playwright reaching for something beyond a postmodernist puppet show. All great art begins with the unshakable habit, and this seems to be Bennett’s meaning.

In the closing moments, Auden and Britten briefly revert to Fitz and Henry, who leave the stage before coming back to bow as Griffiths and Jennings. At this point, you would be forgiven for leaving the National-within-the-National thinking you had come out on the wrong side of the theatre. You might ask, “Where was the poetry?” and also “Where was the play?”. But Bennett’s great affirmation is the pursuit of art rather than art itself. In the absence of a single stanza of poetic verse, the drama makes clear that in acting, writing, and music, in the words of Auden himself, “what matters is the work.”

Paul Sweeten is reading for an MSt in Creative Writing at Kellogg College, Oxford.

Friedrich Schiller—dramatist, poet, philosopher, historian—was and remains the greatest playwright in the German language. His idioms have taken root in the way the Germans speak and think about themselves; his memory stands as the very measure of literary greatness. Yet last month, Schiller’s 250th birthday came and went largely unheralded, in Germany and elsewhere. Where one might have expected a flood of biographies and anthologies, there was only a trickle of trivia, faded bouquets of his bonmots on contemporary topics, and a few indolent reviews. No critic seemed prepared to argue for—or even against—Schiller’s import.

This silence is not for lack of relevance. The themes with which Schiller dealt in his plays have self-evident appeal to modern taste, and their core is timeless and true: the self-fulfilment of human beings, and the limits of their potential. Drawing his subject matter from the rancorous history of medieval Europe, Schiller cast naïve protagonists against a harsh, uncomprehending world. “The courage to overcome, sooner or later, the resistance of an obtuse Welt” (Jener Mut, der, früher oder später, / Den Widerstand der stumpfen Welt besiegt) was Schiller’s own great virtue, Goethe later wrote in an elegy for his friend. But in Schiller’s plays, the world would usually win.

Schiller was preoccupied most of all with the social and moral responsibilities of human beings, liberated in his time from centuries of political and religious oppression. These are big ideas, explored by a figure who looms larger than most in Europe’s literary history. And it is this, perhaps, that accounts for the lukewarm response to Schiller’s anniversary, and so to his life and work. In short, Schiller’s greatness has made him remote. The veneration of generations within and beyond Germany has assured his place in the history of ideas, but at the same time consigned him to it. His dramatic works, the bedrock of German theater, have been reduced to historical sediment; and the human side of his works, as well as the extraordinary human being behind them, have been dissected to death.

Of course, Schiller was a great man preoccupied with great ideas. But as a dramatist and poet, he explored the intellectual aspirations of the Enlightenment—the Aufklärung—in a way that was deeply practical and psychologically sensitive. According to the consensus which emerged in Schiller’s age, reason is the critical tool by which one overcomes the self-imposed shackles of religious and political oppression. To those who would venerate reason at the expense of the sensual, however, Schiller put the case of Don Carlos, his fourth play.

There, Schiller chronicles the travails of an enlightened Spanish aristocrat, the Marquis de Posa, as he tries to resolve an intrigue surrounding a love affair at court. The failure of reason results in catastrophe: the forces of reaction triumph. But Don Carlos is not just a philosophical or political allegory; Schiller’s characters do not only act rationally or irrationally, but also through genuine feeling. It is this humanity which creates the deepest impression in the audience. As Thomas Mann (who adored the play as a boy) has his protagonist gush in the short story Tonio Kröger, “some passages are so rivetingly beautiful they almost make you see stars”. Don Carlos is a plain case for reading Schiller more broadly, for although an intellectualist lens works, it obscures Schiller’s fundamentally affective point.

The remote, intellectual veneer surrounding Schiller’s work also surrounds the man himself. In seeking the many-sided human being in his plays and poetry, we might then begin with the human being behind them. Schiller’s life, like his life’s work, was classic in the fullest sense. Like his friend Goethe, he strove to emulate the polymath excellence of the great figures of classical antiquity. The results of this effort showed: Schiller’s writings on the theory of art were taken seriously by the likes of Kant, while his ability and fame as a playwright positioned him to tell Goethe that the Iphigenie auf Tauris—Goethe’s adaptation of the Euripidean tragedy—was tedious. And such was Schiller’s earnestness, his perfectionism, that he would anonymously publish sharp critiques of his own plays as soon as they had been produced. Behind Schiller’s philosophical and poetic opus is a man who lived with an inexhaustible wholeheartedness and an irresistible sense of potential.

The ideal actor, Schiller once wrote, must always walk a tightrope between intellectual mannerism and “imitation of nature”. Like this actor, Schiller’s plays traverse a middle road between thought and feeling. In doing so, they offer a vision of how the extremes of mind and heart might be reconciled, on stage and in life. Late in his career, Schiller claimed that all his efforts would be worthwhile if his viewer could recognise a personal reality in the playwright’s fictional world—if that viewer, by contemplating someone else’s fate, realises that he is simultaneously contemplating his own. As he explained it, “A noble and true soul will be enlivened and invigorated by the stage—and as for the rabble, there is surely some lost chord of humanity to be struck in their hearts.”

To Schiller, poetry is both the illustration and the instrument of the perfectibility of man. No sentiment could seem more old-fashioned, nor more appropriate for our times. If we could for a moment abandon the intellectual consensus which banishes the author from his own work, we may find in Friedrich Schiller a man who fulfilled the potential and the optimism of his writings—a man who was truly alive.

Schiller’s physique was not as robust as his intellect. He worked through many years of serious illness and died young, at age 44. After his death, an autopsy revealed that his inner organs, in particular his lungs, had almost completely dissolved. Schiller’s body was not fit for purpose; but then he never did accept that physical necessity or practical purpose (Nutzen) should govern existence. This was an aristocratic ideal, of course, but one that was tempered by his belief in the basic freedom of human beings. Indeed, Schiller’s enduring faith in freedom explains why later generations have felt liberated by reading his poetry and inspired by his life—even today, when man is much freer than Schiller could have dreamed.

Christopher Metcalf is reading for a DPhil in Classical Languages and Literature at Balliol College, Oxford. 

Matt Charman
The Observer
Directed by Richard Eyre
The National Theatre until July 8

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When seasoned election observer Fiona Russell (Anna Chancellor) encourages a man who has been savagely beaten for ferrying people to the polls to use a van to carry even greater numbers, her faith in the power of elections to achieve democracy seems callously short-sighted. The man’s mother, who has brought a bloodied rearview mirror to Russell and her team of international observers in the hopes that they will do something about the violence, is mortified at the suggestion; she literally cannot understand Russell, who assures her loudly and slowly in English that her son’s actions should make her proud.

This scene in Matt Charman’s new play The Observer throws the tensions surrounding the role of electoral observers into relief. As the title suggests, the play is primarily concerned with the electoral umpires responsible for determining whether the process of an election are sufficiently “free and fair” to consider the results valid. In the aforementioned scene, the woman’s unrealistic faith in the observers’ powers highlights the limited authority that they wield in a local context despite the possible significance of their findings. This dynamic underpins a central concern of the play, the dissonance between the observers’ idealized conception of elections and the imperfect manner in which they are inevitably executed.

The bureaucratic task of electoral monitoring might not seem to be the stuff of high drama. The observers are hardly dashing heroes, clothed, as they are, in uniforms of blue polo shirts and khaki pants, with officious laminated identity tags hung from their necks. The play reveals, however, that the observers are routinely placed in situations where they must make snap judgments based largely on their own intuition. This puts a strain on the team and calls into question their legitimacy when quick decisions are shown to have important consequences.

A strong ensemble cast under the direction of Richard Eyre ably explores the ways in which the observers and locals negotiate personal and professional objectives. In a tense face-off with an army general, Russell strives to get the incumbent to accept electoral defeat while the general seeks to define the terms of his concession. The shock that flits across the face of her interpreter highlights the extent to which she has brazenly taken on responsibility to engage him on matters beyond her remit.

Charman paints the work of the international electoral observer team as a highly subjective and immensely difficult task. The interpretative nature of the observers’ work is captured in a scene where Russell and her team of two argue over what to include in their report. Should they include reports that student opposition supporters were intimidated and forced to eat their placards? Was this shown to materially have affected the elections? Once one accepts that standards of fair elections are often set impossibly high, and that that impossibility often leads to a slackening of the criteria for assessment, such judgments are almost dangerously arbitrary.

The impartiality of Russell’s decisions is threatened, however, not by unrealistic monitoring criteria, but by her preferences for the opposition candidate. She puts more stock in the possibilities offered by a change in leadership than the prospect of continued rule under the ogre-ish autocrat who ruled the country before the onset of multiparty electoral competition. Motivated by these preferences, she convinces the electoral commission to allow her team to register more voters in between the first closely contested elections and the next round run-off.

Blind to the degree of her involvement, she defends her action in terms of a principled interest in enabling citizens to vote. This tension drives the plot as Russell struggles to deny the true implications of her action, evoking the travails of numerous other naïve protagonists such as Alden Pyle in The Quiet American. Chancellor gives a convincing portrayal of an emotionally inaccessible workaholic, self-righteously executing her office out of a blind faith in the power and importance of elections. To the extent that her breakdown in the second half becomes tiresomely weepy, it is a weakness of the plot, which, in a moralizing turn toward tragedy, overdoes her descent into dejection.

Placing the play in a “fictitious, Igbo-speaking, former colony in West Africa”, Charman runs the risk of distorting the intricacies of the continent. He skirts this danger with credibly complex characters, successfully avoiding the misrepresentations that could so easily riddle a play about conflict in Africa. A scene where Russell confronts the electoral commission to ask if she can help them register more voters could easily have become a cliché: the defender of democracy, facing off against lazy, self-interested African office-bearers. As the episode unfolds, however, our faith in her is undermined by her self-righteousness, even as she betrays her inferior knowledge of the country’s electoral law. In turn, we become more sympathetic to the commissioners as we realise their commitment to ensuring peace in their country.

Ultimately, the play offers a pessimistic view of elections and democratization, suggesting that a competitive struggle for the people’s vote is necessary but not sufficient to create a democratic system of government. The Observer reminds us of the human aspect of a subject often deadened by statistics, showing how a democratic procedure that has become routine in many developed countries can be a battleground in others.

Tumi Makgetla is reading for an MPhil Politics in Comparative Government at New College, Oxford. She is a contributing editor of the Oxonian Review.

Michael Boyd
William Shakespeare’s As You Like It
The Royal Shakespeare Company
The Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
In repertoire through October 3

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In Michael Boyd’s new production of As You Like It, the action moves from the frozen monochrome of a court in crisis to a forest less welcoming than a Siberian tundra. The comedy of Rosalind following her father into exile in the Forest of Arden is often portrayed as a play of riotous thigh slapping and lurid green sets, with plenty of opportunity for flowers, straw, and a strutting “Ganymede” (Rosalind’s male alter-ego; this being Shakespeare, she exchanges her skirt for trousers for much of the play). Instead, the latest Royal Shakespeare Company production finds both savagery and beauty in this beloved Shakespeare play. The result is a compelling exploration of the comedy’s dark heart.

Returning from the Histories season, Boyd and designer Tom Piper create a new aesthetic for the new RSC ensemble. From the blue-ochre blaze of the Histories sets, Piper has moved to a starker, colder look.  Initially, the stage is spare, the back of the courtyard dominated by a gleaming silver-white structure of square panels. Its metallic sheen provides a static backdrop to the glittering, inhospitable court that Duke Ferdinand, Orlando and Adam, Rosalind, Celia, and Touchstone successively flee.

But then Boyd and Piper unleash destruction on the set: the wrestling bout between Orlando and Charles smears the panels with blood; an enormous ball of straw bursts through double doors—quite literally the forest of Arden. Inside is Richard Katz’s Touchstone, a man with the frizzy grey hair of a clown, with his legs strait-jacketed together. The square panels are opened, battered, or removed altogether, revealing a casual abattoir (a deer hangs from a meathook, coat glistening), dead branches, or a dusty, yellow light. Instead of elegant poems on parchment, Orlando’s sonnets are big black letters on scrappy placards, enormous cardboard panels suspended from the flies or pinned to the pillars and set. In this production, the concepts As You Like It usually conveys with charm—clown, forest, poetry—are pushed to their limits, creating visual shocks that alternately amuse and surprise.

At the end of the interval, Geoffrey Freshwater as Corin guts and skins a real dead rabbit onstage. Detractors may find it too gory, but even the decapitation (a flash of the cleaver while the audience braces itself) is remarkable more for its efficiency than for its horror. The moment is an effective metaphor for a production fighting audience assumptions about this cosy comedy. Boyd’s As You Like It refuses the notion that a big-budget staging has to look safe or beautiful.

Where other productions gloss the play’s darkness to foreground the comedy, Boyd and his cast address the psychological impact of the characters’ experiences. Katy Stephens’s Rosalind is, above all, a woman who has just lost her father, and her performance has the sharpness of raw grief. Rosalind’s love for Orlando is as painful as it is instantaneous, and in the intimacy of the courtyard, it’s a shock to see her stand on the stage with tears in her eyes after the first wooing scene. Rather than looking the part of a wriggling schoolboy, when Stephens cross-dresses to become Ganymede, she turns into a dashing young man. She is the only Rosalind I’ve seen who convinces in the fainting scene, when Rosalind has to endure news of her beloved Orlando’s tussle with a lion, herself dressed as the male Ganymede (a slightly spivvy aesthete in Barbour and moustache). Usually, Rosalind keels over at the briefest flash of Orlando’s blood-stained handkerchief; here, she is forced to stand with the gory white scarf around her neck until the proximity of the blood becomes excruciating. Both of them are fighters, the extent of the blood indicating just how much Orlando had to bear.

Mariah Gale’s Celia is Rosalind’s junior, a princess full of an enthusiasm that renders her vulnerable. Celia is a problematic role: she tends to disappear into the trees as the Rosalind-Orlando relationship takes over. Her own last-minute love plot with Oliver is conveyed in a couple of sentences. Nevertheless, Boyd fleshes out the role with a bizarre, but enjoyable, dream sequence and a well-cast Oliver. As Oliver, Charles Aitken, a veteran of physical theatre companies such as Headlong and Frantic Assembly, echoes Stephens’s Rosalind by rooting his performance in trauma, which stems from a father’s death.

The most memorable performance comes from Forbes Masson as Jacques, the melancholic courtier who masterminds the utopian project of Duke Ferdinand’s exile. Masson plays a gin-soaked Goth with sneering blacked eyes and a purple velvet blazer, faintly ridiculous with his Cuban heels and ginger hair ruffled to the ends. Masson sings with intensity. His tenor is disarmingly icy, like Rufus Wainwright turned malevolent choirboy. There’s a hint of the jilted lover in his sneering, bitter relationship with Clarence Smith’s Duke Ferdinand, the exile who sets out to find “sermons in stones, books in the running brooks”. Ferdinand raises Jacques’s hopes of a utopia in Arden, but by the end of the play, those hopes are dashed. When Duke Ferdinand’s crown is miraculously restored, the company drops to their knees, while Jacques stays standing. His sense of contempt as Ferdinand takes the crown—the lure of power is just too strong for the exiled duke—is palpable; their sylvan dream is shattered. Jacques skulks offstage alone, leaving the festivities he can no longer enjoy.

The members of Boyd’s new ensemble have, in As You Like It, created an almost flawless conception of a fiercely flawed world. This company will perform together until 2011, opening the New Royal Shakespeare Theatre currently being built. Traditionally, acting contracts are much shorter, forcing actors into hothouse collaborations lasting only for the few weeks of rehearsal. The Long Ensemble, together since January, has time to develop intense relationships with one another and with the roles they will reprise in future seasons. The visceral emotion and fierce intelligence of this production suggests that summers in Stratford will be hot for years to come.

Sophie Duncan is reading for an MSt in English Literature at Oriel College, Oxford, where she is focusing on Victorian theatre. She is the Theatre Editor of the Oxonian Review.

Roger Scruton
Beauty
Oxford University Press, 2009
176 pages
£10.99
ISBN 978-0199559527

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“A thing of beauty is a joy forever”, begins John Keats’s Endymion. Like all platitudes, this raises more questions than it answers: does beauty remain the same over time? Are all things of beauty equal? And what, exactly, is “a thing of beauty”? Elsewhere, Keats tells us that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”. But, like his other dictum, this claim may be more beautiful than true. In dealing with a concept at once so grand and so personal as beauty, perhaps a certain amount of slippage is inevitable.

Roger Scruton sets out to answer the questions raised by our tired clichés, arguing that beauty is a single quality, that its value is universal, and that it remains important to this day. Beauty, though, is no more satisfying than much of the reasoning it seeks to displace. Scruton seems unclear whether he is writing a meditation on the experience of beauty (along the lines of his England: An Elegy), a work of analytic aesthetics (as he did in the now-standard Aesthetics of Music and Aesthetics of Architecture), or (as in a recent public debate arguing that “Britain has become indifferent to beauty”) a work of cranky cultural criticism. Beauty fulfills the first aim admirably, is far too short to bear the academic weight of the second, and gives too much space to the third. In the end, the book is a frustrating mix of the personal and the academic, the profound and the petty.

Scruton’s approach is a hybrid between the classic tradition of aesthetics that tries to formulate the individual experience of beauty and twentieth-century analytical philosophy’s scrutiny of what the word “beautiful” means. In pursuing the first, phenomenological method, Scruton draws widely on authors from Plato to Alain de Botton, though what he writes is fueled more than anything by personal experience. The other, more rigorous approach leads him to identify a series of “platitudes about beauty” in the first pages of the book, to which he occasionally returns to support his observations. This mediation between common perceptions and their linguistic formulations is a typical method of analytical aesthetics, but here, in tandem with a more personal, idiosyncratic account, reducing beauty to its least controversial elements yields little fruit. In comparison with Scruton’s rich descriptions of beauty’s manifold effects, the more analytic passages feel sterile.

Scruton is committed to the view that beauty is one thing—the same in all times and places—and that the difference between spheres in which we encounter it is a difference of degree and not of kind. This makes for an illuminating account of “everyday beauty”, the modest ways humans seek to order their environment in pleasing ways. For Scruton, the way a house may fit in with its surroundings is no less important than the qualities that make a great work of architecture stand out. This notion of a continuum between “minimal beauty” and the great works of art is Scruton’s most original contribution, and grounds the argument that beauty is an essential part of human life, something that lingers long after a symphony has ended or we have turned away from a landscape. Beauty in all its forms helps us to feel at home in the world.

This is a powerful argument, and salutary in a world where beauty, conceived monolithically as the quality found in art, is often thought to be an effete indulgence. By arguing that a Rembrandt painting and a properly-set dinner table manifest the same quality, Scruton takes beauty out of the museum and places it in daily life. This does not preclude a hierarchy within beautiful objects (he has no problem judging certain works of art the “highest form of beauty”), but it gives a new dignity to lesser species of beauty that seek to fit in and suggests that the greatest artistic beauty can be the experience of ekstasis, standing out.

Yet this unitary concept of beauty also leads Scruton to be quite narrow-minded about what does and does not count. In his final chapter, Scruton examines “The Flight from Beauty”, which he sees as pervasive in contemporary society and particularly pernicious in modern art: “More recent art cultivates a posture of transgression, matching the ugliness of the things it portrays with an ugliness of its own. Beauty is downgraded as something too sweet, too escapist and too far from realities to deserve our undeceived attention.”

This rings of the denunciations that have accompanied changes in art throughout history, from Aristophanes’ satire of Euripides in the Frogs to polemics against Impressionism and the even more vehement debates surrounding Modernism. Undeniably, art today admits of more chaos than it has in the past; but, as Scruton recognizes, dissonance has always been a part of art. Indeed, many of the most powerful works dance on the edge of ugliness (think of Greek tragedy or Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron). Great art can—and sometimes should—unsettle us.

This mixing of pleasurable and unpleasurable impressions is often called “the sublime” in contrast to “the beautiful”, though Scruton might describe it as a kind of beauty that stands out radically. Contemporary art often resists the viewer; its beauty must be won from confrontation. But in an age that has seen man’s powers of destruction increase thousandfold, and finds itself regularly saturated with images of violence and suffering, an untroubled sense of harmony, like that we find in the Botticelli portrait on Scruton’s cover, may indeed feel illusory. Beauty seems not to be at home in the world, today more radically than ever. Our age, as the French theorist Lyotard argued, is more oriented toward the sublime than the beautiful.

Scruton deplores this sublime tendency in contemporary art. But in doing so, he assumes too narrow a concept of what beauty is. Many of the most successful works of the past half-century—think Anselm Kiefer’s brutalist sculptures or Harold Pinter’s violent, inscrutable dramas—achieve a sublime effect through confrontation with ugliness, a flight from beauty that leads back to the beautiful. Instead of detachment and clarity, these pieces offer an intense engagement that is no less a way of making the world our own. This can be jarring and even off-putting at first, but so have been most new means of creating beauty throughout history.

As Scruton argues, the best works of art always make us feel at home in the world. But today they do so by recognizing and incorporating the world’s ugliness, making what is beautiful stand out more wondrous and more strange.

Joshua Billings is a doctoral student in Classics at Merton College, Oxford, writing his dissertation on Greek tragedy and German philosophy. He is a senior editor of the Oxonian Review.

Dancing at Lughnasa
The Old Vic
Directed by Anna Mackmin
Running until 9 May 2009

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Outside the Vic on a sunny, smoke-coloured afternoon, the superlatives fly freely on the blurb for Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa. The most famous work of Ireland’s best-known living playwright, Lughnasa won both an Olivier and a Tony Award with its 1991 premiere. Now it has been reverently revived by director Anna Mackmin. The notorious curmudgeon Friel (director Mackmin said that, during the auditions process, Irish actors would ask her sympathetically how she was getting on with him) receives total textual fidelity from Mackmin; speaking before the show, she says she altered “one word” of Friel’s script.

The story centres on 1930s rural Ireland and the last shared summer of the five Mundy sisters; Catholic spinsters, the youngest of whom, Chris (Andrea Corr, in a radiant stage debut) has an illegitimate son, Michael, aged seven. As an adult, Michael (Peter McDonald) narrates the story in retrospect, recounting the play’s events as childhood memories.

With a lavish set by Lez Brotherston that fits the Old Vic’s aesthetic under Kevin Spacey – productions that look as expensive as the snazzy American Airlines auditorium bar – it’s clear before curtain up that we’re dealing with A Classic. A comfortable classic: Friel’s most lyrical and least controversial play, Lughnasa presents a romanticised Irishness devoid of troubling historical specifics. Conveniently for London audiences, it’s an Irish play that – unusually – doesn’t mention what Frank McCourt called “the English and what they did to us for 800 years”. By presenting us with a world that Michael’s “When I look back” narration constantly describes as “lost”, Friel’s audience is soothed rather than provoked by this endlessly elegiac work.

Lughnasa’s set-up of spinster sisters and narrowing lives is undeniably reminiscent of Chekhov’s plays, which Friel has adapted five times since 1981; however, Lughnasa’s characters lack the life of Chekhov’s three sisters. Each of the Prozorov women, longing for city freedoms they never achieve (see what I mean about the parallels with Friel?), is filled with a full, distinct internal life. From the chaos of desires, inhibitions, and old wounds, Chekhov fashions an endlessly compelling drama. The emotions in Friel’s “Five Sisters” are much more tidy, the conflicts more obvious. Lughnasa never manages to break out of its opening set-up, and is chiefly notable for the opportunity it affords to unite five talented actresses. As with the recent revival of Madame de Sade (starring Judi Dench, Rosamund Pyke, and others), the cast’s strength enhances Lughnasa’s unremarkable script.

The sisters are superb: their detailed interactions with the set and each other – making bread, unpacking endless items of shopping – ensure there is always plenty to watch. As the eldest sister, the devout Kate, Michelle Fairley uses a savage constancy of voice and physicality to bring the schoolteacher’s tragedy to life; desperate to bind her family together, she instead ends up driving it apart. Arguing passionately for duty and responsibility, Kate’s creed now seems the least sympathetic of the play. Fairley really understands the ensemble dynamic, and is able alternately to eschew and command centre-stage from moment to moment. When it’s her time to be seen, she is arresting. Notably, all four women are at their strongest when playing opposite her.

Niamh Cusack’s ebullient, expansive creation of Maggie, the “family joker” who tries to temper Kate’s rigidity, provokes the feelings such a big woman would create in such a small house; she convincingly overcrowds the space. But even if it’s an honest choice, it’s not entirely successful. Against the control and understatement of the other women, Cusack’s huge gestures and husky vocality feel self-consciously stagey. Although often engaging, Cusack’s performance also annoys: she slows the pace with her solo performance when what interests the audience is the progress of the play.

Simone Kirby’s Rose, the middle sister with unspecified learning disabilities, could have all the embarrassment of a bad Ophelia, but instead brings out Mackmin’s eye for subtleties. To the memorable horror of Fairley’s Kate, Rose is conducting a love affair with the unseen (and perhaps unscrupulous) Danny Mack. After an afternoon’s unexplained absence, Rose returns to her terrified sisters apparently unharmed, unaltered. She looks fine. Then we see: at first silently, then under dialogue, Aggy moves to her, and quietly rebuttons Rose’s open blouse. A dreadful stillness covers the theatre at that moment, but Kirby’s passion, as Rose defends the peace Danny has brought her, turns the story from the abuse of a child to the consent of a woman with intelligence, depth and desire.

It is sex, then, rather than poverty that threatens the sisters’ unity: above all, the sexual threat of Gerry, Michael’s feckless father, whom Chris (and not just Chris) passionately loves. Jo Stone-Fewings is the play’s comic core, revitalising the elegiac pensiveness of the sisters and the occasional slowness of Friel’s style. Deepening an underwritten role, Stone-Fewings’s mix of clowning tragedy and high farce suggests more self-awareness than is usually given to Gerry: this chancer knows he’s a failure more than he’s a charmer. There is a whole other play to be written about him.

The botched structure of Friel’s script makes the play’s ending unsatisfying. Michael’s narrative rattle suddenly interrupts the action to tell us all the fates of all the characters before, abruptly, returning to action that now feels meaningless. We are told that Aggy and Rose will flee the family, for reasons neither Friel’s script nor Mackmin’s direction explain. Stronger direction, willing to defy Friel’s ambiguities and find those reasons, would satisfy an audience who sit blinking through Michael’s final, softly surreal monologue, fobbed off with more elegy when what they want is an end to the story. Better still, give such talent, such direction and such money to a more vital Friel script – Translations, for example, or his Cherry Orchard. The pleasure of this revival comes not from the lines Friel writes, but from the images Mackmin and her ensemble create: Maggie, baking real bread before the Old Vic audience; Rose, standing dishevelled before her sisters; the unexpected sensuality of Aggy, lifted into Gerry’s arms. The joyful naturalism of these moments works far better than the slow poetry of the unlikeable Michael’s narration. This Lughnasa needs more dancing.

Sophie Duncan is reading for an MSt in English Literature at Oriel College, Oxford, focusing on Victorian theatre. She is the Theatre Editor of the Oxonian Review.

Photograph of Dancing at Lughnasa © Tristram Kenton

M.D. Fehsenfeld, L.M. Overbeck, D. Gunn and G. Craig (eds.)
The Letters of Samuel Beckett (1929-1940), vol. 1
Cambridge University Press, 2009
782 pages
£30.00
ISBN 978-0521867931

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On the night of 6 January 1938, Samuel Beckett was stabbed in the chest by a French pimp named Robert-Jules Prudent while walking home with friends. Narrowly missing his left lung and heart, the blow confined him to a Paris hospital for over two weeks. When Beckett later met the improbably named Prudent in court and asked why he had attacked, the Frenchman responded wryly: “Je ne sais pas, monsieur. Je m’excuse (I don’t know why, sir. I’m sorry).” In hindsight, it all seems like an episode out of one of Beckett’s own plays, highlighting as it does the absurd contingency of life, the untoward and irrational behaviour of the down-and-out.

Amused by his assailant’s response and ever wary of guarding his privacy, Beckett chose not to press charges. In a gesture of qualified compassion, he had already written from the hospital to his friend Thomas McGreevy that he found his assailant “more cretinous than malicious”. Because Beckett never divulged his inner feelings about the episode, we can only surmise the extent to which it coloured his imagination and might have prompted the composition of later masterpieces of human dejection like Waiting for Godot (1953) and Endgame (1957).

Had Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) not survived his stabbing, he would be largely forgotten today. His legacy would comprise a few poems, short stories and a novel, Murphy, the proofs of which he corrected while convalescing from his stabbing. Yet, as James Knowlson indicates in the title of his 1996 biography, Beckett was “damned to fame”, living to the age of 83 and writing some of the most important plays and novels of the 20th century, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969. His wife, Suzanne, called the prize “a catastrophe” for the intensely private Beckett.

But for Beckett’s fans, the nitty-gritty facts of his private life have always held great interest. Now, with the arrival of the long-awaited Letters of Samuel Beckett (1929-1940), the first in a projected four-volume collection of Beckett’s correspondence, interest in Beckett “the man” only promises to increase. This is not a bad thing at all, as the letters will likely draw readers to Beckett’s more neglected early works, like the superb Murphy.

Letters concerned with the more intimate and potentially scurrilous details of Beckett’s early life, particularly his numerous romantic involvements, have been culled for the most part by the editors, owing more to the enormous mass of letters (over 15,000) in the Beckett archive than to any prudish censorial agenda. We are not spared, however, intimate details of the various ailments Beckett suffered during this period, from “sebaceous cysts” and “lumps between the wind and the water” to “heart palpitations” that seem to have put a provisional fear of God in him. The letters suggest that Beckett was either uncomfortable all the time or a pathological hypochondriac.

For the most part, though, the letters document Beckett’s alternately joyous and miserable youthful peregrinations through Ireland, France, England and Germany as a student, lecturer, tutor, fledgling writer and exquisite loafer. We find him straining to discipline himself as a writer and undertaking a rigorous programme of self-education in the arts and humanities, ranging from European literature and philosophy to music, foreign language, theatre, visual art and even film.

Fittingly, the first two entries in the volume—short, factual notes—are addressed to James Joyce, whom Beckett affectionately dubs “Shem” or “the Penman” in his letters to friends. Beckett was Joyce’s most gifted disciple, working as one of his research assistants for “Work in Progress” (later titled Finnegans Wake) and publishing essays in support of Joyce’s experimental style. He met Joyce in Paris in 1928 through his close friend, confidante and fellow writer, Thomas McGreevy, who is, incidentally, the most frequent addressee in this collection.

Beckett laboured under Joyce’s shadow early on, writing to his friend Samuel Putnam in 1932: “I vow I will get over J.J. before I die. Yessir.” But even more pressing than Beckett’s anxiety of Joycean influence was his concern to overcome the inherited limitations of his own style and mother tongue, namely, the unavoidable stylishness and obtuseness of his English writing. A 1937 letter to Beckett’s acquaintance Axel Kaun illuminates this point:

It is indeed getting more and more difficult, even pointless, for me to write in formal English. . . . To drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through—I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer.

The letter is noteworthy not only because it captures the stylistic underpinnings of his later work, but because it was originally written in German. Indeed, Beckett wrote letters both in passable German and in impeccable French, with snatches of Italian and Latin scattered throughout. Fortunately for non-readers of German, French, Latin and Italian (to name just the major languages that appear), the editors have translated every foreign-language letter, phrase and free-standing word into English.

Beckett’s linguistic brilliance must not be overlooked, particularly because it is so much at odds with his impulse toward linguistic minimalism. How did he balance these opposing qualities in himself? Simply put, he did not, but grappled with stylistic questions his whole career, paring his voice down again and again. Reading the passage above, we come to understand Beckett’s motives for composing much of his post-World War II work in French, notably Waiting for Godot, Endgame and the novel “trilogy” Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951) and The Unnamable (1953). For Beckett, writing in French satisfied an artistic imperative to lay bare the “something or nothing” lurking behind language, an imperative that writing in English seemed to preclude. He aspired to a style-less style that, in its linguistic impoverishment, would raise ideas of negation, impotence and nothingness to a kind of sublime.

Of course, Beckett’s artistic interests extended far beyond literature. In early 1936, Beckett wrote to Sergei Eisenstein, a film director in Moscow, asking to be taken on as his assistant. While Beckett admitted to having no experience of studio work, he wrote, rather clunkily: “It is because I realise that the script is function of its means of realisation that I am anxious to make contact with your mastery of [scenario and editing work].” Although Beckett never heard back from Eisenstein, the letter gestures toward Beckett’s later commitment to drama, the medium for which he is now best known. Beckett went on to write and direct several short films.

We also find him keen to register his opinions about music. In a letter to his cousin, Morris Sinclair, he confesses an inability to make peace with Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, into which the composer “poured everything that was vulgar, facile and childish in him”. Beckett does speak glowingly, however, of Beethoven’s last String Quartet in F (opus 135), which he saw performed in 1934; Beckett was particularly gripped by the epigraph of the final movement: “Der schwer gefasste Entschluss / Muss es sein? Es muss sein! Es muss sein! (The heart-wrenching decision / Must it be? / It must be! / It must be!”) One is reminded of the final lines of Beckett’s 1953 novel, The Unnamable: “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

One could go on listing for pages and pages Beckett’s meditations on art (“I like that crouching brooding quality in Keats—squatting on the moss, crushing a petal, licking his lips & rubbing his hands”), politics (“Germany is horrible”, written on 13 December 1936) and life (“It is so much simpler to be hurt than to hurt”). But that would spoil the fun of perusing this volume and finding for oneself such “shining agates of negation”, to appropriate one of Beckett’s phrases in an early letter. At nearly 800 pages and bulwarked with extensive introductory and biographical material, this first volume is a formidable work of scholarship, destined to assume its rightful place beside The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats and the Letters of James Joyce as essential reading of 20th century Anglophone literature.

The iconic image of Beckett as a wizened, austere prophet of the barrenness and inhuman desolation of the modern world is dispelled, or at least qualified, on nearly every page of this epistolary portrait of a prodigiously gifted, neurotic, humane, and, malgré lui, ineluctably human writer. As he writes in the last letter in the volume (in French) to Marthe Arnaud: “You think you are choosing something, and it is always yourself that you choose; a self that you did not know, if you are lucky.”

Stephen Ross is reading for an MSt in English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford.