Beckett in Performance

"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 book enormous value even as an introduction, albeit a special kind of introduction, to his theatre...The result of Kalb's delineation of Beckett's uniquely disciplined existential drama will, for many, be the discovery of an artist whose achievement was even larger and more original than they had thought. For others, there will be much to contend with in these pages, but no one who seeks to understand the process and the experience of his art upon the stage can afford to ignore them." John Swan, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism "...the book has provided for the first time a theatrically driven analysis of the work of this century's greatest playwright." Rick Davis, Theatre Three "In his close attention to production values and in his ability to move from specific performances to general ideas about the nature of theatre and of interpretation, Jonathan Kalb presents a much needed addition to Beckett criticism." Linda Ben-Zvi, Essays in Theatre