Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Beyond Minimalism explores Beckett's drama of the '70s and '80s, examining the ways in which play text and performance merge through the playwright's poetic idiom. Beginning with Not I and continuing through Catastrophe and What Where, Brater examines the plays not only as texts but also as theater pieces. Discussing the technical and aesthetic demands that productions like Footfalls and Rockaby make on actor, director, and spectator, Brater clarifies the essential relationship between Beckett's achievement in the context of the breakdown of genre, performance poetry, and the electronic intrusion of the recorded voice as a new theatrical convention. In the course of his analysis Brater demonstrates how Beckett's late style in the theater both continues and clarifies the dramatic lyricism that is the hallmark of earlier works such as Endgame and Waiting for Godot.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Brater examines Beckett's eight most recent plays, from Not I (London, 1973) to Ohio Impromptu, Catastrophe, and What Where, which were published in 1984. Noting the primacy of the stage image even in the earlier work, Brater moves through the verbal language of these later pieces to those elements of production-movement, sound, silence, costume, design, gesture, and, especially, lighting-that Beckett conceptualizes in the text. He argues that the late plays sustain,in dramatic form, the poetic moments already identifiable in Waiting for Godot (1952) and Endgame (1957) and culminate in Rockaby (1981), a ``performance poem.'' Brater sees Beckett's late plays as representing, individually and collectively, a generic breakthrough; he does not, however, view them as the endgame of the Beckett canon, which is a rigorous and continuing movement toward restructuring the dramatic medium. Brater's command of the primary and secondary Beckett material is everywhere present in this gracefully written, solidly researched, perceptive, often penetrating work, which not only succeeds in illuminating ``the same but less'' but moves the study of Beckett's plays beyond minimalism. The book contains excellent notes and a suggestive bibliography. Recommended for all libraries.-J. Schlueter, Lafayette College

Author notes provided by Syndetics

EnochBraterProfessor of English and TheaterUniversity of Michigan; past President of the Samuel Beckett Society.