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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Drama and Criticism

Drama and Criticism

Samuel Beckett’s Play was performed in Germany in 1963. Three characters, a man and two women, occupy three large urns on the stage. Their monologues (monologues even when recited in chorus) recapitulate the contours of a hopeless triangular relationship. It seems likely that Beckett is dramatising an imagined state of life after death similar to that envisaged by Sartre in the play In Camera. The language is dense, fragmentary and obscure: but the vision has its own perverse force. The two small radio pieces, Words and Music and Cascando, are more private and disjointed. It is doubtful whether even a true poet of the Absurd, such as Beckett, has tried to be, can write successfully for public media in a code language.

A selection from the Times Literary Supplement 1963 contains, among other pieces, a survey of the critical standards of W.H. Auden, some valuable political comment on Hitler and his generals, and a down-grading review of Henry Miller’s until-recently banned writings. The selection is necessarily very heterogeneous, at its best an interesting rag-bag.

1965 (333)