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Graley Herren. Samuel Beckett's Ploys on Film ond Television. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 228pp. $65.
Samuel Beckett's Plays on Film and Television is the first book to focus primarily on Beckett's screen-plays-a fact that Herren boldly acknowledges in his introduction when thoroughly mapping out the scholarship available on Beckett's work for the large and small screen. While there are numerous articles that deal with Beckett's film and teleplays (the most notable being Gilles Deleuze's "The Exhausted"-a work that Herren often cites), few since Clas Zilliacus in Beckett and Broadcasting (1976) have studied the media plays in great length. This, Herren argues, is in part due to the inaccessibility of the teleplays and film. They are rarely screened even at Beckett conferences. Unlike the original BBC radio productions which have been transferred to CD and made available in 2006, none of the original BBC or SDR teleplays have been available for purchase. Despite this, Herren's study proves valuable to more than just those Beckett scholars haunted by his screen images; Herren's approach-tracing the intratextual and intertextual references in the screen images-situates the teleplays and film more fully than before into the Beckett canon. What is more, his descriptions of the screen-plays are so vivid that even those who have not seen them will gain a better appreciation of these obscure works. Merely reading the scripts, as Herren points out, is problematic because for Beckett they served as blueprints; the performances...