That theatre is an embodiment of text is a truism of contemporary performance studies, but the implications of such an observation are rarely interrogated thoroughly. Even Ezra Pound famously proclaimed that the medium of drama is not words, but people moving about a stage using words. Beckett will challenge some of Pound's terms, of course. ‘People’? ‘Moving’? ‘Stage’? A salient virtue of McMullan's study is that she has selected a dramatist who himself was preoccupied with interrogating the possibilities of performance, the implications, variations and limitations of textual and bodily intersection, and so we have both a careful assessment of Beckett's theatre practice, and a psychoanalytic, feminist meditation on the implications of texts and embodiment. Beckett's drama ‘provokes modes of perceiving, conceiving and experiencing embodiment that address wider preoccupations with corporeality, technology and systems of power’ (p. 2).

McMullan introduces much of the book's theoretical framework in something of a series of snapshots, on ‘The Cartesian Legacy’, ‘Psychoanalysis’, ‘Phenomenology’ and performance theory itself, each a trenchant assessment if none is exhaustive. What follows is nine chapters and a conclusion that takes us through Beckett's theatrical career, beginning with his first student adaptation and performance in 1931. What resulted on the boards in Beckett's first theatrical venture was a travesty, one which Beckett found necessary to defend in a polemical essay called ‘The Possessed’. Each of the chapters in McMullan includes richly textured background information, a historical substructure to the theoretical edifice.

While each chapter takes a distinct approach to body, medium and theory, chapter 9 is particularly insightful, describing a theatre ‘where the scenic space is largely undefined’, which imprecision can evoke ‘simultaneity of locations’ (p. 111). The final chapter focuses on adaptations to the stage of Beckett's prose works. McMullan follows Virginia Cooke's taxonomy of ‘different levels of dramatization’. Much of this analysis assumes the disappearance of text into the body, yet that is the most conventional approach to the possibilities of adapting prose to stage. But Beckett was rarely conventional, as McMullan goes to pains to point out. Other possibilities for adaptation exist beyond Cooke's taxonomy, possibilities with which Beckett was well aware and which he favoured. Beckett tended to advocate a theatrically modified version of reading, a hybrid form of performance which for him seemed to mean the retention of the material text in the performance so that it becomes a stage entity along with the performing body. Dramatic conflict thus develops between a human being and a philosophical, ontological text that a clochard finds in the rubbish and in the reading of which he/she finds something of his/her own story already written. Such duplicity, a body finding his/her double in a found text, is one of Beckett's late and largely unnoticed theatrical innovations. That is to say, there remains another stage of this final chapter yet to be theorized and written.

Be that as it may, this is a fine, sensitive study, one of the few which treats the details of performance historically and theoretically and takes seriously Beckett's work as an active director.