Anna McMullan's Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett's Drama considers the representation and experience of embodiment as it occurs in (and through the performance of) Samuel Beckett's dramatic works for stage, radio, film and television. Thankfully, she adopts a completist approach to this, reflecting on unpublished material and more marginal texts, starting with Beckett's earliest theatrical experience (Le Kid) and incomplete fragment (Human Wishes) before considering the early play Eleutheria as manifesting the interest Beckett had in the breaking asunder of the protagonist and the formal structure of his contemporaneous prose writing. By then considering the vulnerability of the body to pain and craving in Waiting for Godot and Endgame, and keeping an eye on the bones and bodies of historical atrocities that echo through the works, McMullan considers how the two plays emphasize the dynamic between interpersonal need and vulnerability in an unreliable world. Through Krapp's Last Tape and Happy Days, she explores the limitation in seeing and sensory experience, with emphasis on being perceived as tortuous intrusion specifically in Happy Days. The later dramas, she argues, present bodies as intermedial, in process.

A useful and informative discussion of the history of French mime as it informed Beckett's practice leads to a close examination of the performance experience in Beckett's own mimes, in terms of how this experience actualizes the vulnerable body in conflict with a tormenting interior or exterior will. Her work on Beckett's radio plays foregrounds Beckett's provisional bodies, ‘at the interface between . . . the speaking subject and its remembered or phantasmatic guises’ (p. 69), before contemplating the extension of this objective in Words and Music and Cascando, where ‘body-circuits’ were set in operation by their author.

Reflection on Film, the 1963 film made with Buster Keaton in the lead role, illustrates Beckett's engagement with modernist conventions of constructing visual media with the ambition of finding a filmic equivalent of human appetite and distaste. His later use of television as a medium of composition serves the monograph's objectives more precisely, and McMullan foregrounds the manner in which the body is represented through ‘an interchange between the visible, the linguistic and the auditory’, made available artistically by that medium. Here, the author offers valuable insight into the generation of the human ‘semblances’ that populate much of Beckett's late writing. A penultimate chapter considers these staged fragmented embodiments where the body ‘emerges as a site of struggle between the agency of the self, the other and the inherited grammar of language and movement’ (p. 110) though a series of oppositions: vision/voice, self/other, male/female, body/object and body/matrix.

Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett's Drama offers a complete survey of Beckett's dramatic writing, and seems deliberately structured to do that around and in addition to the tight and informative focus on embodiment (which might have easily been developed by focusing on selected works). In doing so, McMullan provides a fresh textbook for students and scholars of Beckett's drama, and one that brings up to date its reflection on a series of theoretical models that are commonly applied to that body of work.

Enoch Brater's 10 Ways of Thinking about Samuel Beckett: The Falsetto of Reason is a very different book indeed to McMullan's, although it surveys exactly the same landscapes, with additional attention to Beckett's prose works. The contrast between the approaches is distinct. Where McMullan is focused, linear and precise, Brater is deliberately and delightfully blurred, meandering and provocative. At first, the reader is left wondering quite what this book is attempting to achieve: who is it for and what is it offering? Quickly one realizes that such questions are not relevant: the book has not been written with a target audience in mind so much as it pursues its own liberating objective of thinking of and around Beckett's remarkable artistic achievements, following those thoughts wherever they might go. Consequently, the book comes across as something of a love letter to Beckett's oeuvre. Warmth and wit are unrestrainedly woven in amid the dense erudition, and as one reads one finds oneself intellectually engaging in the insights that Brater offers on Beckett's writing, the book seems intent on promoting an impossible dialogue with its reader.

Look up any one Beckett work in the book's index, and you will be sent to numerous sentences scattered across its twelve chapters, rather than any extended analysis of any one work (Waiting for Godot aside). By its very nature, then, this is not a book that can be readily excavated for supporting illustrations by scholars or students, and its structure avoids any sequencing of responses by traditional means that would facilitate that anyway; there is no chronological sequence, or grouping by theme or genre, for example. Ten of these twelve chapters are the ‘ways of thinking about’ Beckett, bookended by the introduction and an ‘addendum’. The ‘ten ways’ begin with reflections on Waiting for Godot, moving on to consider the traces of Dadaist ambition throughout Beckett, and then to more specific elements of theatricality such as offstage action, the recurrence of greyness and the prevalence of seated characters. A fascinating chapter on Beckett's ‘devious interventions’ considers Beckett's authorial presence within the texts, and how it serves metatheatrical purposes, or estranging moments that purposefully and fruitfully unsettle the reading/watching contract. Two further chapters then consider Beckett's Romanticism and the presence of – or ambition towards – silence in his works, before the lens is broadened to consider Beckett more fully in the history of twentieth-century dramatic writing by mapping his achievement against that of Henrik Ibsen (who also employed the formal elements of staging to ‘articulate patterns of movement and meaning’; p. 136), Anton Chekhov, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, with specific reference to stage properties. Painting Beckett into a broad canvas of theatrical strategies – and Shakespeare is inevitably brought in to effective measure – encourages a wide-ranging appreciation of what Beckett contributed to the theatrical grammar and syntax of our age, and provides a useful perspective over his oeuvre that we often forgo in the interests of detailed close readings of text and performance moments.

Though utterly different in approach, both Brater's and McMullan's books promote new ways of considering Samuel Beckett's artistry, and both offer a detailed consideration of the dramatic writings in their actual or potential theatrical environments as a means of evaluating their expressivity. The experience of the reader, or audience member, is central to both surveys, and, as such, these are valuable additions to the body of literature on this most written-about of authors from a theatre and performance studies perspective.