Hannah Simpson's incisive critique of the representation and simulated presentation of wartime suffering onstage in the postwar francophone plays of Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, Eugène Ionesco, Pablo Picasso and Marguerite Duras invites the reader to reflect on the role and the responsibility of audiences as the witnesses of the performance of pain. Simpson juxtaposes each play of Beckett with that of his contemporaries, who, like him, were ‘non-combatant’ (p. 81), non-French nationals residing in France during the Second World War witnessing Nazi violence and the forced deportation and painful deaths of their friends and/or family. The author clarifies that her work differs from David Houston Jones's Samuel Beckett and Testimony (2011) and Joseph Anderton's Beckett's Creatures: Art of Failure after the Holocaust (2016) for two reasons. First, she collocates Beckett's postwar plays with the works of his coevals to present a comparative analysis of the representation of pain. This comparison highlights how ‘Beckett's postwar plays relentlessly refuse a redemptive perspective on the encounter with physical suffering’ and differ from his francophone contemporaries who present ‘a thread of a surviving redemptive impulse’ in the face of suffering (p. 156). Second, the writer studies the efficiency of theatre as a medium to present the performance of pain as opposed to the mixed-media representation examined in preceding scholarship. This book could be particularly useful to the researchers of postwar theatre and performance studies, Beckett studies, the medical humanities and French theatre, and in general to any student pursuing theatre and performance studies.
Simpson's comparative analysis explores the spectrum of witnesses’ response to the performance of onstage pain. The juxtaposition of Beckett's Eleutheria (1996) and Albert Camus's Caligula (1944), Le Malentendu or The Misunderstanding (1944), and L’état de siège or State of Siege (1948) studies ‘the individual's refusal to sympathise with the spectacle of another's physical pain’ (p. 31). From there on, the text proceeds to analyse the spectacle of pain as a contagion and the onstage performers of pain as bearers of the contagion who spread this infection to their spectators, thereby making the auditorium the shrine of contagion. The examination of this infectious spectacle then facilitates understanding of the tranquilizing effect of the aesthetic spectacle of pain in the comparative analysis of Beckett's Endgame (1957) and Pablo Picasso's Le désir attrapé par la queue or Desire Caught by the Tail (1944), and Les quatre petites filles or The Four Little Girls (1949). The anaesthetic effect of the aesthetic spectacle of pain paves the way to discussing whether pain needs to be or can be confined to the body while examining Beckett's Happy Days (1961) and Play (1964) alongside Eugène Ionesco's Amédée, ou Comment s'en débarasser or Amédée, or, How to Get Rid of It (1954) and Le piéton de l'air or A Stroll in the Air (1963). The penultimate chapter interrogates ‘the affective transmission’ (p. 142) of physical suffering from the actors performing onstage to the spectators while examining Beckett's Not I (1972) and Marguerite Duras's L'amante anglaise (1968). Both plays deny ‘the reassuring boundary between stage and auditorium’ (p. 142) to the spectators. This argument of blurring the boundaries and the audiences’ response to it could use more space to discuss the translation of ‘sympathetic identification’ into the creative representation of ‘corporeal empathy’ (p. 133), as is discussed with reference to Duras's subjective experience of pain on her husband's deportation and his return home. It could provide a segue for the perusal of Beckett's Breath (1969) that studies the capability of the audiences as the witnesses to empathize with the performer's pain alongside drawing the distinction between their empathetic and empathic experience of the spectacle.
As a medical humanities and Beckett studies researcher, I believe the book provides innovative and strongly justified concepts of spectatorship that can help understand various nuances of the term.
