Two weeks ago we learned that a James Joyce scholar had sued the Irish author’s estate, accusing it of abusing copyright law to prevent her from disseminating research findings that the estate wanted to cover up (The Chronicle, June 14). In a front-page article in today’s Wall Street Journal, we learn that the estate of Joyce’s good friend Samuel Beckett is enforcing, just as rigorously, the dramatist’s detailed instructions for the staging of his plays. Because the plays are all still under copyright, the estate is well within its rights to police the stage, even to the point of shutting down productions that violate the Nobel Prize winner’s dictates. For example, an Italian production of Waiting for Godot in which the leading characters are played by women instead of men.
It’s a longstanding tradition in theater to breathe fresh life into classics by staging them as variations on themes set down by the playwrights. One thinks of Orson Welles and John Houseman’s all-black production of Macbeth, or the elaborate restaging of Romeo and Juliet in the recent movie Shakespeare in Love. Beckett’s estate, managed by his nephew, Edward Beckett, has been entrusted with protecting the legacy of one of the central dramatists of the 20th century—a writer who is justly celebrated for shaking up convention and redefining theater (The Chronicle, May 12). It seems a paradox worthy of Beckett’s theater of the absurd, however, that his estate is setting the stage for his great works to become so conventional—by order of his voice from beyond the grave—that they are lost on future generations.
