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Rabaté’s collection of essays examines the textual and digital revolutions that have expanded Samuel Beckett’s corpus over the last ten years and the critical approaches that have evolved to take account of this new material. Its chapters offer new ways of approaching and analysing Beckett’s fiction and drama.

Julia Jarcho’s Writing and the Modern Stage: Theater beyond Drama argues that writing plays a constitutive role on the modern experimental stage by pointing beyond the dramatic present to what this present cannot contain. Jarcho offers a powerful rejoinder to theatre theorists who celebrate performance’s priority over dramatic and other forms of textuality.

While the role of medicine in early modern theatre has been studied extensively in recent years, little attention has been paid to the intersections of theatre and medicine in modern drama. The second half of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth witnessed innovations in both fields, as a self-styled “modern” theatre asserted itself against the conventions of an earlier period, and medical science claimed new authority as part of the emerging network of modern disciplines. One impediment to recognizing the role of the medical in modern drama has been the prominence of realism within this tradition. Because of realism's investment in the ideology of the visible, the interior landscape of disease is consigned to one of its many offstage realms, while the theatrical use of technological devices by which this realm might be disclosed to the audience – image and sound projection, X-ray imaging, and so on – are precluded from strictly illusionistic theatre. But realist (and naturalist) theatre is more deeply implicated in medical ways of seeing than its representational limitations suggest. Because of the tensions within realism between illusionism and actuality, realism is uniquely poised to reveal the somatic body in its normal and pathological states and in its physiological interaction with its environment. The many doctors who people modern drama are threshold figures who negotiate the social visibility of illness, demarcate the line between normal and pathological, and often represent theories and disciplinary ideologies that construct the human in medical terms. By modelling various forms of scientific and medical observation, theatrical doctors also direct attention to the complex symptomology of modern drama, in which the boundary between the body's surface and interior becomes the site of spectatorial interpretive operations.

This article explores the impact of facial injury and reconstructive surgery on Tristan Tzara's Dada play The Gas Heart. The European theatre of World War I saw an unprecedented number of facial injuries and other instances of physical mutilation, and their prevalence inaugurated a social crisis of appearance and representation. With its dramaturgy of fragmentation, Tzara's play provides a theatrical field of face and defacement, figure and disfiguration. The body to which it gives voice is a body deeply embedded in its historical, cultural, and artistic moment. In its giving and taking away of faces, it reflects—and transforms—a cultural anxiety over the destruction of the human form and the claims of identity, normality, and corporeal integrity to which it has been historically subordinated. While the brilliantly re-formed, constantly changing human body that emerges from The Gas Heart stands in opposition to the normalized body posited by reconstructive medicine, Tzara's body-in-pieces reveals the wider field of permutations and possibilities—material, subjective, aesthetic—that the shattered bodies of World War I helped open to view.

I open with Neveux's tribute because it foregrounds an important intersection in the discourse of modem drama. In his reference to "today's theater," Neveux employs the language of the modem familiar to the late-nineteenth and early/mid-twentieth-century theatre's discourse about itself. Theatre "today" — and by this Neveux means the theatre of Jean Giraudoux, Almand Salacrou, Jean Anouilh , and himself — achieves its contemporaneity through reference to an earlier moment of disclosure. The newness of this disclosure — its modernity — is represented, in part, through the language of bodies and bodily penetration. If the "real" world is a body, then Pirandello's theatre constitutes an operation on that body, crossing its thresholds, turning it inside out, revealing in the organic matter of its entrails "the other side of ourselves". To the extent that the world of the "real" and of "ourselves" is something living, then the drama of Pirandello offers itself, before the spectatorial gaze, as a kind of theatrical vivisection.