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By Christophe Collard<\/strong> Reviewed by Thomas Irmer<\/strong>*<\/a> (Germany)<\/p>\n David Mamet is certainly, along with Sam Shepard, one of the best-known American playwrights of his generation, with at least five major plays now considered canonical. The first was Sexual Perversity in Chicago<\/em> (1974), followed by American Buffalo<\/em> (1975), Edmond<\/em> (1982), Glengarry Glen Ross<\/em> (1983), and Oleanna<\/em> (1992), all produced in theatres internationally. A great number of academic studies have also been devoted to Mamet the dramatist and his aesthetic\/linguistic strategies within the context of theatre and drama history.<\/p>\n The first book-length study of his work was written by Christopher Bigsby, a leading European scholar of modern American drama, in 1985, and, in 1987, Dennis Carroll did an introductory monograph. This was before Mamet turned to film as a screenwriter and director. Since then, Mamet has only occasionally returned to the theatre with his play November<\/em>, in 2008, and Race<\/em>, in 2011. Mamet\u2019s prolific writing now also includes several volumes of essays and reminiscences, the novel The Old Religion<\/em> (1997), children\u2019s books, and a superb critical examination of the film industry: Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose and Practice of the Movie Business<\/em> (2007).<\/p>\n Mamet\u2019s work and writing now spans over forty years and clearly needs to be seen in overview as the complex venture in various fields that it is. Such a view can certainly show the underlying patterns and offer deeper insights. The Cambridge Companion to David Mamet<\/em>, edited by Christopher Bigsby, in 2004, is such an example. It offered two separate chapters on Mamet\u2019s film and fiction, by individual authors, in a volume devoted mainly to aspects of the playwright\u2019s work. A comprehensive volume of Mamet\u2019s work \u201cacross media and genres\u201d could in theory offer more. In this sense, the fundamental question is whether Mamet the dramatist works in other genres as a means to fulfil a vision that takes him beyond boundaries, or whether his other work is merely somewhere between serious art and popular entertainment. Mamet\u2019s status as a contemporary classic playwright is already secure, but what of the other Mamet? It is doubtless uncharted territory. Is he just a dramatist or is he really a jack-of-all-arts?<\/p>\n Christophe Collard, a scholar at the Free University of Brussels, sets out his study of Mamet with a long first chapter called \u201cFirst Principles,\u201d analysing foundations for the overall development of Mamet\u2019s aesthetics in theatre and, more especially, character building and language shaping. The playwright was first of all an actor who encountered the basic rules of acting in a promising off-theatre environment in Chicago, in the early 1970s. Some of his work with the St. Nicholas Players became legend. Collard notes the significant shift from simply acting to the teaching of actors, which inspired Mamet\u2019s first short pieces and then fuelled most of his major plays.<\/p>\n In terms of dramatic theory, Collard sees Mamet\u2019s early works as keeping with the master trope of aporia rather than being allegorical, moralizing or even political, and highlights \u201cthe artist\u2019s preference of process over product, i.e. his relative unconcern with the specific interpretations that his work generates, as opposed to the mechanisms it stages and the (cognitive) strategies it mediates\u201d (115). Collard applies no evolutionary model on Mamet\u2019s artistic development to describe these \u201cfirst principles.\u201d Some quotations from later writings are used to prove what is being said about the young artist and, in the end, this first chapter is more of a catalogue of thematic issues that run through many of Mamet\u2019s works, e.g. the topics of \u201cabsurd heroism\u201d and \u201ddeception.\u201d<\/p>\n The second chapter\u2014Mamet\u2019s work in different media\u2014is treated by Collard as a specific questions of genre. This he sees as problematic because \u201cthe term connotes conventionality and functionality\u201d (136). Thus, he combines the problem of genre with Mamet\u2019s works in radio, film and television. One might not agree with this in general, but Collard discusses each of his examples in a convincing way. Mamet\u2019s first radio play was The Water Engine,<\/em> which was first a play for the stage (after the material had been discarded as a short story and screenplay) (142). Collard also shows how Mamet\u2019s first original radio play, Prairie du Chien<\/em>, of 1979, was a kind of bridge on his way to becoming a screenwriter. Indeed, his screenplay for Bob Rafelson\u2019s remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice<\/em> (1981) is certainly a matter of film genre (147).<\/p>\n Mamet\u2019s \u201cauthorship in popular media\u201d is a crucial point in Collard\u2019s study. He states \u201cthat popular media laws taught him that bigger budgets meant more personnel and less creative autonomy,\u201d and \u201con top of that, making a profit implied generic compromises\u201d (148). Collard\u2019s focus here is exclusively on how Mamet as an author and director in the film industry operates on what had previously been introduced as \u201cfirst principles\u201d of aesthetic strategies.<\/p>\n Mamet\u2019s work for film in the early 1980s, when \u201cNew Hollywood\u201d merged and dissolved into the Spielberg era, was characterized by the reworking of genres and their hybridization (172). In that sense, Postman<\/em> and Mamet\u2019s later films must be noted as examples of a larger trend in which Collard sees Mamet working in a \u201cschizo-pragmatic quality\u201d (172). Now a renowned playwright in the film industry for his role in the systematic and strategic reshaping of established genres, Mamet still remains \u201ca pragmatist humanist with a knack for mind games\u201d (186). At this point, Collard hybridizes what is commonly separated in film, theatre and literary studies. His genre is now the all-encompassing Mamet, with his manifold works across media.<\/p>\n \u201cMamet Merging Media,\u201d the third chapter, is therefore devoted to various aspects of adaptation\u2014a rich field, as Mamet adapted some of his own plays for film and television, or, within the world of theatre, made adaptations from three of Chekhov\u2019s plays. Instead of examining the typical issues of appropriated originality and the doctrine of fidelity, Collard sees adaptations as a special form: \u201cA palimpsest, the adaptation effectively stages multiple texts simultaneously. However, rather than to be lamented for its parasitical \u2018impurity,\u2019 the \u2018double vision\u2019 it stimulates is generative at heart\u201d (213). Such a positive approach to adaptations allows for a deeper analysis of Mamet\u2019s work, most comprehensively with the 1992 film adaptation of his most successful play, Glengarry Glen Ross<\/em> (238-46).<\/p>\n Collard applies the term \u201ctransmedial authorship\u201d (244) to this phenomenon of Mamet adapting his own work, while Wag the Dog<\/em>, probably the best-known film Mamet has written and an adaptation of Larry Beinhart\u2019s novel American Hero<\/em>, is analyzed as a case of conflicting approaches to adaptation between novelist, director and a second screenwriter before Mamet took over (267). Here, we can see how the practice of an author is framed by the different interests in the movie business.<\/p>\n Another example, Mamet\u2019s bold adaptation of Faust<\/em> for the stage and radio, has been chosen for \u201cthe dynamic that drives Mamet\u2019s relentless explorations of media and genres, his adaptations, as well as the \u2018militantly intermedial\u2019 works\u201d (288). It is no surprise that Neil LaBute, a writer-director also working in both film and stage, with popular and critical success, is presented as a \u201cspiritual successor\u201d to Mamet (300-02).<\/p>\n In his concluding remarks, Collard again takes up the title of the book, which is itself an adaptation of City on the Make<\/em>, the title of Nelson Algren\u2019s book about Chicago (1951), and ends by referring back to Mamet\u2019s \u201cparticularly Chicagoan admixture of the populist and the intellectual\u201d (317), a mixture that effectively underlies this detailed study of expanded authorship.<\/p>\n
\n366 pp. Nancy, France: Presses Universitaires de Nancy<\/strong><\/p>\n
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