THE HONOURABLE BEAST

Deep salad of diary clippings, jottings, and letters—all bearing on directing plays, films, and operas—from the collected unpublished writings of the Tony-winning director of Equus and M. Butterfly, who died in 1990 following seven years of directing operas at the Met. Never in great health and disabled by polio as a soldier, Dexter touches on autobiography here only when it ties into a production. When he died, he was assembling a journal of sorts from his diaries and director's notes, as well as from letters to and from actors and playwrights, singers, set designers, and other theatrical folk he'd worked with during his 40 years in the theater: Here, his labors were taken over by longtime friend Riggs O'Hara, assisted by Andrew Weale—and theater writing doesn't get much richer than this. Dexter worked and mingled with the greatest talents of his day: Laurence Olivier, Joan Plowright, Rudolf Nureyev, Paul Scofield, Richard Burton, Stephen Sondheim, Maria Callas, Anthony Hopkins, Kenneth Tynan, and Maggie Smith, among fabled others. We follow his early mullings and musings about productions to be launched, as well as about rehearsals, fights, and sackings. Working often with a nearly bare stage to draw out the audience's imagination, Dexter strives to bring freshness to each work while not getting in the way of the talent at hand. Meanwhile, he has the actor-manager's passion for budgets. As he says when the producers waffle about hiring him for M. Butterfly, ``No call. They don't want me. I am difficult, British, homosexual, expensive—and whilst I can, with modified rapture, admit to the first three charges, the last is deeply wounding.'' Many inspiring moments prime the reader with hope for a biography—as well as for a clearer spelling-out of Dexter's stagecraft. (Illustrations)