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Ghost Trio by Samuel Beckett (1976)

Ghost Trio is a short television play by Samuel Beckett, which lasts about twenty minutes. Beckett wrote it in English in 1975 and it was first televised on BBC 2 on 17 April 1977.

Ghost Trio has fantastically detailed stage directions specifying the exact layout of the room the action is set in and the position of the male figure at various points of the action. As with most later Beckett plays it includes a diagram of the set, showing a room 5 metres by 6 metres, with a window at the far end, a pallet on the left and a door leading into a corridor on the right. Near this door, for most of the action, the solitary protagonist, a silent man, sits hunched over on a small bench. Here’s the diagram:

Schematic diagram of the stage set and camera positions for Ghost Trio

And here’s the key to the diagram:

  1. Door
  2. Window.
  3. Mirror.
  4. Pallet.
  5. Male figure (F) seated by door.
  6. F at window.
  7. F at head of pallet.

A and B and C represent successive points of view of the TV camera:

A. Position general view.
B. Position medium shot.
C. Position near shot of 5 and 1, 6 and 2, 7 and 3.

Colour? Lighting? Well, as the mysterious woman’s voice who narrates the text tells us:

The light: faint, omnipresent. No visible source. As if all luminous. Faintly luminous. No shadow. [Pause.] No shadow. Colour : none. All grey. Shades of grey. [Pause.] The colour grey if you wish, shades of the colour grey.

A trio in three parts

As the name suggests, the play itself is divided into three parts and within each section further sub-divided into a set of numbered steps or directions, specifying not only the actor’s movements and words, but which of the 3 camera positions should be used, A, B or C.

I. Pre-action, contains 34 numbered actions or snippets of monologue
II. Action, contains 38 numbered directions or steps
III. Re-action, contains 41 numbered directions or steps

It is called Ghost Trio because the action is interspersed with excerpts from the Largo of Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Trio, Opus 70 #1, which was given the nickname ‘The Ghost’ because of the spooky feel of some passages. And because, like Footfalls before it and …but for clouds.. after it, the play itself feels ghostly, feels as if the protagonist is not really there at all. The human figure is a kind of pretext for things which go on around him, but not real physical things: he is the kind of locus for a succession of psychological states.

Typically, Beckett doesn’t leave the selection of passages from Beethoven’s work to the director, but is hyper-specific, giving the part number and direction number from his play and then specifying exactly which excerpt from the Ghost Trio should be used, right down to the  exact bar number:

I.13 beginning bar 47
I.23 beginning bar 49
I.31 to 34 beginning bar 19
II.26 to 29 beginning bar 64
II.35 to 36 beginning bar 71
III.1 to 2, 4 to 5 beginning bar 26
III.29 beginning bar 64
III.36 to end beginning bar 82

The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett suggests that the extraordinary detail of the directions make this a kind of ‘post-literary’ work in the sense that the text of the play is almost unreadable. By which the authors mean that you have to see and hear the entire thing in an integrated production to really ‘get’ the entire effect. The Companion says it is, in this respect, a ghostly descendant of the kind of Gesamtkunstwerk proposed by Wagner in which all the arts are combined in harmony, which demands to be read and heard and seen.

As the Wagner reference suggests, the Companion goes on to suggest that the work can be said to be Beckett’s only attempt at an opera. Personally, I think that’s misleading: if opera means anything it is the singing of lyrics to music throughout an extended work which features characters and a plot, none of which is true of Ghost Trio. If anything is Beckett’s attempt at an opera, I’d have thought it was the 1961 radio play Words and Music which doesn’t actually feature sung lyrics, words and music of the title place in apposition i.e. next to each other, but for which various composers have written specially composed music. But even that is more accurately thought of as an allegorical masque.

Synopsis

The reader of these complex stage directions, with their diagrams and numbered steps, might easily be intimidated. But when you actually watch or listen to a production of Ghost Trio it is disarmingly simple.

Part one In part one a woman’s voice formally introduces herself and then describes the room we’re looking at, pointing out the features mentioned above, namely door, window and palette, then asks us to look in detail at the wall and floor, which are grey and dusty. She then asks us to look again as if there is value in really scrutinising these sparse elements. Part one ends with a clipped sentence stating that: ‘Sole sign of life a sitting figure’. A shambling, decrepit-looking man sitting on a bench, hunched forward over what the directions specify might be a ‘cassette’.

He is not named. He never speaks. Only the Voice speaks.

Part two There is no formal differentiation between parts one and two, no dipping of the lights to black as in other plays of this time. Instead, part two sets the tone or defines the theme in the opening sentence when the same woman’s voice says:

‘He will now think he hears her.’

Aha. Her. So the piece turns into a depiction of a silent, shuffling man who appears to be haunted by memories of ‘her’, a woman, an absent woman. In this it is very close to …but the clouds… which followed it, but also harks back to the surprisingly sentimental core of a piece like Krapp’s Last Tape which uses the innovative idea of an old man listening to tapes made by his younger self, but which focuses on a repeated memory of being a young man lying in a field in summer with his true love.

In other words, for all the disconcertingly modernist and anti-humanist apparatus of the text, the mise-en-scène, the long pauses between the fragmented and robotic voice etc – arguably, the piece is at heart shockingly sentimental, a man recalls his lost love. After all, Beethoven was the Romantic composer par excellence and Beckett (apparently) never abandoned his youthful attachment to German Romanticism.

A very recurrent Beckett trope is introduced at the end of part two where the woman’s voice says simply. ‘Stop. Repeat.’ which is what most Beckett characters and most Beckett texts do.

Part 3 has the most written instructions so is likely to be the longest in a production, but features no speaking voice at all, just a sequence of 41 stage directions, which require the figure onstage to go to the window and look out to the sound of rain falling, go to the palette and look at it, goes to a mirror hanging on the wall and stares into it for a while, all interspersed with snippets of the music being played, before these cut out and the action returns to silence.

Part 3 ‘builds up to’ a moment of pregnant symbolism, when we hear a faint knock on the door into the corridor. The protagonist slowly opens it and the camera cuts to his point of view. In the long empty corridor he sees what appears to be the figure of a boy ‘Dressed in black oilskin with hood glistening with rain. White face raised to invisible [figure]’.

The boy slowly shakes his head, twice, very slowly, then slowly withdraws back down the corridor. Is he saying, ‘Not today, she is not coming today, your lover, your Muse, not today’, much as the boy in Godot says Godot isn’t coming today. Tomorrow, maybe. Stop. Repeat.

If you keep a straight face, the image of the boy in the narrow corridor slowly shaking his head at all the old man’s hopes and wishes is a poignant symbol of loss and abandonment. If you have a sense of humour, this feels like Peak Beckett.

Ghost Trio ends with the door slowly closing and the figure withdrawing to sit on the nearby bench where we see him, again, hunched over, an eternal image of loss and abandonment.

Productions

Irksomely, it doesn’t seem possible to view the original 1977 BBC production. The closest we can get is the video below which appears to consist of just part 3, from a production Samuel Beckett himself directed in May 1977 at the television studios of the Süddeutscher Rundfunk in Stuttgart. So it’s presumably as close to the author’s intention as possible.

It certainly brings out the greyness, the bleakness, the slowness, and the hauntedness of the piece.

Conversely, here is a high-tech production featuring Nicholas Johnson as the figure and Hannah Grady as the Voice, adapted, filmed and edited by M. Dixon Causey.

If you can overcome an aversion to the American accent, it raises a few questions about the use of modern techno music or white noise as background to the narrator, and the funky ways the tape is treated and distorted to make it look like a modern cyber-thriller – all of which come from a different technical universe than Beckett knew. The male figure is hardly the decrepit, wasted, long-haired old geezer of the Beckett version, but a shaven-headed, snappy young American film studies graduate, clutching an ipod docking station and mini-speakers rather than a ‘cassette’.

And, most strikingly, when the Voice says ‘Repeat’, the film does in fact repeat all the figure’s actions from the first two parts, speeded up to a techno soundtrack with heavily treated (sepia-ed) visuals.

Is this radical updating valid and appropriate?

Personally, I think so. I positively like the superimposition of the huge Roman numerals I, II and III to introduce the three parts, and the big captions indicating DOOR and WINDOW in part one. These seem as suitably blunt and brain-damaged as the entire text is made to feel in this production. Whereas the German production accurately portrays a small grey enclosed space, much like a shabby boarding house room, this American production – with its bright white interiors, walls painted clinical white, and the man’s shaven head, all these elements make it feel as if the figure is an inmate in a medical facility, maybe an asylum.

Thoughts

Beethoven Is Ghost Trio an interpretation of the Beethoven work? A commentary on it? Or a reworking? Is the Beethoven piece intrinsic to the work or purely illustrative? Could it have been more or less any piece of work with a haunting theme which could have been cut up and sampled like this?

The boy In the German production I only knew the face was that of a boy because the text told me so. It could be interpreted as that of a young androgynous woman, maybe the woman the man appears to be listening out for.

Choosing a boy to deliver the head shake is reminiscent of the boy who makes two unexpected, and often overlooked, appearances at the end of each of the two acts of Waiting For Godot, and tells Vladimir and Estragon that, no, Godot will not be coming today. Tomorrow, maybe. Mañana.

Shades of grey The woman’s voice describing the entire room being bereft of colour, and even of an obvious light source, but consisting only of:

‘All grey. Shades of grey. [Pause.] The colour grey if you wish, shades of the colour grey…

to the modern reader prompts association quite different from what Beckett intended. How many shades of grey, the reader wants to ask.

Mr Bleaney To the average viewer it looks a lot like a depressed old man sitting in a room. More than ever, it seems like a Portrait of the Artist As A Writer Sitting In A Small Room Mulling Over What It Is Like To Be A Writer Sitting In A Small Room Mulling Over What It Is Like To Be A Writer Sitting In A Small Room Mulling Over What It Is Like To Be… and so on. Stop. Repeat.

Hammer horror I showed the German version to my daughter. She said what’s the old man so depressed about? When the door in the wall opened painfully slowly with its stagey Hammer Horror creaking sound effect, she burst out laughing and asked me whether it was a rejected episode of Scooby Doo. The younger generation – no soul.

Related link

Samuel Beckett’s works

An asterisk indicates that a work was included in the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.

The Second World War 1939 to 1945

*Waiting For Godot 1953 Play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

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by Simon on January 25, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 25, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/01/25/ghost-trio-samuel-beckett/

Eh Joe by Samuel Beckett (1967)

Beckett wrote his first play for television, Eh Joe, in May 1965. The first English broadcast of Eh Joe was on BBC2 on 4 July 1966, with Jack MacGowran playing Joe and Siân Phillips as Voice.

The play is another of Beckett’s ‘skullscapes’ in the sense of being entirely about an older male figure ‘trapped’ inside a space – in this case a shabby room very like the room in Film – while he is addressed by an interminable female voice accusing him of various crimes, so trapped that the setup becomes a metaphor for being inside the protagonist’s head.

Where does the voice come from? Is it real? Is it the voice of his conscience? Is it from within what the Voice calls his ‘penny farthing hell you call your mind’? Or is it in some sense ‘real’, external to him, an objective entity?

In any case, the man is dumb, says nothing, is forced to listen, to let the Voice play out.

Voices, unnamed abstract voices, play a big role in Beckett’s works. In his two most extreme novels, The Unnamable and How It Is, the text is driven by a voice which speaks to and through the protagonist and which appears to be more ‘real’ than him. Many Beckett protagonists are driven by the voice in their head, which dominates them, propels them forward, which haunts them with fragments of memory and, to some extent, gives them such reality as they possess.

In Eh Joe the voice is particularly haunting and accusatory. Is it saying he killed his father and mother or merely laid their tormenting ghosts to rest? It strongly implies he was responsible for a lover he abandoned committing suicide? In the other texts I’ve mentioned, the protagonist to some extent talks back or discusses the voice or voices in his head. There is something extremely stifling in the way which, in Eh Joe, the male figure can not reply, can not move, can not speak, but is utterly paralysed by the Voice and forced to listen to its accusations.

Stage directions

As so often with the plays from the 1960s onwards, the preciseness of the physical and visual direction Beckett wrote for it are as thought provoking as the ‘content’. For Eh Joe there are one and a half pages of detailed directions and just five pages of text. The directions start with a brief sketch of Joe’s persona and appearance.

Joe
Joe, late fifties, grey hair, old dressing-gown, carpet slippers, in his room.

The play opens in a shabby knackered bedsit to reveal a shabby knackered man pottering about. Like a child he methodically goes through his room as if checking for monsters. As he does so the camera follows him until he finally settles on the edge of his shabby bed, and then… we hear a voice, sly and beguiling. Beckett was very specific indeed about how the voice should sound.

Voice
Low, distinct, remote, little colour, absolutely steady rhythm, slightly slower than normal. Between phrases a beat of one second at least. Between paragraphs about seven, i.e. three before camera starts to advance and four for advance before it is stopped by voice resuming.

The voice is clearly accusing him. Actresses and directors left records of working directly with Beckett on this play. Billie Whitelaw says Beckett kept on saying “‘No colour, no colour” and “slow”… absolutely flat; absolutely on a monotone.’ She explained how she delivered her lines as a form of ‘Chinese water torture’ so that each phrase of the text was delivered as a drop of water literally dripped into Joe’s head.” In the first TV production the vocal colourlessness Beckett was aiming for was achieved by placing a microphone right up against Sian Phillips’s mouth so that, as she spoke, both high and low frequencies were filtered out, producing a flat, slow, calm accusing voice.

To the American director he often worked with, Alan Schneider, Beckett wrote: ‘Voice should be whispered. A dead voice in his head. Minimum of colour. Attacking. Each sentence a knife going in, pause for withdrawal, then in again.’ In the play itself the Voice says Joe once describes her as having a voice ‘like flint glass’.

The voice comes in ten instalments, paragraphs of monologue. Between each section of monologue the camera moves a little closer to Joe, increasing our sense of claustrophobia, creating a sense of trapment, beginning at a distance and moving closer and closer until the camera is literally staring him in the face. As you might imagine, the precise timing and movement of the camera are also very precisely specified by Beckett.

Camera
Joe’s opening movements followed by camera at constant remove, Joe full length in frame throughout. No need to record room as whole. After this opening pursuit, between first and final closeup of face, camera has nine slight moves in towards face, say four inches each time. Each move is stopped by voice resuming, never camera move and voice together. This would give position of camera when dolly stopped by first word of text as one yard from maximum closeup of face. Camera does not move between paragraphs till clear that pause (say three seconds) longer than between phrases. Then four inches in say four seconds when movement stopped by voice resuming.
Voice Low, distinct, remote, little colour, absolutely steady rhythm, slightly slower than normal. Between phrases a beat of one second at least. Between paragraphs about seven, i.e. three before camera starts to advance and four for advance before it is stopped by voice resuming.

If the Voice and the Camera are the first two elements, the third is Joe’s face. Jack MacGowran was one of Beckett’s favourite actors because of the tired, haunted expressiveness of his face and that is all the male actor is actually called on to do. After the opening minute fiddling with the window, door and cupboard, the main requirement of the play is for him to find the facial expressions to react to the Voice’s accusations and the slow forward advance of the Camera towards him. It is solely about conveying guilt and hauntedness through his expression. The only bit of dynamic he can bring to the role is that, when the Accusing Voice pauses, he can for a moment relax his haunted gaze.

Face
Practically motionless throughout, eyes unblinking during paragraphs, impassive except in so far as it reflects mounting tension of listening. Brief zones of relaxation between paragraphs when perhaps voice has relented for the evening and intentness may relax variously till restored by voice resuming.

‘Zones of relaxation… when perhaps voice has relented’. But it doesn’t relent, for the play’s 18 tense and intense minutes, piling on the accusations, heaping up the guilt on the unspeaking middle-aged man.

Content

So what does the Voice say in these knife-like sentences?

1. The voice asks Joe if he has checked everything. Why is the light on? And the bed, he’s changed the bed, hasn’t he, but it doesn’t make any difference… It crumbles when he lies in the dark…

2. He told her the best was still to come as he hurried her into her coat, she taunts him that no-one can say that phrase like him, ‘the best’s to come’…

3. The Voice says she is not the first to come and haunt him like this. First it was his father, his father’s voice in his head for years, until he found a way to metaphorically throttle him. Then, the Voice says, it was his mother’s voice, getting weaker and weaker ’till you laid her too’, and others, lots of others, all loved him this pitiful man who now spends his nights alone in his shabby bedroom, ‘throttling the dead in  his head.’

4. The Voice knows he pays a woman to come every Saturday, demeaning the transaction with a children’s playground phrase ‘Penny a hoist tuppence as long as you like’, but warns him what it’ll be like if he runs out of money, if he runs out of ‘us‘, presumably meaning women, or women prepared to pander to him.

5. The Voice recalls what it was like in the early days of their relationship, summer, sitting together on the grass watching the ducks, holding hands. He liked her, complimented her on her elocution, said she had a voice like ‘flint glass’. But now he has squeezed her down to a voice, a bare whisper, in  his head. She taunts him: he was able to throttle the other voices, his father’s, his mother’s – but what if she can’t stop hers? Imagine if the whispering goes on forever as he strains to catch the words. She uses the phrase ‘until you join us’ – does that mean she is dead? A Voice from beyond the grave?

6. The Voice mocks Joe’s religious faith, and turns it against him. What happens when He, his God, ‘starts in on you’, starts talking in his head. Does Joe think he’ll be able to throttle that voice as he did his father and mother’s.

7. She taunts him that she found another (presumably another man), better than Joe, kinder, stronger, more intelligent, better looking. Now that’s the kind of taunting which wounds a man.

8. So the Voice has done alright but now she turns to consider one of Joe’s girlfriends who didn’t do so well, a young, slim, pale girl, ‘the green one… the narrow one’. The Voice mocks him with their intimate details, the way her pale eyes opened after they’d made love. But then taunts him – he told her the same lies, told her the best was yet to come, just like he told the Voice. All the time he had an airplane ticket in his pocket, knowing he was going to desert her.

9. The Voice asks whether Joe ever wonders what happened to that girl, the one he abandoned? He tries to throttle the Voice in order not to hear, as he throttled his father and mother’s voices (‘That’s right, Joe, squeeze away’) but he can’t, and this leads us into the final and by far the longest section.

10. In by far the longest section, at some five minutes, the Voice gives a lengthy description of what happened to this young woman that, it is implied, Joe seduced and abandoned. One night, in her slip, she got up and went down to the sea (the sea such a constant presence in Beckett’s works from Malone to Embers to Cascando). She goes down to the sea, lies down in the wash to drown herself, but it doesn’t work. She slips back up to her house and gets a razor, the Gillette razor he himself recommended for her to shave her ‘body hair’, slips back out the house, down to the beach, tries to slash her wrists. Doesn’t work either. Tears a strip from the slip and ties it round the cuts on her wrist. Nips back to the house and gets a bottle of pills. Goes back down the garden, under the viaduct, to the beach, walks along the shoreline swallowing the pills. ‘There’s love for you’, the Voice mocks him.

The Voice torments Joe very effectively, interspersing these descriptions of the young woman’s suicide attempts, with erotic details designed to taunt a sensualist and philanderer like him, the way her wet silk slip clings to her slender body, and the special look in her eyes, before they made love, after they made love.

With whispered intensity the Voice tells Joe to imagine what it must have been like for the young woman, the pale one, the narrow one, lying on the cold stones of the shingly beach, her hands scooping holes, her breasts against the cold stones, lips kissing the stones. The camera is right up in Joe’s face as the Voice taunts him with the exquisite sensual details of the misery of the young woman he seduced and abandoned. The Voice tells Joe to imagine it, imagine the misery and the cold and the lips breasts hands face, more tortured than Him (presumably Christ) and then… the Voice fades out… and is gone.

The smile

In the BBC production, after the Voice has whispered itself into silence…. MacGowran smiles. This, apparently, was a note Beckett himself made to the screenplay which has never been incorporated in the printed text. This final decision utterly transforms the experience of the play and its meaning – up till now we are presented with a man haunted, potentially forever, until he becomes ‘one of us’ i.e. dies, with mental and psychological torment. Here, right at the end, in this tiny but massive addition, Beckett suggests there is relief and escape. Joe has been harrowed but the Voice and all its accusation does, eventually, fade out and leave him. Suddenly there is hope, hope that he might be able to throttle this nagging haunting voice as he has done all the others…

BBC production

So here’s the original BBC2 production with Jack MacGowran playing Joe and Siân Phillips as Voice. I think it’s stunning, both MacGowran and Phillips are brilliant, but so is the staging and direction.

Is the Voice real? Is she the Voice of his conscience haunting him? Or an actual real exterior voice? Is she the product of Christian Guilt or a Freudian cathexis of guilt complexes or Jung’s idea that aspects of the individual’s personality can be hived off to become real, independent entities (the cause of much mental illness)? Or a ghost? Or a voice from beyond the grave, from some afterlife nagging ’till you join us’?

As so often, I don’t think it matters. It can be any or all of the above, plus whatever the viewer wishes to add. That is the point of art and literature, to free the mind from ‘interpretations’. In fact it’s easy to overlook but this is one of Beckett’s most accessible works. Anyone could watch this, with no special knowledge of Beckett, or avant-garde theatre, and simply be spooked. Watched cold with no prior knowledge, the play fits well enough into the tradition of great ghost stories, Gothic thrillers that go back to Dickens and beyond.

Looked at in the context of Beckett’s overall body of works, Eh Joe is an interesting variation on the theme of the Voice, the dominating controlling Voice which creates the narratives of The Unnameable and How It Is but feels quite a lot different. Those works explored a kind of psychologically and artistically extreme vision in which the so-called voices called into being the entire text, while at the same time throwing into doubt their own provenance and blocking or negating the text itself, in texts made up of self-interrogation which create a kind of hallucinatory strangeness.

There’s nothing that weird or difficult or challenging about Eh Joe. Even the quotes are straightforward references to the Bible designed to bring out the way Joe is a (hypocritical) Catholic and at the same time play on his sense of guilt and fear of punishment. I.e. they are easily recognisable accentuators of the guilt and psychological suffering hundreds of Catholic authors have described in such detail across a range of media.

Similarly, the voices in the novels I’ve mentioned are of indeterminable gender, if they even exist at all, which adds multiple layers of complexity and uncertainty. In this play a wronged woman is mocking and taunting her philandering lover i.e. it is a super-familiar genre, and takes its place in a huge line of works, and real life experiences’ Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’ is a distortion of a quote from one of William Congreve’s Restoration comedies, an entire genre of drama devoted to the anger of spurned women lovers. It doesn’t matter whether that saying is true or not, it is a truism of the Restoration comedy genre: but it is obviously very applicable to this play.

Ghost story or woman wronged story or both, Eh Joe is so successful because, despite the technical dressing up of camera angles and creeping zooms etc, it in fact invokes some very familiar genres and employs so many familiar tropes.

Related link

Samuel Beckett’s works

An asterisk indicates that a work was included in the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.

The Second World War 1939 to 1945

*Waiting For Godot 1953 Play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

Leave a comment
by Simon on January 4, 2021  •  Permalink
Posted in Play, TV
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on January 4, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/01/04/eh-joe-samuel-beckett/

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