All posts tagged Play

That Time by Samuel Beckett (1975)

A man is onstage standing high up and unnaturally still. Only his head is lit by a spotlight, a mature face with long flowing white hair. The audience hears a voice coming from somewhere, presumably his voice, although his lips don’t move, and after a minute or so the tone of the voice changes, then later for a third time, so that the audience slowly realises we are listening to three voices. Or are they three aspects of his own mind, specifically three trains or types of memory, gentle, wistful, and harsh (‘ah for God’s sake’) or from different periods of his life, young, mature and old man?

Stage directions

As usual, Beckett gives very precise stage directions in the script:

Curtain. Stage in darkness. Fade up to LISTENER’s FACE about 10 feet above stage level midstage off centre.
Old white face, long flaring white hair as if seen from above outspread
Voices A B C are his own coming to him from both sides and above. They modulate back and forth without any break in general flow except where silence indicated. See note.
Silence 7 seconds. LISTENER’s EYES are open. His breath audible, slow and regular.

And as to the NOTE mentioned, it says:

Moments of one and the same voice A B C relay one another without solution of continuity-apart from the two 10-second breaks. Yet the switch from one to another must be clearly faintly perceptible. If threefold source and context prove insufficient to produce this effect it should be assisted mechanically (e.g. threefold pitch).

Power of three

Three is, of course, a profoundly lucky number, three wishes, three bears, three billy goats gruff, a symbolic number, a theological number, the Trinity, and a very manageable number, a very practical number to arrange into any conversation or short play – witness the three heads in jars in Play or the three old women in Come and Go. Most of Beckett’s works can be sorted into solos, duos and trios. This combines two: a solo figure assailed by a trio of voices, which are all variations on his voice.

Beckett’s heads and the reflexive self

Visually, it is another Beckett head, disembodied, like the three heads activated by spotlights in Play or the jabbering woman’s head in Not I (where the head is positioned 8 feet above the stage, compared to the ten feet above stage level or That Time), or Winnie’s head sticking up out of the midden in part two of Happy Days.

Beckett’s obsession with heads can be simply explained because the head is the location of the human subject’s puzzlingly split consciousness, which is Beckett’s deepest, most enduring theme – the problem of being a self which observes the self observing the self thinking about the self, processing the things happening to the self now even as the self remembers events which happened to the self in the past – and so on and so on into an indefinitely recursive abyss of self-reflexive uncertainty, where first the sense of ‘self’ disintegrates into doubt and uncertainty, and then language itself begins to fall apart. That’s what happens in many of Beckett’s prose works.

After all, what is this ‘I’ that claims to be in control of the endlessly fissiparous mind? What a preposterous claim! How ridiculous! As one of the three voices puts it:

Did you ever say I to yourself in your life come on now? [Eyes close.] could you ever say I to yourself in your life?

We all say ‘I’ all the time, but none of us really knows what that means, once we start pondering what consciousness is, or appears to be, or how it thinks, or tries to think. Two and a half thousand years of philosophy and psychology have produced all manner of florid theories, but no-one really knows what the mind is or how it works.

Performance

That Time was specifically written for the actor Patrick Magee, who we have seen starring in productions of Krapp’s Last Tape and Cascando. Magee gave That Time‘s first performance, timed to mark Beckett’s seventieth birthday celebration, at the Royal Court Theatre on 20 May 1976.

Here’s the production made for the Beckett on Film project, with the Listener and the three Voices performed by Niall Buggy, directed by Charles Garrad.

Isolation

On a close reading you realise all three voices are describing scenes which, in their different ways, describe a life of self-induced isolation and retrospection. Solitude and isolation are what ooze out of the incantations. Alone alone alone.

alone in the same the same scenes making it up that way to keep it going keep it out on the stone [Eyes close.]
– alone on the end of the stone with the wheat and blue or the towpath alone on the towpath with the ghosts

The importance of memory, but even more of his isolation, is somehow rammed home by the insistent repetition of the title phrase ‘that time’:

  • that time you went back that last time to look…
  • that time in the Portrait Gallery in off the street out of the cold and rain…
  • that time curled up worm in slime…
  • muttering that time altogether on the stone in the sun or that time together on the towpath or that time together in the sand that time that time…
  • stock still like that time on the stone or that time in the sand…
  • that time in the Post Office all bustle Christmas bustle…
  • was that the time or was that another time…?
  • that time in the sand the glider passing over that time you went back soon after long after…
  • like that time on the stone the child on the stone where none ever came…
  • the Library that was another place another time that time you slipped in off the street out of the cold and rain…
  • that time in the end when you tried and couldn’t…

But that said (over and over again), the insistence and the implicit accusations… listening a bit more, I found the play slowly becoming, well, more nostalgic and comforting (if in a rather gritty way).

None of the three difference voices recall any horror, physical violence or abuse, nothing really disturbing. The first time I listened, I caught just random details – the protagonist remembering going into the portrait gallery, huddled in a doorstep, sitting together on a stone in the sunshine on the edge of a little wood with his sweetheart, hiding in some old ruins as a child, making up stories and voices when a child, by moonlight, on the towpath, on the sand ran away from home and everyone out looking for him…

Maybe it’s meant to be harrowing, and some bits are rather chilling, but overall I found the stories and the memories and the imagery (grittily) nostalgic. It sounds like your man had, in its way, quite a colourful life, a rather wonderful childhood in the country, exciting ruins, Foley’s Folly, woods and fields of wheat, a pretty girl with blue eyes, a night ferry, a portrait gallery. To a listener stuck inside during a COVID lockdown, it bespeaks a big wide wonderful world.

Structure

The Faber Companion To Samuel Beckett, as is its wont, emphasises the structural aspects of the piece and the history of its careful assembling by Beckett. This has at least two obvious features. 1. The piece is divided into three parts of exactly five minutes each, the parts divided by the breaks consisting of ten seconds of silence when you can hear his breathing quite audibly. 2. More subtly, the three voices alternate in alternating patterns. In the first two parts, these are: ACB, ACB, ACB, CAB and CBA, CBA, CBA, BCA. So a triplet with the same order and a fourth trio in a different order. However, the third part has a consistent pattern all the way through, namely BAC, BAC, BAC, BAC, thus creating a subliminal sense of order and what the Companion calls ‘serenity’.

Does it? Is this very calculated structuring of the piece what creates, at an unconscious level, the sense of a lulling rhythm of memory and reminiscence which is strangely, incongruously, comforting? Almost like… a lullaby.

The final smile

The main character is, in accordance with Beckett’s anti-humanist requirements, unnamed. In fact he is referred to simply LISTENER, along the lines of OPENER, VOICE and MUSIC in Cascando or HE and SHE in Rough For Radio, or W1 and W2 in Play or READER and LISTENER in Ohio Impromptu (I wonder if someone’s done the simple exercise of totting up all the ‘characters’ in all Beckett’s plays and figuring out whether there are more unnamed than named ones).

For most of the performance the actor is required to stand quite still, his only action being opening or closing his eyes. The text is punctuated by three ten-second silences (much as the jabbering monologue of Not I is punctuated four times by abrupt pauses, when the mysterious ‘other figure’ raises and lowers its arms).

So far so schematic and familiar as the three voices punish, criticise and assail the stricken, immobile, silent figure, very much as the silent figure of Joe is harangued with all his past betrayals and adulteries by WOMAN’S VOICE in Eh Joe.

But there’s a big surprise at the end, when the play requires that the LISTENER, right at the very end of the 20-minute play, when all the voices have finished… breaks into a smile. Now, Beckett being Beckett, the author tries to disavow any sentimental or romantic interpretation by requiring that the smile should be ‘toothless for preference’. Still. It’s a smile.

And it’s not the first one, because after tormenting Joe for eighteen minutes or so in the play Eh Joe, right at the very bitter end of that play, after having his life and bad behaviour and betrayals thrown in his face as if under an intense interrogation, the voice eventually ceases and… Joe breaks into a big smile. So that’s two plays which end, very unexpectedly, with smiles.

Why? Why do both these plays showing a middle-aged man being assailed by bad memories or an external accuser, suddenly end with this enigmatic smile? The shortest answer is that it is a smile of relief, certainly in Joe’s case, because the nagging accusing woman’s voice has finally ceased punishing him, at least for this evening.

But maybe the smiles hint at something subtler, which is a sense of psychological closure. Nowadays we all know a lot more about therapy and counselling than people did 50 years ago, about the need to talk, to get it out, to express the hurt, to be listened to, and so on. And the notion that, eventually, by dint of this process, you achieve closure, a word which has become more and more common currency in recent decades.

So the smiles might be both: smiles of simple relief – and also smiles indicating the process of self-accusation is in some sense, in this dramatic representation, something approaching ‘over’.

That Time and Not I

So That Time has a pretty close resemblance to Eh Joe in that both consist of a wordless, speechless man being persecuted by bad memories from the past but who, in the plays’ dying moments breaks into a broad smile. But Beckett also highlighted links with another of his works, Not I. In a letter he described That Time as a ‘brother to Not I‘.

He wrote to George Reavey [in his characteristic clipped style]:

Have written a short piece (theatre): That Time. Not I family.

The fact that Beckett described That Time as ‘cut out of the same texture’ as Not I explains why he didn’t want them on the same theatre bill.

As you enter the final phase of Beckett’s career, the gathering linkages between the plays and prose, the recurring topics, setups, themes and images, build up to create a kind of meta-structure – a Beckett cathedral of correspondences and connections which ramify out in all directions, reinforcing and complexifying each other.

… after that never looked back after that was that the time or was that another time… or was that another time all that another time was there ever any other time but that time…

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

  • Lessness (1970) Short prose
  • The Lost Ones (1966-70) Short prose
  • *Not I (1972) Stage play
  • Fizzles (1973 to 1975) Short prose pieces
  • Heard in the Dark, One evening and others – Short prose pieces
  • *That Time (1975) Stage play
  • *Footfalls (1976) Stage play
  • … but the clouds… (1976) Television play
  • For to End Yet Again (1976)
  • Ghost Trio (1977) Television play
  • Company (1980) Short story
  • *A Piece of Monologue (1980) Stage play
  • *Rockaby (1981) Stage play
  • Quad (1981) Television play
  • Ill Seen Ill Said (1981) Short novel
  • *Ohio Impromptu (1981) Stage play
  • *Catastrophe (1982) Stage play
  • Worstward Ho (1983) Prose
  • Nacht und Träume (1983) Television play
  • *What Where (1983) Stage play
  • Stirrings Still (1988) Short prose
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by Simon on January 20, 2021  •  Permalink
Posted in Play, Theatre
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Posted by Simon on January 20, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/01/20/that-time-samuel-beckett/

Not I by Samuel Beckett (1972)

…. grabbing at the straw… straining to hear… the odd word… make some sense of it… whole body like gone… just the mouth… like maddened… and can’t stop… no stopping it… something she – … something she had to –
… what?… who?… no!… she!…

Remember how episodes of the American sitcom Friends were named ‘The one where….’, well, this Beckett play is ‘the one where’ almost the entire stage is in darkness except for the face of a woman, in fact just her mouth, a woman’s mouth illuminated by one tight spotlight while she declaims a fragmented panic-stricken monologue at breathless speed.

Mise-en-scène

As with all Beckett’s ‘plays’ from 1960 or so onwards, the stage directions are extremely precise, because Not I is, arguably, less a play than a piece of performance art which happens to be taking place in a theatre:

Stage in darkness but for MOUTH, upstage audience right, about 8 feet above stage level, faintly lit from close-up and below, rest of face in shadow. Invisible microphone. AUDITOR, downstage audience left, tall standing figure, sex undeterminable, enveloped from head to foot in loose black djellaba, with hood, fully faintly lit, standing on invisible podium about 4 feet high shown by attitude alone to be facing diagonally across stage intent on MOUTH, dead still throughout but for four brief movements where indicated. See Note. As house lights down MOUTH ‘s voice unintelligible behind curtain. House lights out. Voice continues unintelligible behind curtain, 10 seconds: With rise of curtain ad-libbing from text as required leading when curtain fully up and attention sufficient
into:

Into the ceaseless flow of verbiage coming out of MOUTH’s mouth. As to ‘See Note’, the Note says:

Movement: this consists in simple sideways raising of arms from sides and their falling back, in a gesture of helpless compassion. It lessens with each recurrence till scarcely perceptible at third. There is just enough pause to contain it as MOUTH recovers from vehement refusal to relinquish third person.

So two people are onstage, a woman about 8 feet above the stage to the right and a tall figure standing 4 feet above the stage on the left.

In my review of Breath I wrote about the importance of exact stage directions in Beckett’s plays and the sense you often have that the staging and the stage directions virtually overshadow the actual content of the plays. Not I is a classic example of this, in that there is content, the mouth does say thing of consequence and import – but it is all dwarfed by the intensity of the conception and of the extremely precise and very vivid stage directions.

Content

So what is this voice ceasely reciting at such high speed? Well, like so many other Beckett texts it is built out of the repetition of key phrases, pretty banal in themselves, which quickly accumulate a freight of meaning, ominous overtones, and which are told in a high voltage, jerky panic. The opening few lines give a complete flavour:

out… into this world… this world… tiny little thing… before its time… in a god for- … what?… girl?… yes… tiny little girl… into this… out into this… before her time… godforsaken hole called… called… no matter… parents unknown… unheard of…

It sounds like yet another deranged Beckett consciousness, an Alzheimer’s victim, feverishly piecing together fragments of memory, torn by incessant questions she addresses to herself, who? why? what? and moments of panic:

… what?… who?… no !.. she !..

There is a passage about punishment and sin, and the fact she’d been brought up to believe in ‘a merciful God’.

… thing she understood perfectly … that notion of punishment … which had first occurred to her … brought up as she had been to believe .. . with the other waifs … in a merciful . . . [Brief laugh. ] .. . God … [Good laugh. ]

She sounds like one of the old ladies from Beckett’s childhood in rural Ireland, except with a thoroughly modern hysteria, complaining about the sounds in her skull, the relentless buzzing, and then… a passage about how she couldn’t scream, some problem with screaming, screaming, which leads up to her harrowing actual screams:

… never got the message… or powerless to respond… like numbed… couldn’t make the sound… not any sound… no sound of any kind… no screaming for help for example… should she feel so inclined… scream… [Screams. ]… then listen… [Silence. ]… scream again… [Screams again.]

The frenzy of the ceaseless wording leading up to the four movements from the AUDITOR, which occur during the silences after the woman works herself up to a frenzy or short, staccato, terrified words, almost as if she’s having a seizure, a fit:

.. the buzzing?.. yes… all dead still but for the buzzing… when suddenly she realized… words were – … what ?.. who?.. no !.. she!..

She appears to be sent shopping as a girl but stands dumb and terrified giving her bag to a man who does it all for her, it takes a while to realise that this is one of about four scenarios which the flood of fragmented memories seem to be reconstructing.

But specific memories tend to be eclipsed by descriptions of the voice itself, of the experience of being hag-ridden and driven by the voice by the mouth, no  idea what she’s saying but can’t stop:

just the mouth… lips… cheeks… jaws… never-… what?.. tongue?.. yes… lips… cheeks… jaws… tongue… never still a second… mouth on fire… stream of words… in her ear… practically in her ear… not catching the half… not the quarter… no idea what she’s saying… imagine!.. no idea what she ‘s saying!.. and can’t stop… no stopping it… she who but a moment before… but a moment!.. could not make a sound… no sound of any kind… now can’t stop… imagine!.. can’t stop the stream… and the whole brain begging… something begging in the brain… begging the mouth to stop… pause a moment… if only for a moment… and no response… as if it hadn’t heard… or couldn’t… couldn’t pause a second… like maddened… all that together… straining to hear… piece it together… and the brain… raving away on its own… trying to make sense of it… or make it stop…

God, it’s a vision of intense horror, despair, astonishing intensity, a soul driven, endlessly driven on, by what she keeps describing as a buzzing inside her skull, very much the motive of Beckett’s many monologuists since The Unnameable who hear a voice compelling them to speak, think, make sense of the endless voice compelling words within their skulls, the motive force behind so many of Beckett’s skullscapes. One critic, Vivian Mercier, suggests that Not I is, in effect, a placing on stage of the prose experience of The Unnameable a dramatisation of the same terrible compulsion.

… something she had to -… what?… the buzzing?… yes… all the time the buzzing… dull roar… in the skull…

Another important element is the way MOUTH appears, in these fragmentary memories or anecdotes, to be talking about herself and describing herself in the third person, a common symptom of mental illness, observing memories of their own lives with detachment as if they happened to someone else.

In this mood she seems to be referring to herself when she talks about the tiny little thing, the wee bairn, the tiny mite, born into a world of woe, illegitimate and rejected… and then jumps to herself as an old lady, surprised at her own age:

coming up to sixty when – … what?.. seventy?.. good God !.. coming up to seventy…

An old lady, her mind completely gone, fragments of memories, trying to make sense, driven on by the incessant buzzing in her skull.

This alienation from herself rises to a terrifying climax at each of the punctuation points when she pauses a moment and the other figure on the stage makes its strange hieratic gesture. Each time the crisis is signalled by a formula of the same four words, the last of which is ‘she’, as if MOUTH is seized with panic-horror by it, the Other, herself as other, her maenad voice.

… what?.. who ?.. no!.. she !..

The final section gives a bit more biography, how she was always a silent child, almost a mute, but just occasionally experienced the sudden urge to speak and had to rush outside, rushed into the outdoors lavatory, spewed it all up. That was the root, the precursor of the plight she is in now:

… now this… this… quicker and quicker… the words… the brain… flickering away like mad… quick grab and on… nothing there… on somewhere else… try somewhere else… all the time something begging… something in her begging… begging it all to stop…

God, the horror. Beckett told the American actress Jessica Tandy he hoped that the piece would ‘work on the nerves of the audience, not its intellect’ and it certainly sets my nerves jangling.

Not I

… what?.. who ?.. no!.. she !..

This is the rationale for the title, Not I. On one level the piece is not exactly a systematic ‘investigation’ but a terrifying dramatisation of the way all of us are aware not only of our ‘selves’, but of other elements in our minds which we, on the whole, manage or reject, the host of alternative suggestions, the way we are inside ourselves and yet, at various moments, are also capable of seeing ourselves as if from the outside.

This is busy territory, and over the past two and a half thousand years a host of philosophers and, more recently, psychologists, have developed all manner of theories about how the mind develops and, in particular, manages the dichotomy of being an I which perceives but also developing the awareness that this I exists in a world which is mostly Not I. In its entry of Not I the Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett refers to the theories of:

  • Schopenhauer, for whom perception of the external world was always accompanied by a sense that it is not I
  • Nordau‘s theory of the development of the psyche which first defines itself but as it conceptualises and understands the external world, the I retreats behind the Not I
  • St Paul Corinthians 15:10: ‘But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.’
  • Jakob Böhme, asked by what authority he wrote, replied: ‘Not I, the I that I am, knows these things, but God knows them in me’ (page 412)

Of these, I like the St Paul quote. If it bears any relation to this play it is the notion that I am that I am but I am not I, I am only I by virtue of another, of the Not I. Hence the shadowy Other sharing the stage.

But there’s no end to the concordances and echoes of these two words which can be found in the world’s literature and theology and philosophy – but most people are aware of there being levels of their selves, or of it being fragmented into peripheral, casual elements which we can easily dismiss, spectruming through to core elements of our selves which we cling on to and consider essential.

The Mouth’s monologue dramatises a set of four big moments which come back to her in fragments after some kind of epiphany or trigger moment in a field full of cowslips to the sound of larks. They are:

  1. being born a little thing
  2. crying on her hands one summer day in Croker’s acre
  3. being sent to do the shopping in some shopping centre
  4. in court

But really these moments serve to bring out the troubled relationship between the core being, whatever you want to call it, and those other moments, those other aspects of our personalities, everything which is ‘Not I’.

Of course in the play as conceived there is a physical embodiment of Not I onstage, namely the other figure. The way it raises its arms ‘in a gesture of helpless compassion’ at the four moments when Mouth stutters to a horrified silence, suggests they are linked. Is the figure Death, a Guardian Angel, the speaker’s Id or Superego? You pays your money and you takes your choice, but there’s no doubting the importance of the dynamic relationship between the two figures, an I and a Not I. Or maybe two Is which both possess Not Is. Or maybe they are two parts of the same I…

The Billie Whitelaw production

Beckett’s muse, the actress Billie Whitelaw, didn’t give the piece’s premiere, but starred in its first London performance in 1973. This was then recreated in order to be filmed in 1975 and can be found on YouTube.

I think this is spectacular, what a spectacular, amazing performance, what an experience, how disorientating, how revolting the way that, after a while the mouth seems to morph into some disgusting animal, and the endless mad demented drivel, the breathless haste in Whitelaw’s voice rising to the recurrent shout of SHE!! God, the horror.

Although very sexy and feminine when she wanted to be, Whitelaw also had a no-nonsense, working class toughness about her, a strong northern accent (she grew up in a working class area of Bradford) which slips out throughout the recitation.

But her real toughness comes over in those four big cries of SHE!!, delivered much deeper and ballsier than softer actresses, and so giving it a real terror.

Once you get over the sheer thrill of the performance there is an obvious feature about it which is that it largely ignores Beckett’s stage directions. In the piece as conceived there is a dynamic tension between the speaking woman on the right of the stage and the androgynous cloaked figure to the left who responds to the four big hysterical climaxes of the monologue with the mysterious, slow-motion raising and lowering of the arms gesture.

The oddity is that Whitelaw’s performance benefited from extensive coaching from Beckett. So why did he completely jettison a key part of the initial concept? Did he realise it was distracting from the core idea of the spotlight on a ceaselessly talking mouth? Apparently so because, according to the Wikipedia article:

When Beckett came to be involved in staging the play, he found that he was unable to place the Auditor in a stage position that pleased him, and consequently allowed the character to be omitted from those productions. However, he chose not to cut the character from the published script, and whether or not the character is used in production seems to be at the discretion of individual producers. As he wrote to two American directors in 1986: “He is very difficult to stage (light–position) and may well be of more harm than good. For me the play needs him but I can do without him. I have never seen him function effectively.”

Staging the production presented extreme difficulties for the leading lady.

Initially Billie Whitelaw wanted to stand on a dais but she found this didn’t work for her so she allowed herself to be strapped in a chair called an ‘artist’s rest’ on which a film actor wearing armour rests because he cannot sit down. Her entire body was draped in black; her face covered with black gauze with a black transparent slip for her eyes and her head was clamped between two pieces of sponge rubber so that her mouth would remain fixed in the spotlight. Finally a bar was fixed which she could cling to and on to which she could direct her tension. She was unable to use a visual aid and so memorised the text.

Regarding selves and unselves, it is a maybe a profound insight that, although Whitelaw found is a desperately difficult role and was, after the initial rehearsals, seriously disorientated, she came to regard it as one of her most powerful performances because it unlocked something inside her,

She heard in Mouth’s outpourings her own ‘inner scream’: ‘I found so much of my self in Not I.’

Maybe we all do. Maybe that’s one function of art, allowing us to discover the Not I in all of us.

A touch of autobiography

I grew up above the village grocery shop and sub-post office my parents ran, and across the road and through some woodland was a priory which had been turned into an old people’s home which was still run by nuns, old nuns, very old nuns, in fact most of the nuns were too old and infirm to make it the couple of hundred yards through the trees up to the road they had to cross to get to the shop and some of the nuns and old ladies who could make it up weren’t too confident crossing the road, not least Miss Luck (real name) who was very short-sighted, almost blind, who would arrive at the road and just set out across it regardless of traffic, so that the first thing all the new staff in the shop were taught was, ‘If you see Miss Luck arrive at the gate from the Priory, drop everything and run across the road to help her walk across without being run over’.

And so I watch this amazing work of art, and I’m aware of the multiple meanings it can be given, from the characteristic sex obsession of many literary critics who see the mouth a vagina trying to give birth to the self (given that Whitelaw has a set of 32 immaculate-looking sharp teeth, these critics must have been hanging round some very odd vaginas); to the many invocations of philosophers and psychologists to extrapolate umpteen different theories of the self and not-self; through to the more purely literary notion that the endless repetition of the voice’s obsessive moments, insights, anxieties are a further iteration of the struggle of the narrator in The Unnamable to fulfil the compulsion, the order, the directive to talk talk talk he doesn’t know why, because he must, because they say so.

So I am aware of many types of interpretation the piece is susceptible to. But I also understand what Beckett meant when he said in an interview that:

I knew that woman in Ireland. I knew who she was — not ‘she’ specifically, one single woman, but there were so many of those old crones, stumbling down the lanes, in the ditches, besides the hedgerows.

Because there were so many old, old ladies pottering across the road from the Priory or from other parts of my village, talking talking talking, babbling their way around the place in a continual stream of undertones and monologue, throughout my boyhood.

It is at the same time an artfully contrived work of avant-garde art, but also an unnervingly realistic depiction of how some people actually are. And not just some – nearly 9 million people in the UK are aged over 70, and Alzheimer’s disease has gone from being a condition few of us had heard about 20 years ago, to now being the leading cause of death in the UK.

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

  • Lessness (1970) Short prose
  • The Lost Ones (1966-70) Short prose
  • *Not I (1972) Stage play
  • Fizzles (1973 to 1975) Short prose pieces
  • *That Time (1975) Stage play
  • *Footfalls (1976) Stage play
  • … but the clouds… (1976) Television play
  • neither (1976)
  • For to End Yet Again (1976)
  • Ghost Trio (1977) Television play
  • Company (1979) Short story
  • *A Piece of Monologue (1980) Stage play
  • *Rockaby (1981) Stage play
  • Quad (1981) Television play
  • Ill Seen Ill Said (1981) Short novel
  • *Ohio Impromptu (1981) Stage play
  • *Catastrophe (1982) Stage play
  • Worstward Ho (1983) Prose
  • Nacht und Träume (1983) Television play
  • *What Where (1983) Stage play
  • Stirrings Still (1988) Short prose
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by Simon on January 13, 2021  •  Permalink
Posted in Literature, Play, Theatre
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on January 13, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/01/13/not-i-samuel-beckett/

Breath by Samuel Beckett (1969)

In 1969 Kenneth Tynan wrote to Beckett asking for a contribution to his hit stage revue, Oh! Calcutta!, which made headlines because of the extensive use of full-frontal nudity.

Beckett replied with the stage directions for what must be one of the shortest plays ever written. Some versions barely last a minute. Longer ones stretch it out to two minutes. Here are the directions:

Curtain.
1. Faint light on stage littered with miscellaneous rubbish. Hold for about five seconds.
2. Faint brief cry and immediately inspiration and slow increase of light together reaching maximum together in about ten seconds. Silence and hold about five seconds.
3. Expiration and slow decrease of light together reaching minimum together (light as in 1.) in about ten seconds and immediately cry as before. Silence and hold for about five seconds.

Rubbish No verticals, all scattered and lying.
Cry Instant of recorded vagitus. Important that two cries be identical, switching on and off strictly synchronized light and breath.
Breath Amplified recording.
Maximum light Not bright. If 0 = dark and 10 = bright, light should move from about 3 to 6 and back.

That’s the full text in its entirety. In other words, the stage lighting comes up on a pile of rubbish for a few seconds, there is the distant sound of the cry of a newborn baby followed by a big breath in accompanied by the light growing, followed by a big breath out as the light fades, a repeat of the cry of a newborn baby, then fade to black.

There are quite a few versions on YouTube and one of the funny things about them, taken as a group, is how few of them adhere strictly to Beckett’s directions, but feel the need to add and elaborate and embroider the bleak simplicity of the original.

Absurdist joke

On one level it’s clearly a sort of joke, in the same sort of absurdist spirit as John Cage’s 4’33” or Marcel Duchamp’s urinal – a reduction of theatre to almost its minimal possible components in order to see what the bare bones look like, to see what the most reduced idea of a theatrical piece can be. And yet at the same time be a work which is interesting in its own right – just like John Cage’s 4’33” or Marcel Duchamp’s urinal.

The unsustainability of a nihilistic attitude

At the same time it’s also a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the nihilistic attitude (I hesitate to use the word ‘philosophy’ because although Beckett likes to refer to canonical philosophers and difficult philosophical ideas in his works, he is not a philosopher and doesn’t propound a philosophy) expressed in the famous line from Waiting For Godot:

They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.

In other words, we are born into a heap of rubbish, cry at our entrance, our entire existence can be summarised as a couple of breaths, and then there is the second cry of our death. Here’s another version, clearly inspired by Philip Glass and Godfrey Reggio’s film Koyaanisqatsi.

But as I remarked of that line in my review of Waiting For Godot, this nihilistic worldview is simply not true and everyone knows it’s not true. Lots of people live long, complex and fulfilling lives. People play computer games and chess, make discoveries, run theatres, write plays, go to art festivals and galleries and football matches, go scuba diving and skiing, build houses and cars, drive across America, join the army, join the navy, go to school, go to church, have children, grandchildren and quite a bit more.

It takes a special kind of imagination to see human life as simply a matter of two cries of pain and a handful of breaths set against a pile of rubbish, and a special kind of mindset to think this could possibly be true. It takes quite a bit of education to be quite this self-deluded.

Of course as a simplified allegory of human existence, as a symbol of a particular worldview, then fine. Paint what you like, draw what you like, write what you like. But as a depiction of the so-called ‘human condition’, it is profoundly untrue.

The unstoppable human instinct to tinker

And this is exactly the point driven home when you watch the half dozen or so short productions of Breath on YouTube – not one of them does it straight, just films Beckett’s simple directions; almost all of them feel compelled to add and embroider and elaborate in all kinds of ways, whether it’s bringing in the music of Philip Glass or a load of slides about the Nazis and the Holocaust.

Now there is where you have the real human spirit or experience – the endless urge to tell stories, tell anecdotes and jokes, harrow with horror, set to music, hum, sing, dance, plunge into grief, gossip about work colleagues, keep a diary, share instagram photos.

The multiplicity of productions which betray Beckett’s simple spartan and crystal clear stage directions, they’re the ones which tell you about ‘the human spirit’, the spirit which can’t stop itself adding, embroidering, inventing, yakking on, adding a new bit, what about some music, hey let’s project some slides, shall we add wheels, how about a flashing light on top and a siren. Humans: incorrigibly gabby.

In fact this betrayal of Beckett’s vision occurred right at the start, when the creator of Oh Calcutta, Kenneth Tynan, gratefully received Beckett’s contribution but thought, ‘Well, that’s a bit boring, let’s adapt it to suit the vibe of our bravely nude stage show’ and added a number of naked men and women to the production. As Beckett’s biographer, Deirdre Blair put it:

‘In one of his few displays of public anger, Beckett called Tynan a “liar” and a “cheat”, prompting Tynan to send a formal notice through his lawyers that he was not responsible for the travesty, which he claimed was due to others … Beckett decided the incident wasn’t worth the argument and dropped it.’

When you think about it it’s a delicious irony, because lovely naked young men and nubile young women, powerful symbols of fertility and sex and the Life Force are pretty much the exact opposite of the nihilistic and bleak ‘philosophy’ the piece supposedly exemplifies.

Drop it, Sam. Walk away. It’s just people, Sam, doing what they do, adding bells and whistles and go-faster stripes. I know you intended it as a searing indictment of the human condition, but the producer wanted boobs and bums.

Beckett as writer not ‘philosopher’

I am interested in Beckett, I am reading my way through his complete works, because I think he is an extraordinary writer – he conceives of language and the scenarios language can conjure and the tension between what can barely be called its ‘subject’ and the wrecked tatters of language it is conveyed in, with extraordinary originality. He repeatedly takes language to entirely new places, creating a kind of powerful and original dynamic interplay between form and content which is unparalleled.

But I don’t think his subject matter is true, good grief, what an idea. It is merely the subject matter he needs to create in order to develop the linguistic effects he is interested in. The white boxes which the narrative finds its protagonists stuck inside in the so-called ‘skullscapes’ or the people crawling through the mud in How It Is are objective correlatives or symbols or scenarios or setups which justify the extreme linguistic experimentation, the phenomenally strange and eerie way he handles the language.

The producers of the Beckett On Film project asked artist Damian Hirst to film it but even though part of an attempt to produce canonical versions, Hirst’s version simply omits the baby’s cry, the vagitus at beginning and end. It’s almost as if the text’s brevity and simplicity taunts producers to over-ride it.

The triumph of stage directions

And, quite obviously, this micro-drama also represents the triumph of stage directions over content. It’s easy to find critics and commentators lauding Beckett as among the greatest prose explorers of the 20th century, and I would whole-heartedly agree. But not so many people make the just-as-obvious point, that he was one of the greatest writers of stage directions.

All of the plays contain very, very detailed stage instructions specifying every aspect of the set, of props, what the characters are wearing, the kind of lighting, exactly how they move, how they speak or whisper or pause.

There’s the story of the hapless Americans who had the bright idea of staging Endgame but setting it in a disused New York subway station. Oops. It is comic and instructive to read the outraged response this prompted from Beckett himself, who tried to get the production stopped and, when that failed, got his lawyers to ensure that the following note was inserted into the programmes for the production:

Any production of Endgame which ignores my stage directions is completely unacceptable to me. My play requires an empty room and two small windows. The American Repertory Theater production which dismisses my directions is a complete parody of the play as conceived by me. Anybody who cares for the work couldn’t fail to be disgusted by this.
(quoted in the Wikipedia article)

What I’m driving at is that many of the later plays can be seen as the triumph of stage directions over prose content. Thus the short work Come And Go really consists of the tightly choreographed movements of the three women. The two Acts Without Words cease to have any dialogue at all, and are what they say on the tin, mimes. Similarly, Quad consists of the wordless movement of four humans dressed in shrouds through a complex series of positions on a stage set conceived as a mathematical quadrant, not really resembling anything we associate with the word ‘play’.

Even some of Beckett’s most famous works can be seen as the triumph of mise-en-scène over content. The only thing most people know or remember about Happy Days is that it’s about a woman trapped up to her waist in a mound of sand trying to look on the bright side of the situation.

Similarly, it’s not really necessary to understand any the text spoken in Not I to be dazzled by the beautiful simplicity of having the stage (or camera) focused entirely and only on a disconcerting close-up of the yammering mouth.

And Krapp’s Last Tape can be summed up as a knackered old man listening in anguish to tape recordings of his much younger, more confident self.

Prose there might have to be, language might be required, to make plays go, to allow a production to go ahead. I’m just suggesting that the stage setups and the fantastically detailed stage directions Beckett supplied to all his dramatic works is at least as, and sometimes maybe more, important than the supposed semantic content of the texts, their so-called ‘philosophy’ and so on. The setup and the actions are the play.

So, to repeat, a minute-long work in which we simply hear the cry of a newborn baby set against a rubbish dump, is brilliantly minimalistic, reduces Beckett’s so-called philosophy of life to one piercing image – but is also a kind of epitome of his theatrical practice.

The law of unintended adaptations

Last point. I suppose there is a cheeky connection between Beckett’s minimalism and the way so many of the interpreters on YouTube and elsewhere have felt free to embroider it. Maybe Beckett’s work survives and his reputation endures precisely because, contrary to his emphatic and repeated directions, the very minimalism, especially of the later plays, allows directors and producers a surprising amount of creative freedom.

More, as I hinted earlier, it’s almost as if the super-precise stage directions are tempting producers to ignore this or that aspect of them, and to improve on Beckett’s vision – to make it contemporary, make it diverse, bring it up to date, make it relevant to the age of social media, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and so on.

There’s some kind of perverse law of human nature at play, almost as if the more precise Beckett’s directions became, the more free later generations of producers have felt to bugger about with them,

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

  • Lessness (1970) Short prose
  • The Lost Ones (1966-70) Short prose
  • *Not I (1972) Stage play
  • Fizzles (1973 to 1975) Short prose pieces
  • *That Time (1975) Stage play
  • *Footfalls (1976) Stage play
  • … but the clouds… (1976) Television play
  • neither (1976)
  • For to End Yet Again (1976)
  • Ghost Trio (1977) Television play
  • Company (1979) Short story
  • *A Piece of Monologue (1980) Stage play
  • *Rockaby (1981) Stage play
  • Quad (1981) Television play
  • Ill Seen Ill Said (1981) Short novel
  • *Ohio Impromptu (1981) Stage play
  • *Catastrophe (1982) Stage play
  • Worstward Ho (1983) Prose
  • Nacht und Träume (1983) Television play
  • *What Where (1983) Stage play
  • Stirrings Still (1988) Short prose
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by Simon on January 6, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 6, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/01/06/breath-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

  • Lessness (1970) Short prose
  • The Lost Ones (1966-70) Short prose
  • *Not I (1972) Stage play
  • Fizzles (1973 to 1975) Short prose pieces
  • *That Time (1975) Stage play
  • *Footfalls (1976) Stage play
  • … but the clouds… (1976) Television play
  • neither (1976)
  • For to End Yet Again (1976)
  • Ghost Trio (1977) Television play
  • Company (1979) Short story
  • *A Piece of Monologue (1980) Stage play
  • *Rockaby (1981) Stage play
  • Quad (1981) Television play
  • Ill Seen Ill Said (1981) Short novel
  • *Ohio Impromptu (1981) Stage play
  • *Catastrophe (1982) Stage play
  • Worstward Ho (1983) Prose
  • Nacht und Träume (1983) Television play
  • *What Where (1983) Stage play
  • Stirrings Still (1988) Short prose
Leave a comment
by Simon on January 4, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 4, 2021

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

Come and Go by Samuel Beckett (1965)

Come and Go is an example of the form Beckett came to call ‘dramaticules’ for the simple reason that they are very short. Come and Go consists of a set of very precise stage movements and just over 120 words of dialogue, and is about seven minutes long in performance. As with most of Beckett’s later works, the detailed stage directions are as long as the text of the ‘play’ itself.

Stage directions

Lights go up on a stage empty apart from a bench on which are sitting three women. The lighting is:

Soft, from above only and concentrated on playing area. Rest of stage as dark as possible.

Over the course of the seven minutes we will learn from the sparse dialogue that the women’s names are Ru, Vi and Flo. They are wearing full-length coats, buttoned high, a dull violet for Ru, dull red for Vi, dull yellow for Flo. They should be wearing:

Drab nondescript hats with enough brim to shade faces. Apart from colour differentiation three figures as
alike as possible. Light shoes with rubber soles. Hands made up to be as visible as possible. No rings apparent.

The seat? It must be:

Narrow benchlike seat, without back, just long enough to accommodate three figures almost touching. As little visible as possible. It should not be clear what they are sitting on.

When the women come and go:

They should disappear a few steps from lit area. If dark not sufficient to allow this, recourse should be had to screens or drapes as little visible as possible. Exits and entrances slow, without sound of feet.

Their voices should be:

As low as compatible with audibility. Colourless except for three ‘ohs’ and two lines following.

The women’s movements

The three women, Flo, Vi, Ru, are sitting on a bench. The central one, Vi, gets up and walks backstage, leaving Flo and Ru. The one on our left, Flo, shuffles over to the one on the right, Ru, and whispers in her ear and Ru gasps, ‘Oh’.

The one who had left, Vi, re-enters and takes up the vacant place on the left. The one in the middle, Flo, gets up and walks backstage. The one on the right, Ru, shuffles over to sit next to the one on the left, Vi, and whispers something in her ear. Vi gasps ‘Oh’. Flo reappears from backstage and takes the vacant place on the right.

The one now in the middle, Ru, gets up and walks backstage. The one on the left, Vi, shuffles across to be sitting next to the one on the right, Flo and whispers in her ear. Flo gasps, ‘Oh’.

Ru appears from backstage and takes up the vacant place on the left of the bench. All this is entirely in line with one of Beckett’s central attributes which is a fanatically precise attention to physical postures and movements. It’s quite possible that the prose works from this period (the mid-1960s) have their genesis in the various, precisely described, physical postures of the various protagonists. Certainly his plays had, for some time, not only become shorter, but more interested in the precise posture and movements of the protagonists than in what they say. So precise were his instructions that he drew a schematic of the women’s changing positions:

The changing positions of Flo, Vi and Ru on the bench in ‘Come and Go’

In the final minute of the play the three women join hands in a gesture designed, one suspects, purely for its agreeable geometric complexity. Beckett gives a detailed prose description of the movement:

[After a moment they join bands as follows: Vi’s right band with Ru ‘s right band. Vi’s left band with Flo ‘s left
hand, Flo’s right band with Ru’s left band, Vi’s arms being above Ru’s left arm and Flo’s right arm. The three
pairs of clasped bands rest on the three laps.]

And in case that’s not enough, Beckett also gives another schematic diagram:

Schematic of the arrangement of the three women’s hands at the end of ‘Come and Go’

The careful notation and the pattern of movements and gestures is reminiscent of many musical forms, most of which require the statement of a particular theme or cadence which is then repeated with variations.

The Beckett on Film version

What does all this look like in practice? Well, here is a very faithful production which fulfils Beckett’s instructions to the letter. It was part of the Beckett On Film project, and was directed by John Crow, featuring Anna Massey as Vi, Siân Phillips as Ru and Paola Dionisotti as Flo.

Performance art

Personally, I find this obsessive emphasis on the precise delineation and definition of every single element of the performance makes the piece more like a kind of living sculpture or piece of performance art than a ‘play’.

There are three individuals and they are given actual names (unlike M, W1 and W2 in Play, for example) and they do actually say things which make a sort of sense – but personally I can’t help thinking of the apparent content of the playlet i.e. what the characters say, as very, very secondary to the visualisation of the staging and the dogmatic precision with which Beckett polices it. In the same way that semi-abstract art may take its origin from some aspect of ‘the real world’ but the real interest is in how these elements are abstracted out into an overall design.

Content

It’s almost scary how much commentary critics and scholars have been able to spool out of this short playlet. The Wikipedia article about Come and Go is dismayingly long. Four elements stand out, for me:

1. Old ladies

The play depicts three old ladies nattering. I grew up in a village full of old people, in fact my parents ran the village shop and I started working in it when I was 12 or 13. Not only that, but across the road was a nunnery which had been converted into an old people’s home, staffed by very old nuns looking after even older ladies. My point is that my boyhood was dominated by different groups of old ladies meeting up in the shop or just outside and nattering on for hours. Old Miss Luck, Miss Grace, Miss Denis and Mrs Hobson are just four that spring to mind. So I take the play at face value as three old ladies sitting on a bench having a natter.

A possibly overlooked element of this ‘realistic’ interpretation is how boring and empty a lot of old people’s lives are. With no jobs to fill their days, with no children to bring up, lots of retired and elderly people find their lives very empty. Chatting with friends your own age, specially about children and grandchildren, or about the thousand aches and pains that flesh is heir to, fills the time. Specially for old women, who will more than likely outlive their husbands, often by decades.

2. Bad news

The notion that as soon as one of three old ladies departs the other two instantly fall to gossiping about her is as old as the human race. Modern young feminist scholars may dismiss it as sexist stereotyping but I’ve seen it happen, myself, so many hundreds of times that I consider it simple realism. What makes it even more realistic, to my mind, is that the two remainers instantly share some ‘shocking’ news about the woman who’s just left the stage. This news is whispered, but whispered quite loudly, in a showy, attention-pulling kind of way, to make the whisperer feel important. And it’s fairly obvious from the auditor’s response, that the two women are sharing the ‘secret’ that the one who is offstage at that moment, has some fatal illness but doesn’t know it.

This feature of the playlet manages to combine three elements: a pretty realistic aspect of old ladies gossiping, with the Beckett theme of doom-laden lives, impending death etc, with a third element, which is a multiple dramatic irony. Level one of dramatic irony is the way each pair of old ladies knows that the other one is dying of an incurable disease; level two is that we, the audience, know that they are all dying of an incurable disease.

Beckett is saying that we all like to reassure ourselves that we are alright and it is the others who are in a parlous plight. But you know what – in reality we are all in the same parlous plight, all of us are dying by degrees and doomed to the same fate.

3. Threes

VI: When did we three last meet?

The fact that it is three women lends itself to all kinds of symbolic interpretations, for example the three Graces, the three Fates of Greek mythology, the three Norns of Norse mythology, or the Trinity of Christian theology. Small essays can be written imposing these or any other triad you can think of onto the three women, but they don’t interest me much.

Three of anything is just a convenient number. 2,000 years ago Cicero pointed out that if you wanted to impress your listeners, your speeches should include sentences containing three clauses: blood, sweat and tears; earth, wind and fire; the good, the bad and the ugly; hands, face, space; if at first you don’t succeed, try, try and try again; the German proverb Alle guten Dinge sind drei; you wait ages for one bus, then three come along at once.

And of course that opening sentence has reminded every English student who ever read or heard it of the opening line of Macbeth with its three witches:

When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

In any context, three entities feels just the right number (to our ape minds, for whatever reason): two isn’t quite enough, four is too many, three is a perfect size.

4. Padding

I can’t find quite the right word to describe the fourth element, what you could call ‘filler material’ or ‘padding’, in the sense of ‘content produced to fill up gaps or holes’. What I’m getting at is that having assembled his three old ladies and conceived the ironic core of the action – the way each pair of them shares the secret of the other one’s fatal illness – all good so far, Beckett now has to, er pad the rest of the time out with something. But with what?

I think this is an easily identifiable aspect of most of Beckett’s work, whether prose or plays: there’s a basic structure often based on the position of a body or bodies; there’s a kind of geometric ideas about how bodies position themselves or move; a set of key words and phrases emerge which can be repeated to an intense degree… but there needs to be something else, some kind of distinct content which makes each piece unique.

Often it’s a name, thrown in almost at random to create the illusion of ‘content’, that the piece is referring to something the rest of us can relate to, to ‘characters’ who may then be given some attributes to pad them out. For me the standout example is the figure of ‘Woburn’ in Cascando. In that work Beckett had conceived of a kind of impresario who controls the contributions of the two abstract entities Voice and Music. Now Music is easy enough to create, and Beckett worked with composers who created it for him. But Voice, what can Voice say? It needed to be a story which is continually started but never finished and never told in quite the right way. The easiest solution was to think of a person undertaking an activity and so the finished piece has Voice repeatedly telling the ‘story’ of this figure Woburn, who he repeatedly describes getting out of bed, getting dressed, going downstairs, out the house, across the beach and trying to launch a dinghy into the sea.

My point is that what he does and his name, Woburn, are utterly irrelevant to the basic structure of the piece, but once they had been decided, then they become both strangely hypnotic in performance, and susceptible to any number of clever scholarly interpretations. But Woburn’s primary purpose is to pad out the structural skeleton, to provide the filler which gives it content.

Same here. Beckett adds a name and a factual reference, just one:

FLO: Just sit together as we used to, in the playground at Miss Wade’s.
RU: On the log.

Who is Miss Wade? What does the log symbolise? Ten thousand scholars have shed much ink investing this handful of words with multiple significances, and who knows, maybe they’re all right. Maybe it starts by meaning what it says at face value, namely the three old ladies are remembering when they were little girls back at Miss Wade’s nursery or school and used to sit on a log and hold hands. And scholars have indeed discovered that Beckett’s female cousins attended a school in Dublin run by three spinster sisters and commonly known Miss Wade’s. ‘Aha! Gotcha!’ This might be called the sentimental interpretation. Aah.

But looked at structurally, this is quite obviously a familiar Beckett strategy: he has created the skeleton, the frame of a work, and it is the skeleton – the bench, the three women, their carefully choreographed movements – which really interest him. Now he has to put some flesh on it to keep the punters happy. He needs a few touches of colour in an otherwise almost entirely white, abstract design.

Same sort of thing happens a few minutes later:

VI: May we not speak of the old days? [Silence. ] Of what came after? [Silence. ]

Beckett is dangling his familiar theme, the sense of loss and decay, hinting at some disaster or unmentionable incident, for the gossips in the audience and academy to speculate about. But it is almost over-familiar; we have heard Beckett characters make these kind of pseudo-profound statements so many times, they come as no surprise. But the characters have to say something.

And again, at the very end, the last words, after the three ladies have joined hands:

FLO: I can feel the rings. [Silence. ]

Well, you don’t have to be a genius to see how these words emphasise the circular shape of the play which ends where it began and consists of a series of repeated patterns within itself, and brings out the intertwining nature of the three women’s lives, or fates.

The bombastic among us might reference Wagner’s massive Ring series of operas. The sentimental might notice that none of the three are actually wearing rings (a detail emphasised by Beckett) and so Flo is referring to invisible and imagined rings, maybe the rings the three spinsters longed for all their lives and never attained. The literary (such as the editors of The Beckett Companion) may think of Henry Vaughan’s poem, Eternity:

I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light

Or those of us with small children might be prompted to think of the Circle of Life from that great philosophical work, The Lion King. I.e. it’s almost like these brief, pregnant phrases are consciously designed to trigger responses in the word and idea centres of the brain…

But, for me, the point is not the words, or the meanings the words conjure up – it is the silences. In fact, surely the most important thing about the verbal content of Come and Go – once you have processed the irony of the whispered secrets – is the long, looong silences which punctuate it. It is a play made up of silences. Just over 120 words, but how many silences? (I counted: the word ‘silence’ appears 12 times; 1 silence per ten words).

A complex ballet of movements. Three whispered revelations. The bare minimum of ‘affect’ or content. Long silences. It is amazing how dense and complex such a brief piece of drama can be.

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

  • Lessness (1970) Short prose
  • The Lost Ones (1966-70) Short prose
  • *Not I (1972) Stage play
  • Fizzles (1973 to 1975) Short prose pieces
  • *That Time (1975) Stage play
  • *Footfalls (1976) Stage play
  • … but the clouds… (1976) Television play
  • neither (1976)
  • For to End Yet Again (1976)
  • Ghost Trio (1977) Television play
  • Company (1979) Short story
  • *A Piece of Monologue (1980) Stage play
  • *Rockaby (1981) Stage play
  • Quad (1981) Television play
  • Ill Seen Ill Said (1981) Short novel
  • *Ohio Impromptu (1981) Stage play
  • *Catastrophe (1982) Stage play
  • Worstward Ho (1983) Prose
  • Nacht und Träume (1983) Television play
  • *What Where (1983) Stage play
  • Stirrings Still (1988) Short prose
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by Simon on January 1, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 1, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/01/01/come-and-go-samuel-beckett/

Play by Samuel Beckett (1963)

The imaginatively-titled Play is a 15-minute stage play written by Samuel Beckett in English in late 1962. The first performance of Spiel, the German version, took place in Ulm-Donau in June 1963 and was published in German the following month. The English version was first performed by the National Theatre Company at the Old Vic on 7 April 1964 and published by Faber and Faber later the same year.

Play’s mise en scène

Three characters are set in yard-high urns, reminiscent of Nag and Nell who live in dustbins in Endgame. As usual in later Beckett there are very, very precise stage directions for exactly how the actors should be positioned, appear, move or not move. Here they are:

Faces so lost to age and aspect as to seem almost part of urns. But no masks.
Their speech is provoked by a spotlight projected on faces alone.
The transfer of light from one face to another is immediate.
No blackout, i. e. return to almost complete darkness of opening, except where indicated.
The response to light is immediate.
Faces impassive throughout. Voices toneless except where an expression is indicated.
Rapid tempo throughout.
The curtain rises on a stage in almost complete darkness.
Urns just discernible. Five seconds.
Faint spots simultaneously on three faces. Three seconds.
Voices faint, largely unintelligible.

You can see how this is, in its way, a kind of poetry but, characteristically, without any natural feel for language. It is as hard and blunt as a manual. The poetry, such as there is, is in the obsessive attention to detail, a strange obsessive-compulsive form of metallic rhetoric.

Note the way the faces are, inevitably, so ‘lost to age, as to seem almost part of [the] urns’, characteristic of Beckett’s obsession with old age and senility and decay and the atrophy of ‘the human’ in human beings. Almost all his people are post-people, post-human,

Also the relatively simplistic stage effect that each voice is ‘activated’ by a spotlight being shone on it. This isn’t the only stage direction. He goes on to give very detailed requirements for the spotlight and for the urns and positioning of the actors therein.

In order for the urns to be only one yard high, it is necessary either that traps be used, enabling the actors to stand below stage level, or that they kneel throughout play, the urns being open at the back.
Should traps be not available, and the kneeling posture found impracticable, the actors should stand, the urns be enlarged to full length and moved back from front to mid-stage, the tallest actor setting the height, the broadest the breadth, to which the three urns should conform.
The sitting posture results in urns of unacceptable bulk and is not to be considered.

Beckett took his stagings deadly seriously and was very upset by, and refused to give permission for, performances which deviated from them – the obsession with detail is part of the work or part of the mindset behind the work. Still, for someone not part of the luvvie profession, there is also something comic about its fanatical obsessiveness.

The Anthony Minghella production

Bearing this fanatical obsession with staging his plays just as he wanted them with the way Play was filmed by Anthony Minghella for the Beckett on Film project at the turn of the millennium.

What you immediately notice are a) the characters are very much not lost to age, they are in fact played by three British movie stars, the gorgeous Alan Rickman, charismatic Juliet Stevenson and the sensationally gorgeous Kristin Scott Thomas b) why are they wearing glitter on their faces, that’s not anywhere in Beckett’s directions, are they part of a Marc Bolan tribute band? and c) there’s no attempt at all to recreate the spotlight effect which is central to Beckett’s conception

As so often with Beckett’s plays, the mise-en-scène is stunning and exciting, but then what the characters actually say borders on the banal. In this case it appears to be one of the oldest plots in history, the triangle of husband and wife and mistress, who obsessively recount, at high speed, their encounters, arguments and recriminations. Boring.

All the more boring as Minghella focuses on this aspect by cutting the interesting opening section where the three ‘characters’ give a characteristically bleak, struggling-on-to-the-end, the darkness etc:

W1: Yes, strange, darkness best, and the darker the worse, till all dark, then all well, for the time, but it will come, the time will come, the thing is there, you’ll see it, get off me, keep off me, all dark, all still, all over, wiped out
W2: Yes, perhaps, a shade gone, I suppose, some might say, poor thing, a shade gone, just a shade, in the head-[Faint wild laugh.] – just a shade, but I doubt it, I doubt it, not really, I’m all right, still all right, do my best, all I can
M: Yes, peace, one assumed, all out, all the pain, all as if … never been, it will come – [Hiccup.] – pardon, no sense in
this, oh I know … nonetheless, one assumed, peace … I mean … not merely all over, but as if … never been –

That’s the true Beckett voice, but Minghella cuts this opening in order to focus on the adultery passages starting with:

W1: I said to him, Give her up . I swore by all I held most sacred­…

Incidentally, M stands for Man, W1 stands for woman 1 and… I’ll leave you to work out what W2 stands for. Fiendishly difficult, this avant-garde literature!

The word ‘play’ which appears to give the piece its title appears in the Man’s monologue. He wonders how long it will take before the sorry tawdry tale of his adultery is old enough to seem just ‘play’:

M: I know now, all that was just … play. And all this? When will all this –
[Spot from M to w 1 . ]
W1: Is that it?
[Spot from w1 to w 2.]
W2: Mightn’t you?
[Spot from w 2 to M .]
M: All this, when will all this have been … just play?

There is something so consistent in Beckett’s addiction to inserting trivia into his texts. The references to Erskine remind me of the reference to Woburn in the previous play, there’s always the innocuous name of someone peripheral who, through repetition, is meant to gain significance. There is always a clutch of innocuous and banal details, in this case the references to the pair drinking tea. The man speculates:

Perhaps they meet, and sit, over a cup of that green tea they both so loved, without milk or sugar, not even a squeeze of lemon…

Although later M remarks:

Personally I always preferred Lipton’s.

Presumably the point is the utter trivia with which humans, with their god-given ‘intelligences’, waste their lives and minds on trash.

The Beckett Companion tells me the play was ‘inspired’, if that’s the right word, by an affair Beckett had with another woman, thus ‘betraying’ his long-time companion, resulting in ‘the inevitable guilt rising from the intense banalities of an emotional triangle’ (Beckett Companion, Faber, 2004, page 443). This also, apparently, accounts for the very ‘Home Counties’ feel of the content (Liptons tea) unlike the rural Irish content of most of his novels and plays.

Repetition

The play actually takes about 7 minutes to perform, what makes it last 15 minutes is that the entire thing is repeated, but with slight decay. Very much like Waiting For Godot or Happy Days are in two parts, the second parts repeating the key elements of the first but significantly deteriorated. In the original London production the second half just repeated the first half in every detail. In the original Paris production the repeat was shorter, the speakers more breathless, the spotlights on them less strong. ‘Repetition with decay’.

The repetition and exactly how it should be performed are, of course, very precisely defined by Beckett in his production notes.


It’s worth quoting at such length to make the point – which becomes steadily more apparent as you read Beckett’s later works – that their stage directions often have more verve and precision, are more striking and vivid, than the supposed ‘content’ of the plays or works.

In some of the later works you get the sense that the content is cobbled together using a reliable set of techniques – the pauses, the rhetoric about darkness and the end, references to gloomy sex or love affairs, the mysterious individual whose name is repeated (Erskine), the tragi-bathetic reference to brands of tea or some other trivia, like the man’s memory of being in a rowing boat with one of the women, as banal and pathetic as Krapp’s much-repeated memory of lying in a field with his hand on his lover’s breast etc – while Beckett’s real imaginative energy went more and more into the envisioning and staging of the works, which he describes in ever-more obsessive precision.

Thus, in Play, you can’t help thinking the urns and the spotlight activating the speakers, are the key elements. What they actually say is of barely any significance.

This explains the lengthy arguments which accompanied the first productions in Paris, London and New York, where Beckett insisted to all the directors that the words be spoken at breakneck speed, so fast no audience could catch them or make sense of them. In all three cases directors and actors pushed back and wanted the words spoken slow enough to be understood by an audience. On the one hand Beckett may be making a point about dialogue and the theatre in general, an anti-humanistic, anti-theatre statement. On another interpretation, he may just have been embarrassed by the banality of the content and so devised a way of it being spoken too fast for anyone to understand.

Anyway, the speed at which actors say the words is no accident. Overall, the play was a phenomenal shock to polite, dressed-up theatre goers in the 1960s and amounts to a calculated assault on ideas of narrative, storyline, plot, closure, character or dialogue. Instead it presents images of dehumanisation and entropy. I hadn’t realised from reading or watching the play, but the Beckett Companion points out the characters are ‘post mortem’ i.e. dead, voices, phantoms, condemned to obsessively relive meaningless fragments of their meaningless lives in jagged snatches of accelerated monologue…

According to the Companion Play marks a turning point. Beckett, never anything like a traditional humanist playwright, from now on produced works of ever-great mechanisation which barely feature people at all, but body parts, fragments, gestures and actions isolated and abstracted and stylised. Words, what most of us think of as the content or purpose or meaning of a literary work or play, become increasingly merely the ‘dramatic ammunition’ (in Beckett’s phrase) for staged events which become more like living sculptures. Seen in this perspective, later Beckett is more like living sculptures to be viewed in an art gallery, than ‘plays’ with narrative arcs or anything like characters or dialogue.

If you stop trying to process them as plays, if you liberate your mind from those expectations – then you are freed to experience them as very interesting works of art, which happen to be in a theatre.

Betrayal or modernisation?

Given all this, the question inevitably arises of whether the Minghella production is a profound betrayal of Beckett’s original and hyper-precise envisioning of his work – or a stylish and very tech-savvy (all those funky quick cuts and jagged camera moves) updating of Beckett for the Instagram age.

This comes into focus at the end for the original Beckett vision obviously sees the play as literally consisting of just three urns on a stage. Never in his wildest dreams can he have imagined Minghella’s funking up of the whole thing to feature not only Hollywood A-list stars but the astonishing array of other urns, stretching off in all directions to create a landscape. You can see what he’s doing, placing the futile repetitive stories told by this tawdry little trio of middle class adulterers amid an entire world of exactly similar futile repetitive stories told by thousands and thousands of other humans, potentially the entire human race.

In this respect – fidelity to the original – this 1974 production by the New Music Choral Ensemble, UCSD, La Jolla directed by Kenneth Gaburo, may be terrible quality but gives a much better indication of what Beckett imagined and what his production notes demand.

In particular the way the voices don’t activate until they are hit by the spotlight, begin the instant they are lit, cease the second the spot cuts off them, makes the entire experience much more jagged and broken.

It’s harder to watch, infinitely less finished and Hollywood high tech than the Minghella production, but I think I prefer its lo-fi minimalism.

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

  • The Lost Ones (1972) Short story
  • *Not I (1972) Stage play
  • *That Time (1975) Stage play
  • *Footfalls (1976) Stage play
  • … but the clouds… (1976) Television play
  • All Strange Away (1976) Short story
  • Fizzles (1976) Short prose pieces
  • Ghost Trio (1977) Television play
  • Company (1979) Short story
  • *A Piece of Monologue (1980) Stage play
  • *Rockaby (1981) Stage play
  • Quad (1981) Television play
  • Ill Seen Ill Said (1981) Short novel
  • *Ohio Impromptu (1981) Stage play
  • *Catastrophe (1982) Stage play
  • Worstward Ho (1983) Prose
  • Nacht und Träume (1983) Television play
  • *What Where (1983) Stage play
  • Stirrings Still (1989) Short prose
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by Simon on December 14, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Play, Theatre
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Posted by Simon on December 14, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/12/14/play-samuel-beckett/

Happy Days by Samuel Beckett (1961)

Beckett wrote a lot of plays, 19 of them according to the Beckett On Film project, more than 30 if you include the seven plays for radio and the various fragments and dramaticules.

But only a handful of them are ‘full length’ enough to sustain an evening at the theatre, being: Waiting For Godot (1953), Endgame (1958), Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) and Happy Days (1961).

To verify this assertion I made this table based, in a very rough and ready way, on the duration of the plays as filmed for the Beckett On Film project (indicated by an asterisk) or according to the durations of the most popular recordings on YouTube.

Play Duration   
*Waiting For Godot (1953) 120
*Endgame (1958) 84
*Happy Days (1961) 79
All That Fall (1957) (Radio play) 70
*Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) 58
Beginning to End (1965) (Television production)   49
Embers (1959) (Radio play) 45
Words and Music (1961) (Radio play)   42
*Rough For Theatre II 30
*Footfalls (1976) 28
Quad I and II (1980) (Television play) 23
Cascando (1961) (Radio play) 22
Eh Joe (1967) (Television play) 20
*Rough for Theatre I 20
*A Piece of Monologue (1978) 20
*That Time (1975) 20
Rough for Radio I (Radio play) 17
Rough For Radio II (Radio play)
*Play (1963) 16
*Act Without Words I (1957) 15
*Rockaby (1981) 14
*Not I (1972) 14
*Ohio Impromptu (1980) 12
*What Where (1983) 12
*Act Without Words II 11
… but the clouds … (1977) (Television play)   10
*Come and Go (1965) 8
*Catastrophe (1982) 7
*Breath (1969) 45 seconds 

Obviously, performance times can vary quite a bit from production to production, so these figures are the opposite of definitive, they are merely indicative, but the result tends to show two things:

1. Only a surprisingly small handful of Beckett plays amount to anything like an evening in the theatre, and that’s why they’re the ones we’ve heard about. The great majority of Beckett’s plays are short, often very short.

2. The last evening-length drama he produced was Happy Days in 1961. From that point onwards, for the next 23 years, Beckett’s plays become progressively shorter and can only be staged in an evening of such fragments, as additions to the other plays. That’s why the Beckett on Film project was so very useful, because it allows us all to see stagings of ‘dramas’ which are so brief or fragmentary that they might never be staged in a theatre in our lifetimes. Many of them are almost like thoughts or sketches for dramas, hence the word dramaticules which is often used about them.

Happy Days

The premise of most of even the full-length Beckett plays is simple. There is generally just the bare minimum of characters required to enable a dialogue. Thus:

  • Waiting For Godot is mostly about the relationship between Vladimir and Estragon
  • Endgame similarly is mostly about Clov and Hamm
  • Krapp’s Last Tape is (ingeniously) about the relationship between an old man and the tape recordings he made of his thoughts as a young man

And Happy Days follows the formula by being entirely about just two characters, Winnie (a woman of about 50) and her husband Willie (a man of about 60). Like Godot it is a play of two halves and, exactly like Godot, if the first half finds the characters in a bad plight, part two shows a significant deterioration in their condition.

Thus the first half of Happy Days finds Winnie buried up to her waist in a mound of sand or rubbish. Surreally, she completely ignores her plight, accepting it all as completely normal, wakes up and starts fussing about her day. She fusses about her handbag and applies her makeup, all the time throwing comments at her husband who is lying on the other side of the mound, out of sight of the audience, apparently reading a paper, mostly ignoring her endless prattle, occasionally grunting a reply.

In part two the curtains open to reveal Winnie now up to her neck in sand or detritus or whatever the play’s producers choose. Throughout her fiddly fussy prattle she repeats the refrain that it is ‘a happy day’, a lovely day, mustn’t complain, can’t grumble, and so on.

In other words, Happy Days is a classic epitome of the theme of decline and fall, degradation and entropy, which characterises all of Beckett’s work. It’s also typical, in a slightly less obvious way – to anyone who’s read quite a lot of his works, as I now have – in the extreme banality of the content.

Many of Beckett’s works, from the early novels through to the late mimes and dramaticules, may be off-the-scale in their avant-garde experimentalism. But it is striking how utterly thumpingly banal much of the actual content is. Characters prattle on about catching their train, or how tight their boots are, fuss – as here – about their lipstick and makeup, remember inconsequential details of their former lives, love affairs, sitting on Charlie Hunter’s knee, her first kiss – a torrent of trivia.

Now, learnèd professors and Beckett scholars have managed to find in his works a steady stream of references to many aspects of Western philosophy, quotes from Spinoza, rebuttals of Descartes, critiques of the Rationalist tradition, and so on. They argue that these fragments and snippets provide a kind of foil against which is set against the bustling twaddle of Winnie’s monologue. And even a non-philosopher like myself can spot it when the characters suddenly switch register and quote a bit of Shelley, or are suddenly dazzled by a memory or phrase which clearly indicates a moment of deeper reflection or emotion…

Nonetheless, the most powerful impact of so many of these works is of a prattling inconsequentiality completely at odds with the dramatic and stricken situations in which the characters find themselves.

My reading of Albert Camus is that this is what he meant by The Absurd – the yawning gap between human beings’ longing for meaning and purpose in their lives and the steadfast refusal of the universe to give them any – in fact its tendency to block and frustrate petty human wishes at every turn.

But there’s another feeling you get from watching a play like this which is that the mis-en-scène is striking and imaginative, like a surrealist painting, like a mind-blowing picture by Max Ernst. But as soon as the characters start talking there’s an odd sense of letdown and anti-climax. Very rarely does anyone in a Beckett play say anything which really lives up to the astonishing starkness of the scenarios he’s thought up.

Almost all the common Beckett quotes come from Waiting For Godot which was not only the turning point in his career as a writer, but somehow summarised the best of the preceding prose works, their complex interweaving of themes and registers of language, in their peak form. For this reason, maybe, it is by far the longest of his plays. It feels like he’d stumbled across the new format and tried to pack everything into it, with the result that it is by far the richest play to read and study, there’s so much going on.

Less so in Endgame, which is still long and complex and (hauntingly) set in an apparently post-apocalyptic world. A lot less so in Krapp’s Last Tape, one sad old man in his garret. And again, here in Happy Days, the scenario is astonishing, but then the actual words you listen to are, well, a bit disappointing.

It’s amazing that just 31 pages of text result in an hour and twenty minutes of stage time. It shows the importance of:

  1. the numerous pauses throughout the play
  2. the often elaborate stage ‘business’ that is involved in Beckett plays, in this case Winnie’s fussing and fretting with her handbag and makeup

Film version

This is a very good film version of the play starring Rosaleen Linehan as Winnie and Richard Johnson as Willie, directed by Patricia Rozema.

We watch a woman buried up to her waist in sand woken by an alarm bell, saying her daily prayers, brushing her teeth and then nattering on and fussing about make-up and medicine while her husband sits wearing his boater occasionally reading out bits of his newspaper (Reynolds News, according to Winnie towards the end of the play).

Maybe the point is how most people comfort themselves with endless natter and chatter while ignoring the reality of their ‘plight’, in the view of the existentialist school of philosophy, thrown into a godless universe, abandoned, stricken, trapped in lives of pointless repetition and futile routine.

Going on

Just like Malone and the Unnamable, and as Vladimir and Estragon frequently point out that they’re doing, maybe Winnie talks interminably simply to be able to go on with life, but the obvious objection to this entire train of thought is that it only makes sense if you think that ‘going on’ i.e. carrying on living, is an enormous challenge which requires the tactic of endlessly prattling and telling yourself interminable stories to make it at all manageable.

But language is not an abstract form like painting or music. Language is a means of communicating, and that is what becomes, ultimately, so wearing about the Beckett Trilogy of novels, that the reader submits to reading so many hundreds of pages which convey almost no information at all.

I understand the point (I think): that language in all of Beckett’s works is not intended to convey any important information – or maybe that all language is equally meaningful or meaningless, and that, therefore, language’s ultimate purpose is as a flow of sound designed to comfort the speaking characters, and insulate them from the ‘horror’ or ’emptiness’ of existence.

And thus the entire play amounts to yet another enactment of the basic principle defined in the talismanic phrase which ends the 1953 novel, The Unnamable:

You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

In Winnie’s characteristically more verbose rendering:

So that I may say at all times, even when you do not answer and perhaps hear nothing, something of this is being heard, I am not merely talking to myself, that is in the wilderness, a thing I could never bear to do – for any length of time. [Pause] That is what enables me to go on…

‘That is what enables me to go on’. Happy Days is cast in a different setting, in fact in a different medium from The Unnameable (stage compared to prose). But it is the same idea. The identical idea. Repeated. Again and again. I can’t go on. I’ll go on. I’ll tell myself stories. That is what enables me to go on…

Details

The ringing bell reminds me of the whistle blown to torment the protagonist of Act Without Words I or the whistle Hamm blows to summon Clov in Endgame.

Credit

Happy Days by Samuel Beckett was written in English in 1961, and the author then translated it into French by November 1962.

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

  • All That Fall (1957) Radio play
  • *Acts Without Words I & II (1957) Mimes
  • *Endgame (1958) Stage play
  • *Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) Stage play
  • *Rough for Theatre I & II – Stage plays
  • Embers (1959) – Radio play
  • *Happy Days (1961) – Stage play
  • Rough for Radio I & II (1961) Radio plays
  • Words and Music (1961) Radio play
  • Cascando (1961) Radio play
  • *Play (1963) Stage play
  • How it Is (1964) Novel
  • *Come and Go (1965) Stage play
  • Imagination Dead Imagine (1965) Short story
  • Eh Joe (1967) Television play
  • *Breath (1969) Stage play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

  • The Lost Ones (1972) Short story
  • *Not I (1972) Stage play
  • *That Time (1975) Stage play
  • *Footfalls (1976) Stage play
  • … but the clouds… (1976) Television play
  • All Strange Away (1976) Short story
  • Ghost Trio (1977) Television play
  • Company (1979) Short story
  • *A Piece of Monologue (1980) Stage play
  • *Rockaby (1981) Stage play
  • Quad (1981) Television play
  • Ill Seen Ill Said (1981) Short novel
  • *Ohio Impromptu (1981) Stage play
  • *Catastrophe (1982) Stage play
  • Worstward Ho (1983) Prose
  • Nacht und Träume (1983) Television play
  • *What Where (1983) Stage play
  • Stirrings Still (1989) Short prose
Leave a comment
by Simon on December 2, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on December 2, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/12/02/happy-days-samuel-beckett/

Rough for Theatre I and II by Samuel Beckett

Rough for Theatre I

Rough for Theatre I is a one-act theatrical sketch by Samuel Beckett. Also known simply as Theatre I it was originally written in French in the late 1950s and known as Fragment de théâtre, although an early version was known as The Gloaming. Beckett later translated it into English. As a fragment it had to wait until 1979 for its first production, at the Schiller Theatre in Hamburg.

On a derelict and empty street corner a decrepit old man (referred to in the text as A) is playing a violin very badly when another man in a wheelchair (referred to as a B) turns a corner and wheels himself up to the violinist. B offers to join forces ’till death ensue’, but their initially friendly exchanges develop into raillery and then abuse, of the usual Beckett kind, before the violinist, having been pushed to the ground by the wheelchair user, grabs the latter’s staff or very big stick and seems about to hit him. The drama cuts at that point, the actors literally freezing in a tableau. Is he going to throw it away? Is he going to hit the wheelchair guy?

The scenario bears a more than passing resemblance to The Cat and the Moon, a play by W.B. Yeats, in which a blind man and a cripple form a symbiotic relationship.

The play was filmed on location in Dublin as a part of the Beckett on Film project in June 2000 starring David Kelly as A and Milo O’Shea as B, two absolutely outstanding actors, brilliantly directed by Kieron Walsh.

Scholars speculate that the play was a sort of continuation of Endgame. This certainly struck me when I saw that the man in the moving chair (B) was carrying a large stick or stave and behaves very aggressively, as Hamm does at some points in Endgame. In fact critic Helen Penet-Astbury claims that both I and II are ‘failed attempts to continue where Endgame had left off’. Maybe Beckett realised it was too much like the earlier play, that he was repeating himself and so abandoned it.

Maybe the freeze at the end of this filmed version is simply a clever way of stopping dead without having to go on – although it works fine imaginatively, in a disruptive and innovative way.

Apparently, there’s an alternative manuscript of the text in which the characters are named B for Blind and C for Cripple. Don’t think that would be allowed in our censorious times.

What really strikes me about this, though, is the way that Beckett was becoming venerated as a great genius, such that even his half-finished fragments began to be carefully preserved, published, annotated and performed on special evenings devoted to fragments and fractions, as if every word, every scrap of text, bore a special and holy significance.

Rough for Theatre II

In Rough For Theatre II two bored bureaucrats, A and B, shuffle through documents which they take out of briefcases as they discuss the life and career of a nameless man, C (once or twice named as Croker) who stands on the window ledge as if about to jump. The studied indifference of two bureaucrats to the fate of a wretched victim whose life is in their hands feels very reminiscent of the bored officials who hold the fate of Joseph K in their hands in The Trial.

The text consists of a sequence of exchanges of studied inconsequence, grey surrealist details, and a peculiar species of non-humorous jokes:

A: Well, to make a long story short he had his head in the oven when they came to tell him his wife had gone under an ambulance. Hell, he says, I can’t miss that, and now he has a steady job at Marks and Spencer’s.

Arf arf, as we said at school forty years ago, about sentences which have the shape and appearance of jokes, but aren’t really that funny? There are sly jokes in the prose works and in Godot, but from that point onwards Beckett begins to specialise in forms of words which have all the appearance of being jokes without any actual humour. Emphasising their humourlessness is a kind of satire on the point of any text or language. It drains humour from the text. These anti-jokes, along with the deliberate inconsequentiality of so much of the detail, has a strong draining and demoralising effect. A related example is the way the man standing on the ledge, who the bored officials wish would just get on and jump, his name is Croker. Because he’s going to croke. It’s as if Beckett is daring his readers to accept dire and dreadful jokes as key components of his works of art.

A (once or twice referred to as ‘Bertrand’) and B (referred to as ‘Morvan’) poke and pry over various aspects of C’s life, his ‘literary aspirations’ and consider a letter to ‘an admiratrix’. This seems heavy satire on the pointlessness of the literary life. The two officials let slip aspects of their own lives, for example, A once belonged to the Band of Hope, a youth temperance movement.

There is a kind of transcendental irrelevance about more or less everything they say. For me the futility doesn’t come from the man about to jump off a window ledge but the utter inconsequentiality of the behaviour and dialogue of the officials, written in a peculiarly dead, airless style. A goes over to look C in the face. B asks how he seems:

B: How does he look?
A: Not at his best.
B: Has he still got that little smile on his face?
A: Probably.
B: What do you mean, probably, haven’t you just been looking at him?
A: He didn’t have it then.
B: [With satisfaction.] Ah! [Pause. ] Could never make out what he thought he was doing with that smile on his face. And his eyes? Still goggling?
A: Shut.
B: Shut!

I appreciate that the ‘play’ is a highly stylised depiction of human inertia and heartlessness, but still… I found myself reading this or watching the film (well made thought it is) and thinking… this is really boring.

The pair’s desk lights go on and off with the kind of mechanical clunkiness I associate with the obsessive mechanical behaviour found throughout the novels, and sprinkled with the kind of banal deadpan repartee familiar from Godot.

B: I ‘ll read the whole passage: ‘… morbidly sensitive to the opinion of others –’ [His lamp goes out. ] Well ! The bulb has blown! [The lamp goes on again.] No, it hasn’t! Must be a faulty connection. [Examines lamp, straightens flex.] The flex was twisted, now all is well. [Reading.] ‘… morbidly sensitive –’ [The lamp goes out. ] Bugger and shit!
A: Try giving her a shake. [B shakes the lamp. It goes on again.] See! I picked up that wrinkle in the Band of Hope.
[Pause.]

They hear a bird sing and discover a birdcage in the corner of the stage, but discover one of the original pair of finches it contained is dead, the male finch, leaving the female to carry on forlornly singing, an old cuttle-bone at the bottom of the cage. Aridity. Blank pointlessness.

A and B eventually decide there is no point C carrying on living, given he has ‘a black future, an unpardonable past’, a conclusion which doesn’t follow particularly logically from the random quotes and excerpts they’ve spent the previous 15 minutes quoting from. Heartless, they agree: ‘Let him jump, let him jump.’

At the very end A climbs up onto the window-ledge and lights a succession of matches to illuminate C’s face. (C, by the way, does not move or respond during any of the previous dialogue or action). A gasps with surprise. I think the implication is that C, despite everything, has a smile on his face… though even this much concession to a meaningful ending is suppressed.

A: Hi! Take a look at this! [B does not move. A strikes another match, holds it high and inspects C’s face.] Come on! Quick! [B does not move. The match burns out, A lets it fall.] Well, I’ll be…! [A takes out his handkerchief and raises it timidly towards C’s face.]

This is the black-and-white film of Rough For Theatre II, which was made for the Beckett On Film project, starring Jim Norton as A, Timothy Spall as B, and Hugh B. O’Brien as C, directed by Katie Mitchell.

It felt like Kafka from start to finish, with the added inconsequentiality of dialogue which is Beckett’s own particular contribution. At some moments the officiousness of the two bureaucrats squabbling and fumbling with their briefcases full of files, more or less oblivious to the character at the window, feels deliberately reminiscent of the great totalitarian states of the middle part of the twentieth century, the Nazi regime of the Holocaust with its mind-boggling concern for correct procedure in murdering millions, or the administration of Stalin’s gulags, with harassed officials struggling to process the huge numbers of the guilty passing through their books on their way to living death in Siberia.

The symbolism of the situation seems almost too obvious. Maybe that’s why Beckett didn’t make it any longer or promote it very much.

Credit

Rough For Theatre I by Samuel Beckett was first published in the summer of 1958, and first performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in October 1958.

Rough For Theatre II by Samuel Beckett was written and then abandoned around 1960. It was eventually published in 1976.

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

  • All That Fall (1957) Radio play
  • *Acts Without Words I & II (1957) Mimes
  • *Endgame (1958) Stage play
  • *Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) Stage play
  • *Rough for Theatre I & II – Stage plays
  • Embers (1959) – Radio play
  • *Happy Days (1961) – Stage play
  • Rough for Radio I & II (1961) Radio plays
  • Words and Music (1961) Radio play
  • Cascando (1961) Radio play
  • *Play (1963) Stage play
  • How it Is (1964) Novel
  • *Come and Go (1965) Stage play
  • Imagination Dead Imagine (1965) Short story
  • Eh Joe (1967) Television play
  • *Breath (1969) Stage play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

  • The Lost Ones (1972) Short story
  • *Not I (1972) Stage play
  • *That Time (1975) Stage play
  • *Footfalls (1976) Stage play
  • … but the clouds… (1976) Television play
  • All Strange Away (1976) Short story
  • Ghost Trio (1977) Television play
  • Company (1979) Short story
  • *A Piece of Monologue (1980) Stage play
  • *Rockaby (1981) Stage play
  • Quad (1981) Television play
  • Ill Seen Ill Said (1981) Short novel
  • *Ohio Impromptu (1981) Stage play
  • *Catastrophe (1982) Stage play
  • Worstward Ho (1983) Prose
  • Nacht und Träume (1983) Television play
  • *What Where (1983) Stage play
  • Stirrings Still (1989) Short prose
Leave a comment
by Simon on November 30, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Literature, Play, Theatre
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Posted by Simon on November 30, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/11/30/rough-for-theatre-samuel-beckett/

Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett (1958)

It’s a simple but effective idea. For 40 minutes or so one old man is on stage sitting at a desk covered with folders and with one massive, old-fashioned tape recorder, as he rummages through old tapes and listens to what turn out to be old recordings of himself when young.

Beckett wrote it for Northern Irish actor Patrick Magee after being impressed by hearing the actor reading extracts from Molloy and from An Abandoned Work on the BBC Third Programme in December 1957. It was originally titled ‘Magee monologue’.

The play premiered as a curtain raiser to Endgame (from 28 October 1958 to 29 November 1958) at the Royal Court Theatre, London, starring Magee and directed by Donald McWhinnie. It ran for 38 performances (Wikipedia). Here it is:

Sentimental

There’s a lot to say. I’ll limit myself to what seems to me by far the biggest single feature of the play which is that, in among all the stage business (the bananas and tape spools) the core of the text is the three-times repeated love scene of Krapp lying in the heather with a beautiful young woman

I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her.

This is, well, almost sentimental. The only place in Beckett’s oeuvre where any character expresses straightforward, unironical, unsubverted, romantic ‘love’. Mind you the thrice repetition goes some way to sucking out the colour.

Mechanical

Obviously, the mechanical aspects of the scenario – the way the character plays certain sections of the tape and so hears his own voice repeating the same phrases – echo the obsessively mechanistic aspect of so much of Beckett’s fiction, which had reached an extraordinary peak of obsessively repeated and enumerated physical movements in the novel Watt. 

Solipsism

The situation of an old decrepit (‘Purple nose. Disordered grey hair. Unshaven.’) protagonist pondering his own thoughts, listening to his own words, reflecting on his own earlier self, safe in his ‘den’, comes from that pure stream of solipsistic narcissism which is so core to Beckett’s brand, the almost completely solitary narrators of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable. In the real world, people take the mickey, pull your leg, bring you down a peg or two, force you to do the washing up and, of course, most of us have to go to work which involves meeting up with and engaging with ‘other people’.

Not in Beckett World. Here characters more often than not lie in bed (Malone Dies) or sit in wheelchairs (Endgame), are half buried in sand (Happy Days) or lie in a dreary bedsit (Eh Joe) talking at interminable length to themselves or about themselves.

With all this darkness around me I feel less alone.

Or, as here, where Beckett cleverly modernises the basic scenario with the inclusion of what, in 1958, was probably cutting edge technology, so that the solitary protagonist is doubled, we get double the amount of solipsism, solipsistic self-obsession².

Ritualised banality

It’s not really about what they say, most of it is almost unbearably trivial or trite. He gives a dog a rubber ball. He lies with his hand on a young woman’s breast. He remembers the lovely singing of a woman neighbour.

I noticed a scratch on her thigh and asked her how she came by it. Picking gooseberries, she said.

Not earth-shattering, is it? Not really very interesting.

The value begins to derive from the repetition of some elements, giving them an incantatory value. The scenario of lying with the beautiful woman is drained of its initial ‘realistic’ sentimental force and changes into something else with the repetition. Repetition, classically, drains away meaning. Repeat a word long enough and it comes to seem absurd. Repeat the same action again and again and it becomes harder to go on. And the impossibility of going on but the unavoidable necessity of going on is more or less the central theme of Beckett’s entire oeuvre.

But on another level, it’s entirely about the language. It’s entirely about the language but it’s not really about what it says, its semantic content. It’s more like the sheer repetition of the words transforms them into a ritual or rite. Or at least Beckett’s texts behave as if they hope that will happen, and his fans treat them as if that does happen, the water of the mostly banal events described in mostly banal language being transformed into the wine of poetry, the magic of writing. I’m not so sure.

This is a production featuring noted playwright and actor Harold Pinter. In my opinion, although his voice is impressively deep and slow and portentous, it only emphasises how lame and poetry-less Beckett’s language is in this play. He tries to bring the character’s relishing of the repeated word ‘spool’ to life, imbuing it with some meaning or significance. Fails. For me, Beckett’s words fall stillborn from Pinter’s lips. Or tapes.

A world no longer empty

At the end he says:

Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.

But it isn’t uninhabited, is it? The very reverse. The earth is overpopulated, crammed, jam-packed with the species which is destroying it. What’s really dated about this play is its assumption that solitariness can be attained. That you can sit in a house in the middle of the night and it be absolutely silent, with no planes or trains or automobiles roaring past. That the world has the space and time and patience for this kind of intense self-absorption.

When it was first produced maybe the play was a rather modish, forward-looking – what with the tape recorder and so on – examination of memory and loss. Now it seems nostalgically backward-looking, bespeaking a lost world of privacy and patience and limitless self-absorption.

Credit

Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett was first published in the summer of 1958, and first performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in October 1958.

Related links

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

  • All That Fall (1957) Radio play
  • *Acts Without Words I & II (1957) Mimes
  • *Endgame (1958) Stage play
  • *Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) Stage play
  • *Rough for Theatre I & II – Stage plays
  • Embers (1959) – Radio play
  • *Happy Days (1961) – Stage play
  • Rough for Radio I & II (1961) Radio plays
  • Words and Music (1961) Radio play
  • Cascando (1961) Radio play
  • *Play (1963) Stage play
  • How it Is (1964) Novel
  • *Come and Go (1965) Stage play
  • Imagination Dead Imagine (1965) Short story
  • Eh Joe (1967) Television play
  • *Breath (1969) Stage play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

  • The Lost Ones (1972) Short story
  • *Not I (1972) Stage play
  • *That Time (1975) Stage play
  • *Footfalls (1976) Stage play
  • … but the clouds… (1976) Television play
  • All Strange Away (1976) Short story
  • Ghost Trio (1977) Television play
  • Company (1979) Short story
  • *A Piece of Monologue (1980) Stage play
  • *Rockaby (1981) Stage play
  • Quad (1981) Television play
  • Ill Seen Ill Said (1981) Short novel
  • *Ohio Impromptu (1981) Stage play
  • *Catastrophe (1982) Stage play
  • Worstward Ho (1983) Prose
  • Nacht und Träume (1983) Television play
  • *What Where (1983) Stage play
  • Stirrings Still (1989) Short prose
Leave a comment
by Simon on November 27, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Play, Theatre
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Posted by Simon on November 27, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/11/27/krapps-last-tape-samuel-beckett/

Endgame by Samuel Beckett (1957)

Conor McPherson’s production

I was lucky enough to stumble across this film version of Endgame, made in 2000, directed by Conor McPherson and starring Michael Gambon as Hamm and David Thewlis as Clov, with Charles Simon as Nagg and the wonderful Jean Anderson as Nell.

It’s not only brilliantly acted, but inventively directed. McPherson uses a range of camera angles and techniques to break up the action, to give different segments or passages of the play their own visual style or technique.

Take the passage where Nagg in his dustbin tells the story of the English lord and the Irish tailor and watch the way McPherson cuts between different angles of Nagg in his bin to create a particular dynamic, but also to differentiate this specific joke-telling passage from everything else in the film.

Or take the passage where Hamm insists on being pushed round the circumference of the room – note the way McPherson switches to using a handheld camera, the only time this happens in the film. This maybe emphasises the sudden and rather hysterical nature of the chair-pushing but, as with Nagg’s joke, it also makes the sequence stick out from the more static technique used in the rest of the play.

The acting is great – but the direction is also extremely inventive and responsive to the changing moods and passages of the text.

Dates and first production

Endgame is a one-act play with four characters. It was originally written in French, entitled Fin de partie, and Beckett himself translated it into English. The play was first performed in a French-language production at the Royal Court Theatre in London, opening on 3 April 1957. The follow-up to Waiting for Godot, it is generally agreed to be among Beckett’s best works.

Part of the reason for this is because, as you investigate Beckett’s oeuvre further, you discover that he only really wrote four proper-length plays (Godot, Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape and Happy Days). All four are masterpieces, but it’s striking to learn that most of Beckett’s many other stage works are far shorter, none of them long enough, on their own, to make a full evening in the theatre.

Cast

Hamm – unable to stand and blind
Clov – Hamm’s servant; unable to sit. Taken in by Hamm as a child.
Nagg – Hamm’s father; has no legs and lives in a dustbin.
Nell – Hamm’s mother; has no legs and lives in a dustbin next to Nagg.

Setting

We are in a bunker in a post-apocalyptic world. Everything has ended. No more people, no more nature.

Hamm is a blind old man sitting in the middle of a dark room which has two small windows opposite each other, in a chair on castors.

Clov is his servant or lackey, who comes whenever his master whistles and does his bidding. Clov has a gammy leg which immediately reminds us of the characters in The Beckett Trilogy whose legs fail, who are forced to use crutches and, eventually, to crawl on their bellies, a theme emphasised by the story Hamm tells intermittently, about a poor man who came begging to him begging for a few scraps of bread for his son, crawling on his belly (as Molloy and Moran in the Trilogy end up crawling).

The references to the death of nature and the obliteration of humanity in some unspecified apocalypse titillate those of us who like science fiction stories and end-of-the-world dramas. I have recently read The Death of Grass by John Christopher (1956) and The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham (1951). The 1950s were drenched in h-bomb paranoia and end-of-the-world terror (The Day The Earth Stood Still 1951, Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1956, On the Beach by Neville Shute 1957).

But these hints are not vital for the story. The story is about the test, it is about the strange dynamic between the four characters trapped in a small room.

The master-servant relationship between Hamm and Clov is not unlike the master-slave relationship of Pozzo and Lucky. This is not a forced comparison. We know that Beckett deliberately echoed themes and structures throughout his works, to create a kind of hall of mirrors where similar characters appear doing or even saying similar things: plays come in two acts (Godot and Happy Days), characters come in pairs who act out what you could call the bare minimum of human interaction. In fact in sociology the dyad – the relationship between just two humans – is the smallest possible social unit. Thus Nagg and Nell have their moments but the play is essentially about the dyad of Hamm and Clov.

Plot summary

Clov enters a dimly lit room, draws the curtains from the two windows and prepares his master Hamm for his day. He says ‘It’s nearly finished’, though it’s not clear what he is referring to. Clov wakes Hamm by pulling a bloodstained rag from off his head. They banter briefly, and Hamm says ‘It’s time it ended’. Presumably they mean the tragi-comedy of their wretched existence after everything else has died.

Hamm’s parents, Nell and Nagg, lift their heads from two trash cans at the back of the stage. Hamm is a sometimes angry and aggressive character and abuses his wretched parents, though his rough words are leavened with bitter humour.

Hamm tells his father he is writing a story, and recites it to him, the fragment I mentioned above, which describes a derelict man who comes crawling on his belly to Hamm, who is putting up Christmas decorations, begging him for food for his starving boy sheltering in the wilderness (very reminiscent of Moran and his son lost in the wilderness in Molloy).

Clov is continually disappearing offstage into a supposed kitchen to prepare things for Hamm and then returning. The pair engage in endless dialogue, quite harsh masculine exchanges, sometimes wryly funny, sometimes quick-witted, sparking off each other.

Clov is continually threatening to leave Hamm, but the exchanges make clear that he has nowhere to go as the world outside seems to have been destroyed. Much of the stage action is deliberately banal and monotonous, including sequences where Clov moves Hamm’s chair in various directions so that he feels to be in the right position, as well as moving him nearer to the window.

They are trapped in an abusive relationship, where both are unhappy, taunt each other, but cannot leave.

By the end of the play, though, Clov appears to finally pluck up the guts to leave his abusive master. Earlier Clov had had to prepare a dose of the painkiller which Hamm appears to rely on to get through the day. Now he tells Hamm there’s none left. Decay. Entropy. Things fall apart.

While Clov bustles into the other room, apparently to pack his bags, Hamm finishes his dark story about the man who crawls to his feet at Christmas. In the story he mocks the degraded man for the futility of trying to feed his son for a few more days when they are obviously doomed to die.

When he finishes this story, being blind, Hamm believes Clov has left. But Clov is still standing in the room silently with his coat on, going nowhere. Throughout the play Hamm has been fiddling with objects and belongings such as his stick. Now he chucks it away. His final remarks are that although Clov has left, the audience ‘will remain’.

It occurs to the thoughtful viewer/reader, that maybe we, the audience, are also trapped in an abusive relationship with the characters onstage and, behind them, with their taunting, bitterly comic creator.

Thoughts

I shy away from the big moral and philosophical interpretations. Typical of this sort of grand sweeping reaction to the play is this critic who said that Endgame is ‘a powerful expression of existential angst and despair, and depicts Beckett’s philosophical worldview, such as the extreme futility of human life and the inescapable dissatisfaction and decay intrinsic to it’.

Maybe I’m too old to have the energy to feel that really biting despair any more, but I seem to find a lot of things about the world – Donald Trump, COVID – grimly hilarious rather than despairing.

Thus, even if the world outside has been devastated by some global catastrophe, the reality of the play is we are stuck in a room with two peculiar characters driving each other round the end. And at two moments, a couple of wizened old crones appear up from two dustbins in the corner of the room, rather like the flowerpot men in Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men. (The Flowerpot Men was first broadcast by the BBC in 1952. Was Beckett inspired by it 🙂 )

In other words, lurking behind the ‘grimly nihilistic’ is the broadly comic. As I commented on Acts Without Words, I think the play is less about ‘the human condition’ and all those 1950s existentialist clichés and something more to do with the ambivalence of discourse, of dialogue and literature and performance. In all these domains the bitterly tragic can be quite close to the unintentionally hilarious.

And if you compare Beckett’s plays with ‘the real world’, where civil wars are raging, rape is a weapon of war, cyber-attacks are increasing, global warming is wiping out entire ecosystems, and COVID-19 is killing hundreds of thousands – then I think you can see in a flash that Endgame is much closer to the comic end of the spectrum than its earnest, initial audiences thought.

There’s also something ‘Irish’ about a sense of humour which expresses bleak sentiments in such a deadpan way as to make them funny. When Hamm remarks: ‘You’re on Earth, there’s no cure for that!’ it can be taken as a bleak expression of hand-wringing despair… or as a sly one-liner delivered in a Dublin pub, to which the listeners are meant to burst into laughter.

So one of the things I enjoy about this play are not the bleak ‘existentialist’ comments – which have become clichés in the 60 odd years since it was premiered – and more the text’s delicious walking a tightrope, this fine dividing line between savage, angry despair, and suddenly whimsical humour.

Beckett’s novels delight in playing with registers and tones and vocabularies but in such a dense and clotted way that it’s sometimes difficult to really isolate and enjoy them. The switch to writing drama made this aspect of his work far more overt, defined, easy to register, and enjoyable.

Credit

Endgame by Samuel Beckett was premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in April 1957 and published by Faber and Faber later the same year.

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

  • All That Fall (1957) Radio play
  • *Acts Without Words I & II (1957) Mimes
  • *Endgame (1958) Stage play
  • *Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) Stage play
  • *Rough for Theatre I & II – Stage plays
  • Embers (1959) – Radio play
  • *Happy Days (1961) – Stage play
  • Rough for Radio I & II (1961) Radio plays
  • Words and Music (1961) Radio play
  • Cascando (1961) Radio play
  • *Play (1963) Stage play
  • How it Is (1964) Novel
  • *Come and Go (1965) Stage play
  • Imagination Dead Imagine (1965) Short story
  • Eh Joe (1967) Television play
  • *Breath (1969) Stage play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

  • The Lost Ones (1972) Short story
  • *Not I (1972) Stage play
  • *That Time (1975) Stage play
  • *Footfalls (1976) Stage play
  • … but the clouds… (1976) Television play
  • All Strange Away (1976) Short story
  • Ghost Trio (1977) Television play
  • Company (1979) Short story
  • *A Piece of Monologue (1980) Stage play
  • *Rockaby (1981) Stage play
  • Quad (1981) Television play
  • Ill Seen Ill Said (1981) Short novel
  • *Ohio Impromptu (1981) Stage play
  • *Catastrophe (1982) Stage play
  • Worstward Ho (1983) Prose
  • Nacht und Träume (1983) Television play
  • *What Where (1983) Stage play
  • Stirrings Still (1989) Short prose
1 Comment
by Simon on November 25, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Irish literature, Literature, Play, Theatre
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Posted by Simon on November 25, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/11/25/endgame-samuel-beckett/

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