All posts tagged VOICE

Ghost Trio by Samuel Beckett (1976)

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

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

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

And here’s the key to the diagram:

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

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

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

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

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

A trio in three parts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Synopsis

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

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

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

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

‘He will now think he hears her.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Productions

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

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

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

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

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

Is this radical updating valid and appropriate?

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

Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related link

Samuel Beckett’s works

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

The Second World War 1939 to 1945

*Waiting For Godot 1953 Play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

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

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

Footfalls by Samuel Beckett (1976)

Footfalls is a short play by Samuel Beckett. Although it consists of barely five pages of text, it lasts a good 25 minutes in performance because of the very frequent use of long, pregnant pauses and its division into four parts separated by intermissions when the lights go completely dark, while the audience hears the solitary chime of a distant church bell.

The action, the onstage activity such as it is, consists of one woman, May, pacing slowly across the stage, reaching the edge of the stage, turning and… pacing slowly back, all the time exchanging slow, moody dialogue with the voice of a woman offstage, who she refers to as ‘Mother’.

Stage directions

In terms of stagecraft, Footfalls is another example of Beckett’s fastidious concern with ultra-precise stage directions. Here’s his instructions for how it opens:

Curtain. Stage in darkness.
Faint single chime. Pause as echoes die.
Fade up to dim on strip. Rest in darkness.
M discovered pacing towards L. Turns at L. paces three more lengths, halts, facing front at R.

That’s the opening, but the full mise-en-scène is this, complete with a precise diagram showing the footsteps.

Strip: downstage, parallel with front, length nine steps, width one metre, a little off centre audience right.Directions for the actress to walk in Samuel Beckett's Footfalls

 

 

Starting with right foot (r), from right (R) to left (L), with left foot (I) from L to R.
Turn: rightabout at L, leftabout at R.
Steps: clearly audible rhythmic tread.
Lighting: dim, strongest at floor level, less on body, least on head.
Voices: both low and slow throughout.

Start stage right, take nine steps, length one metre, starting with the right foot, ending with the right foot, then turn and commence the return journey with the left foot.

The lighting is brightest at floor level to really emphasis the feet pacing and growing dimmer further up the body so the audience can barely see the walking woman’s face, making her voice disembodied.

The consolation of mechanism

I’m so glad I took the trouble to read Beckett’s shorter fiction because it’s in a relatively obscure autobiographical fragment, Heard in the Dark 2, that Beckett writes that:

Simple sums you find a help in times of trouble… Even still in the timeless dark you find figures a comfort…

This, for me, is the key which opens Beckett’s entire worldview. I’ve always felt the critics who dwell on the supposed nihilism and bleakness and existentialism of his worldview were missing or downplaying the equally important element of mechanism, his mechanical way of conceiving the human body and human activity, the obsessive enumeration of all the ways of performing deliberately trivial tasks which infests novels like Molloy and Watt, the obsessive visualising of the way human bodies are cramped and confined and bent at precise angles in the avant-garde prose pieces like How It Is or All Strange Away, and then the obsessive attention to precise measurements in all aspects of the later plays, not only physical distances such as the head of the actor being 8 feet off the stage in Not I but 10 feet in That Time, right down to the exact specification for duration of pauses or, for example in That Time, of the breaths (10 seconds).

Comfort. The boy Beckett found comfort in simple sums, counting and figures. The effect for the reader and viewer may to be powerfully alienated from the protagonists of the fiction and the performers in the plays, which emphasise an anti-humanist mechanistic view of the human machine.

And, when you read the stage directions of this play you realise that the words, the speaking of the words, must at moments exactly match the pacing of the feet. That must be extremely difficult to achieve in actual performance. It is bending the performer to become as precise as a musical instrument, as regular as a metronome.

The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett tells us that, once he saw it in performance, Beckett changed the number of paces from seven to nine. It was crucial to the rhythm of the piece. Likewise, the period of seven seconds. He told the director of the German production that the first chime of the bell must die away in seven seconds and the light comes up in seven seconds. At the end of each of the three parts the light must fade away across seven seconds, and then comes back up for the next part in seven seconds. Exactly. Mechanical and precise as a composition by Bach.

Yes, we understand all that but… it transforms your understanding to realise that this entire worldview has its origin in an urge to control the world, and to control his feelings, felt by a lonely, solitary little boy, and a very clever, sensitive and isolated young man. To realise that the extreme mechanicalness of all these stage details is fraught with tightly controlled emotion. Ready to explode. Those phrases in Heard In the Dark 2 are the key which explains why such low-profile, muted, quiet, dimly-lit and precisely choreographed pieces of stagecraft are, in fact, bursting with suppressed fury.

Beckett on film

This is the Beckett On Film version, directed by Walter Asmus, with Susan Fitzgerald as May, the walking woman, and Joan O’Hara as the Voice, referred to as Mother.

The most obvious thing about it is that it ignores the purity of Beckett’s stage direction and complicates things visually by placing May behind a row of banisters and making it look like she’s on the landing of a house, pacing up and down outside two bedroom doors. Making it much less abstract and minimalist, much more specific than the play’s directions justify.

Themes

Numbers

Obviously it’s two women, a dyad but, in a way, more dynamic than the characters, is the play’s careful division into four parts: part 1 May and mother’s dialogue; part 2 the mother’s monologue; part 3 May’s monologue; part 4 the brief coda with no-one onstage.

Speed

The speed is the extreme opposite of Not I or Play in which the actors were told to rattle on at breakneck speed. Here it is the opposite, slow to almost to soporific, with long pregnant pauses between phrases. And the metronomic speed of the pacing steps is like the tempo of unheard music.

Voices

It is a play of voices, maybe most plays are, but Beckett’s more than most, where there is often no action at all, no interplay, just the haunting effect of voices. One aspect of voices-only drama is that the voices themselves can change identity in the way a physical actor cannot.

Decrepit

Beckett delights in the details of physical decay and decrepitude, hence the initial dialogue about the bedpan, dressing sores etc. Can the Voice really be 90 years old, 89 or 90? The woman onstage, May or Amy, she is quite old, too, certainly a wreck: ‘dishevelled grey hair, worn grey wrap hiding feet, trailing.’ Very often Beckett throws in a swearword or two. Maybe he was restrained out of respect for a woman actor.

Identity

Footfalls is divided into 4 parts by silence and the lights going down to blackness and then the distant chime of a church bell. It is very unnerving when the lights come up on part two and May is no longer speaking, but is addressed by the Voice, the alleged mother, in a sustained monologue, revealing creepy details about the woman we observe continuing her endless pacing. As the piece progresses their respective identities become more uncertain, as the Mother speaks vindictively about the daughter in part 2, before May appears to have a breakdown in part 3 as she becomes utterly absorbed into the anecdote about the mother and daughter in church, before she finally seems to reveal that the mother’s voice is part of her psyche.

And then all identities are cancelled when part 4 opens (briefly) on an empty stage. All gone like dreams, ‘such stuff as dreams are made on’ or, in this case, nightmares of personality disorder.

Pacing

How many Beckett characters are engaged on endless, pointless trudges, from Molloy and Malone in the Trilogy or Mercier and Camier on their pointless quest through to the more blighted characters in prose pieces like How It Is, Enough, Heard in the Dark 1, or Lucky and Pozzo on their pointless circular journey in Waiting For Godot?

Footfalls in a sense zeroes in on just this aspect of Beckett’s small palette, zeroing in on more than the pacing to focus on the very process of footfalls, the falls of foot, precise and precisely notated, the loud, bocking noise of the hard woman’s shoes clod clod clodding across the carpetless floor, ‘however faint they fall’, in an endless sequence, forever.

Stephen King

One of the commentators on YouTube mentions Stephen King. It’s a reminder that Beckett exists in the real world, the wide world that includes Disneyland and Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and reggae. Seen from the perspective of ordinary people a play like this is a spooky ghost story. In fact Beckett’s obsession with people we can see – like May, here, or Joe in Eh Joe or the Listener in That Time – being haunted, bullied and harrowed by the voices of the unseen, they are very much like ghost stories.

The spine-chilling ghoulishness is brought on by the Voice telling us about the woman onstage, that when she was a girl, when other girls were out playing lacrosse, ‘she’ was already at it, at this, at this pointless pacing which has consumed her life. She has rarely if ever left the house, living a life of confinement and obligation to an aged parent. Trapped.

And then the vehemence of the apparently trivial anecdote of the mother and daughter in church, pretty pointless in itself but which leads into the terrifying last minutes where the woman we see, the actress onstage, appears to change from the ‘May’ who began the piece into the ‘Amy’ who featured in the church story. And now for the first time we appear to see that the voice of ‘mother’ is inside her head, as she expresses both characters, Mother and Amy.

It turns, in the final moments, into Psycho, an initially sensible, calm-seeming younger person apparently possessed by the personality of their dead mother.

Leading up to the very final stage instruction which is that, after the lights go down for the third time, after we hear the distant chime even more feebly than before, after an even longer wait for the lights to slowly, feebly go back up, a little…. there is NO TRACE OF MAY! She has disappeared. She was never there. She was a ghost in our minds just as her mother was a ghost in her mind.

For the play turns out to be about people who are not there, in multiple senses. May may only be a figment of her mother’s imagination. Or memory. And May’s rather violent anecdote of the mother and daughter in church may be a representation of the mother’s guilt, a confused expression of the accusation she know can be hurled at her of immuring her daughter, the mother realising her representation of the fictitious version of her daughter, Amy, is as incomplete as her actual daughter, May’s, actual life was. Hence Amy, and maybe her mother through her, claiming:

Amy: I was not there. Mrs W: Not there? Amy: Not there.

Maybe May only existed because her mother gave her being (in a literal and psychological sense, for which she apologises, like everyone in Beckett is sorry for being born) and then gave rise to an accusing imago, May, who berates her. And maybe none of them existed. Or existed for only as long as the audience watched the play. For before and after the curtain went up and down, none of them were there. No one was there.

Personal taste

Myself, I preferred That Time. It may be down to a number of factors: I preferred the lulling cadences of the boyhood memories in That Time which, probably against Beckett’s intentions, I found had an overall comforting effect.

Maybe it’s a gender thing: I found the stories of his earlier life which the Listener is subjected to, were vivid and empowering and adventurous, catching a midnight ferry, ducking into a gallery out of the rain. I identified with them. Whereas Footfalls seemed to me a very feminine story of entrapment, of a middle-aged woman whose life appears to have been stifled into becoming her elderly mother’s carer. It seems to be about a form of psychological imprisonment, immurement since girlhood, the complete loss of agency and, eventually, of identity. I found it demoralising.

Plus I really liked the voice of the Beckett On Film performer, Niall Buggy. I found it warm and enfolding, whereas, I’m afraid to say, I didn’t like Susan Fitzgerald’s performance. It may be apt and appropriate but I found her icy and unsympathetic and, towards the end of her monologue, harsh and shrewish.

Then again, maybe it’s neither performer so much as their respective plays, for Footfalls seems to me much more cold, calculated and detached. It is more spectral and spooky, certainly. It made me feel cold and rather scared. I only watched it once. Whereas I listened to warm Niall’s stories about running away to his boyhood refuge in the ruins on Foley’s Hill multiple times, and enjoyed it more each time I listened.

Related link

Samuel Beckett’s works

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

The Second World War 1939 to 1945

*Waiting For Godot 1953 Play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

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by Simon on January 22, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 22, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/01/22/footfalls-samuel-beckett/

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

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by Simon on January 20, 2021  •  Permalink
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Cascando by Samuel Beckett (1961)

… we’re there… nearly… finish…

‘Cascando’ is an Italian word implying the decrease of volume and the deceleration of tempo. Related, maybe, to ‘diminuendo’, meaning ‘diminishing’, getting quieter.

Cascando is a radio play first broadcast on the BBC Third Programme, 6 October 1964. A speaker, an old man (inevitably) named OPENER (‘I open and I close’) inaugurates activities which consist of words spoken by VOICE, who he listens to for a bit before ‘closing’ and the ‘opening’ a sequence of MUSIC.

The music for the original production was composed by French composer Marcel Mihalovici. I like this, and Words and Music, because I like this kind of ‘experimental’ modern music. Here’s the 1964 BBC production featuring Denys Hawthorne as Opener and Patrick Magee (who we’ve seen in Krapp’s Last Tape and as a voice in Embers) as the quavering, tremulous Voice.

Voice’s words are the same kind of fragmented, demented monologue we first encountered in The Beckett Trilogy, the central theme being Voice’s struggle to tell a story the right way, in the right order, if only he can manage all the elements into the right order, and tell the story right, then he can rest, he can sleep, he can finish, has told so many, thousands, but this time, this time, he’ll manage it, tell it the right way and, finally, at last, sleep and rest:

if you could finish it… you could rest… sleep… not before… oh I know… the ones I’ve finished… thousands and one… all I ever did… in my life… with my life… saying to myself… finish this one… it’s the right one… then rest… sleep… no more stories… no more words… and finished it… and not the right one… couldn’t rest… straight away another… to begin… to finish… saying to myself… finish this one… then rest… this time… it’s the right one… this time… you have it… and finished it… and not the right one… couldn’t rest… straight away another… but this one… it’s different… I’ll finish it…

You’ve got to be awed at the way Beckett span out a career by repeating the same handful of themes or ideas, describing mentally defective people or the forgetful elderly or derelicts, themselves repeating the same handful of themes and ideas, and so on in a vanishing perspective.

For a man who cultivated the imagery of poverty and sparseness and minimalism it’s impressive, almost alarming, how many works he managed to write. All on more or less the same idea (‘I can’t go on… I must go on’) repeated ad nauseam by a succession of defunct old men.

The element of repetition is strikingly obvious at a meta level, because the notion of a kind of Master or impresario calling forth the power of Voice and Music to compete against each other is identical to the previous radio play, Words and Music, this one in fact written immediately after the former.

Even the imagery is from a very narrow range. Once again the sea is a central image, as it was in Embers where a cracked old man sat looking out over the waves, or in the long sequence in Molloy when the hero sucks stones by the sea. Now the story Words struggles to complete does, in fact, surprisingly, appear to progress a little, with the obsessively repeated figure of Woburn, apparently going across the beach, wading into the sea, into a boat and then:

… we’re there… nearly… Woburn… hang on… don’t let go… lights gone… of the land… all gone… nearly all… too far… too late… of the sky… those… if you like… he need only… turn over… he’d see them… shine on him… but no… he clings on… Woburn… he’s changed… nearly enough-

I think it’s an inspirational performance by Magee, quite a bluff, muscular man who, for this production, makes his voice small and fine and trembling, and the worn-out, despairing feel he lends to the repeated phrase ‘Come on‘ is wonderfully… well, what emotion does it evoke, what mood, what strangeness, pitiful hope, self-delusion?

this time… it’s the right one… finish … no more stories… sleep… we’re there… nearly… just a few more… don ‘t let go… Woburn … he clings on… come on… come on —

Listen to it twice. You get an increasing feel for the dynamic between the words and music – apparently in each section, words and music are given exactly the dame duration. And a growing sense of the progression of Voice’s story about Woburn. From what originally sounded like a cascade of words, the outlines of the narrative of Woburn waking in his bed, getting up, leaving his house, going down to the beach, wading out into the sea, mounting the boat or dinghy and heading off for the island emerge more clearly – and the frustrated excitement of Voice as he nearly gets it right, almost nails it, has It, the Final Version, in his sights – become more powerful and poignant.

And, on repeated listening, you begin to feel the dynamic between Opener and Voice. On one level it’s as if Opener is a sadist, in ‘opening’ up Voice he condemns him to the endless iteration of a story he is doomed never to fulfil, like Sisyphus and his rock. But at other moments, Voice seems to be carrying forward Opener’s own quest, and so is like an aspect of his mind or psyche, an aspect he dominates and sits above, but which is always there. Voice doesn’t ‘answer’, doesn’t address high questions or questions from outside – he is intimately involved in Voice’s struggling, muttering, quavering request, to get there to finish, to complete, and please please be allowed to rest…

Repeated listening reveals its depths. Cascando is marvellous. Wonderful.

Credit

Cascando by Samuel Beckett was written in French in 1962, first broadcast in French by the ORTF in October 1963, first broadcast in English on the BBC Third Programme on 6 October 1964.

Related link

Samuel Beckett’s works

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

The Second World War 1939 to 1945

*Waiting For Godot 1953 Play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

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by Simon on December 11, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on December 11, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/12/11/cascando-samuel-beckett/

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