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V. Voice from Page to Stage V. Voice from Page to Stage 1. Script or Text? A Piece of Monologue Writing and Performance Beckett began writing A Piece of Monologue in English in August 1977 under the working title “Gone”.1 He began the text in response to a request by actor David Warrilow to write a solo piece for him to per- form on the subject of death. In November Beckett seemed to have abandoned the text saying it was “becalmed in deep water and likely to founder”,2 until January 1979 when Martin Esslin asked him for an unpublished piece to appear in The Kenyon Review. Beckett men- tioned the text he had been writing for Warrilow and promised to “dig” and “clean it up”.3 It first appeared in print in the summer edi- tion of The Kenyon Review in 1979,4 and was performed by David Warrilow at La MaMa Theatre Club, New York, in December 1979. Drama or Recitation? On the page, A Piece of Monologue resembles a piece of prose more than it does a theatre script. The monologue reads as a block of text uninterrupted by stage directions, and the directions that preface the play, like the “words” and “nights” mentioned in the monologue, are “few” (265). The only instructions for performance concern the posi- tion of the character on the stage, “[s]peaker stands well off centre”, his appearance, “[w]hite hair, white nightgown, white socks”, the props, “standard lamp skull-sized white glove, faintly lit” and “white foot of pallet bed”, and the light, “faint diffuse”, which is visible ten seconds before and after the monologue and “begins to fail” thirty seconds before speech ends (316). No mention is made of Speaker‟s voice, the tempo, tone and volume being left unspecified. And yet, 1 The manuscript is held at the University of Reading: MS 2068. For comments on the earliest holograph, see Gontarski (1985), pp. 174-175. 2 Beckett to James Knowlson 10.11.77, cited in Knowlson (1997), p. 650. 3 Beckett to Martin Esslin 29.01.79, cited in Knowlson (1997), p. 651. 4 The Kenyon Review, NS1, no. 3 (Summer 1979), pp. 1-4. 174 Say It apart from the standing figure, the pallet, and the lamp in a faint light, there is nothing but a voice delivering a narrative. The „drama‟ in A Piece of Monologue, is therefore confined to the stage image and the spoken words of the monologue. One cannot help feeling that Bec- kett‟s commiseration for the actress that played Winnie in Happy Days, “[t]errible rôle, all evening alone on stage and for last 20 min- utes without a gesture to help voice”,5 could equally be extended to the actor playing A Piece of Monologue. The questions that A Piece of Monologue raises invariably centre on genre. Is the audience listening to recitation or are they witnessing drama? Just what can a static spatial image and a monologue delivered in the third person amount to in the theatre? Perplexing questions in Beckett‟s drama are often raised by voices, and their intent and atti- tude are suggested through the enunciation of their speech. The early plays are sprinkled with adjectives and adverbs to describe the deliv- ery of lines, but A Piece of Monologue contains none, the „none‟ being tentative here, given that the monologue categorically states twice that there is “No such thing as none” (265, 266). Beckett merely presents a stage image, the words of a monologue and the voice which delivers it, as if to say, as the Voice in the stage play What Where was soon to do, “Make sense who may” (316). In order to reach conclusions on the genre of A Piece of Monologue, the relationship between image, the spoken word, and theatre space, need to be examined more closely. Seeing versus Hearing Ruby Cohn has commented that A Piece of Monologue is a mise en abyme, citing Lucien Dällenbach‟s definition of the term as “any as- pect enclosed within a work that shows a similarity with the work that contains it”.6 As in Not I, there are very close parallels between the situation of the speaker, which the audience can witness, and what is actually recounted in the monologue. The figure described in the nar- rative wears socks and a nightgown and stands “stock still” in the faint 5 Letter from Beckett to Alan Schneider 01.02.61, in Harmon (1998), p. 79. 6 In the French original: “est mise en abyme tout miroir interne réfléchissant l‟ensemble du récit par réduplication simple, répétée ou spécieuse.” Ruby Cohn, “Ghosting through Beckett”, in Buning and Oppenheim (eds.), Samuel Beckett To- day/Aujourd‟hui (2): „Beckett in the 1990‟s‟ (1993), p. 1. .
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