Samuel Beckett's Play, Quad: an Abstract Synthesis of the Theater

HERTA SCHMID SAMUEL BECKETT'S PLAY, QUAD: AN ABSTRACT SYNTHESIS OF THE THEATER The little play Quad, first transmitted in Germany by Siiddeutscher Rundfunk Stuttgart in 1982 under the title Quadrat 1+2, is probably one of the most puzzling works written by Samuel Beckett. The play is subtitled "A piece for four players, light and percussion," without words, action or any clear generic charac- teristics. An inexperienced spectator would probably link the four players, who within four "series" repeat four times the same "course" through the lines of a square painted on the floor of the stage, with the children's game, "Ludo". The play might be char- acterized as the culmination of the author's minimal art. Among his plays it is the most abstract and the most remote from the theater. And yet it is a play for the theater telling us something about the very essence of theatrical art that has hardly been told anywhere else with such clarity. What does it convey to us? No more and no less than the quintessence of the theater, which is an art that demands from the spectator the perceptive faculty of all artistic genres at the same time-literature, music, painting, dance and architecture. Literature is required in the first instance, although it is a play without words. In order to decode the non-verbal message of the play, four methods of analysis seem appropriate. The first will be the historical approach, the second will be an analysis of the ele- ments, the third approach will examine the structure of dramatic dialogue, a structure, that in its abstract essence can be realized also by non-verbal means, and finally, I shall analyze the composition. I. The Place of Quad in the History of the Theater. Beckett's play seems to be an immediate continuation of the theatrical experiments of the Bauhaus and above all of Oskar Schlemmer, who, inspired by Adolphe Appia's theater of "rhythmical spaces," in 1925 conceived the idea of a theater, where the human body is put into rhythmical motions in order to explore the connection between plane and space. For this purpose Schlemmer invents a play where three actors, dressed in the basic colors yellow, red and blue, stride along a geometrical plane that is painted on the ground of the theater, consisting of a square within a circle, the centre of which is crossed by diagonal lines. The movements of the actors follow the geometry of the painted planes, whereby the human body and the entire human being are supposed to become a part of the stage itself, "un etre ensorcelé par 1'espace."l For technical reasons, Schlemmer himself did not realize his project. The spectator would have had to watch the play from a standing position, allowing him to view the lines on the ground without perspective foreshortening, a position that the new theater building of the Bauhaus in Dessau was not able to give.2 Beckett takes up Schlemmer's idea and modifies it. The script of the play marks out a square on the stage ground. In its center, this square is crossed by two diagonals. Instead of three players it demands four. They are to be dressed in gowns in one of the three basic colours, the additional fourth player wearing white. Like Schlemmer, Beckett associates a particular percussion instrument with each player: drum, gong, triangle, wood block. The percussionists are sitting with their instruments on a raised podium at the back of the set. Each foot of the actor is accompanied by the sound of his particular percussion instrument while the feet themselves produce a particular shuffling noise on the ground. The actors, named A, B, C, D, which are also the names of the four corners of the square, are each connected with their particular corners, where they enter and leave the square: A (white) enters the square always in the upper corner-point on the left and exits at the same point, B (yellow) is attributed to the upper corner-point on the right, C (blue) to the one down on the left, D (red) to the one down on the right. In order to prevent the deformation of the spectator's view on the plane, Beckett introduces a television camera. According to the script's stage directions, the camera is raised frontaly and fixed, framing both players and percussionists. 1. Eric Michaud, Theatre au Bauhaus 1919-1929 (Lausanne: Edition de 1'Homme, 1978), p. 128. 2. Michaud writes: "Mais une fois la scene de Dessau construite, Schlemmer abandonne le projet qui, pour 'produire son effet,' aurait demandd une position en surplomb des spectateurs: 'es trajets dan 1'espace, particulierement important dans la danse, ne sont en r6alit6 visibles que d'en haut."' Ibid., p. 128. .

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