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STAGING Illmself, OR BECKETT's LATE STYLE in the THEATRE

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STAGING IllMSELF, OR BECKETT'S LATE STYLE IN THE THEATRE S.E. Gontarski In the early 1960s the nature of Samuel Beckett's writing for the theatre changed profoundly as he increased his direct advisory role in productions of his work and as he finally began to take full charge of directing his own plays. The experiences of staging himself had a double effect, altering his writing of new plays and, as important, but almost wholly ignored in current criticism, offering Beckett the opportunity to rethink, re-write, and finally re-create previously published work. That revisionist impulse - characteristic of Beckett's creative process at least as early as the rewriting of Dream of Fair to middling Women into several of the stories of More Pricks than Kicks - broke through the restrictions of publication with Play in 1964. In the now-famous letter to George Devine of 9 March 1964, Beckett not only adjusted the da capo ending of Play but essentially redefined the dramatic conflict of the work: The last rehearsals with Serreau [notes Beckett] have led us to a view of the da capo which I think you should know about. According to the text it is rigorously identical with the first statement. We now think it would be dramatically more effective to have it express a slight weakening, both of question and of response, by means of less and perhaps slower light and correspondingly less volume and speed of voice. l Such post publication revision suggests that the work as originally conceived and published was unfinished or incomplete and so as Beckett began officially to take charge of staging his own plays, first in 1967 with the Schiller Theatre production of Endspiel and continuing strongly (despite constant pledges to the contrary) until the 1986 re-write of his stage play What Where for German television, he took those opportunities to complete the creative process. If, as I will argue shortly, what we tend to call Beckett's late style begins with Play, then finally all of Beckett's theatre works are "late plays", written in the "late style", written, that is, after Play - even Play itself. That Beckett was recreating his dramatic corpus, re-inventing himself as a dramatist, rewriting history in effect during this early 1960's period is a perspective of singular critical significance, and yet the critical implications of Beckett's rewriting himself, for both the rewritten works 87 and the corresponding new plays, have been, astonishingly, largely ignored in Beckett studies. 2 When En attendant Godot opened at the Theatre Babylone in Paris on 5 January 1953, the French dramatist and critic Jean Anouilh proclaimed it, "A music-hall sketch of Pascal's Pensees as played by the Fraterlini clowns." That combination of ontological enigma and vaudeville highjinks would become the hallmark of Beckett's assault first on Naturalism and then on high Modernism itself. But in the early 1960's Beckett's theatre moved away from literary and music hall influences, away from a textually-based or literary theatre, towards one more overtly performative, where the visual (light and costume, gesture and pattern) and the auditory (music, repetition, echo) came to the fore. The more bemused critics kept asking, "What ever happened to the comedy in Beckett's theatre," and, of course, British comedians Ryk Mayall and Ad Edmonson did not do Play or Ohio Impromptu in the West End but Waiting for Godot. 3 In many respects the new theatre grew more overtly formalist and patterned as it became more visual, and Beckett balanced a theatre of concrete visual iconography with a theatre of literary imagery. With Play the Beckettian bricks were no longer tossed directly at Naturalism - that particular victim already on life-support by 1960 - but against Modernism, if not against literature itself. With Play Beckett's theatre grew finally more static than active, more lyric than dramatic. It was for Beckett, in a very real sense, the end of literature - but the beginning of theatre. The shift is acutely evident to anyone who has tried to teach or lecture on, say, Play, Breath, Come and Go, Ghost Trio, .. but the clouds ... , or especially Quad without access to the productions. On the page, without the iconic, ideogrammatic counterpart, the works are unreadable - in any traditional literary sense, that is, if by unreadable we mean to suggest that their primary effect is extra literary. These aesthetic changes were signalled as early as 1961 in a pair of radio plays with titles and themes more suggestive of music than theatre: Words and Music written in English at the end of 1961, and Cascando, written in French the following year. The first stage play of this new period, begun in the summer of 1962, as he was completing How it is, 4 was Play. As he wrote to a colleague of Lawrence Harvey, Herbert Myron, on 31 May, "How it is still awaiting revision. Haven't done a [tap?] of work for months, but idea for a new act, one hour, three faces (mouths) and lights.,,5 Finished that summer, the piece was entitled simply Play, and with it Beckett began to turn theatre back on itself with renewed vigour, deliberately exploring, stretching, 88 .
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