Performance As Text in Samuel Beckett's Theatre Author(S): S

Revising Himself: Performance as Text in Samuel Beckett's Theatre Author(s): S. E. Gontarski Source: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 131-145 Published by: Indiana University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3831755 Accessed: 24-04-2016 17:06 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Modern Literature This content downloaded from 193.227.175.117 on Sun, 24 Apr 2016 17:06:19 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Revising Himself: Performance as Text in Samuel Beckett's Theatre S.E. Gontarski Florida State University vjamuel Beckett's transformation from playwright to theatrieal artist is one of the seminal developments of late Modernist theatre and yet one slighted in the critical and historical discourse.1 A dearth of theatrieal documentation may account for some of the neglect as scholars and critics traditionally privilege print over performance, that is, the apparentstability or consistency of the literary script over its theatrieal realization or completion. The absence of Beckett's work on the boards from the historical equation, however, distorts the are of his creative evolution, his emergence as an artist committed to the performance of his drama as its full realization. Beckett was to embrace theatre not just as a medium in which a preconceived work was given its accurate expression, but as the major means through which his theatre was created. As Beckett evolved from being an advisor on productions of his plays to taking full charge of their staging, an apprenticeship of some fifteen years, practical theatre offered him the unique opportunity for self-collaborations through which he re-wrote himself, that is, reinvented himself as an artist?and in the process redefmed late Modernist theatre. In retrospect, it may seem self-evident to proclaim that the Samuel Beckett who authored Waiting for Godot in 1948 and the Samuel Beckett who staged it at the Schiller Theatre, Berlin, in 1978 were not the same person, no less the same artist. Beckett provided his own theoretical paradigm for such dialectics as early as his 1931 treatise on Marcel Proust: "We are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday."2 The Samuel Beckett who came to Waiting for Godot as its director thirty years after having written it was that "other," and the conjunction of the two, the writing self of 1948 and the directing "other" of 1978 (or the reverse, the directing self of 1978 and the writing "other" of 1948), is one of the defming moments of late Modernist theatre. Such conjunction occurred some sixteen times on the stage and another six 1 Research for this essay has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities under its Fellowships for University Teachers program. 2 Samuel Beckett, Proust (Grove Press, 1957), p. 3. S.E. Gontarski, "Revising Himself: Performance as Text in Samuel Beckett's Theatre," Journal of Modern Literature, XXH, 1 (Fall 1998), pp. 131-155. ?Foundation for Modern Literature, 1999. This content downloaded from 193.227.175.117 on Sun, 24 Apr 2016 17:06:19 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 132 Journal of Modern Literature times in the television studio; during each of those encounters, Beckett seized directing opportunities to play both self and other: that is, to refine if not to re-define his creative vision, to continue to discover latent possibilities in his texts, and to reaffirm a fundamentally Modernist aesthetics by expunging any element which he deemed extraneous, and so to demonstrate afresh his commitment to, if not his preoccupation with, the form, the aesthetic shape of his work. Beckett's own theatrical notebooks for what was a pivotal play in his developing sensibility, Spiel (Play), alone contain some twenty-five separate, complex and fiill outiines of the play as Beckett combed his text for visual and aural parallels, reverberations, echoes in preparation for his own staging.3 It is Beckett's direct work in the theatre, particularly between 1967 and 1985 when he directed most of his major work, that led the publisher John Calder to conclude, "I have no doubt that posterity will consider him, not just a great playwright and novelist, but a theatrical director in the class of Piscator, Brecht, Felsenstein."4 Beckett, in short, develops into a major theoretician of the theatre in the process of staging and re-writing his plays. Even before he became his own best reader, Beckett actively participated in staging his plays. From the first, he was concerned with setting what he called "a standard of fidelity" for his theatre. That is, primacy, if not hegemony, was initially given to the playwrighting self. On 9 January 1953, four days after the opening in Paris of En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot), the ever vigilant Beckett wrote his French director, Roger Blin, to admonish him for a textual deviation: One thing which annoys me is Estragon's trousers. I naturally asked [future wife] Suzanne if they fell completely. She told me that they were held up half way. They must not, absolutely must not. The spirit of the play, to the extent that it has any, is that nothing is more grotesque than the tragic, and that must be expressed until the end, and especially at the end. I have a stack of other reasons for not wanting to ruin this effect but I will spare you them. Just be good enough to restore the scene as written and performed in rehearsals, and let the pants fall completely to his ankles. That must seem stupid to you but for me it is capital.5 Despite the difficulties afforded by distance, Beckett tried to maintain similar vigilance over American productions. On 2 February 1956, he wrote his American publisher, Barney Rosset?who had begun, almost by default, acting as his American theatrical agent?in order to forestall what Beckett called "unauthorized deviations" in the forthcoming Broadway production of Godot with a new director and cast, and a producer conscious of the play's dismal failure in its Miami premifere: 3 These notebooks are on deposit at the University of Reading's Samuel Beckett Archive and are published in facsimile and transcription in The Theatrieal Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, Volume IV: The Shorter Plays, ed. with an Introduction and Notes by S.E. Gontarski (Faber and Faber Ltd., 1999). 4 John Calder, "Editorial and Theater Diary," Gambit: International Theater Review, VII (1976), p. 3. 5 The French transcript of this letter appears in the introduction to The Theatrieal Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, Volume II: Endgame (Grove Press, 1993), p. xiv. This content downloaded from 193.227.175.117 on Sun, 24 Apr 2016 17:06:19 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Performance as Text in Beckett's Theatre 133 I am naturally disturbed . at the menace hinted at in one of your letters, of unauthorized deviations from the script. This we cannot have at any price and I am asking [London producer Donald] Albery to write [Ameriean producer Michael] Myerberg to that effect. I am not intransigent, as the [bowdlerized] Criterion production [in London] shows, about minor changes, if I feel they are necessary, but I refuse to be improved by a professional rewriter [in this case Ameriean playwright Thorton Wilder had been proposed, and Wilder had begun a draft translation of Godot].6 After completing Krapp's Last Tape, which as he said he "nearly entitled . 'Ah Well,'" Beckett wrote his Ameriean publisher on 1 April 1958 to set some guidelines for its premtere, telling Rosset, "I'd hate it to be made a balls of at the outset and that's why I question its being let out to small groups beyond our controp [sic] before we get it done more or less right and set a standard of fidelity at least."7 Nine days later, Beckett wrote to Rosset that he was off to London to do just that with the Royal Court Theatre's production, "where I hope to get the mechanics of it right." It was this "standard of fidelity" and the degree of direct oversight entailed in getting "the mechanics of it right" that in good part finally lured Beckett to the semi-public posture of staging his own plays, and, even more important, that allowed him to move to a new phase of his creative development, which critics usually refer to as the "late plays." But the move to staging himself was made reluctantly, hesitantly, accomplished, as it were, in as well as on stages, as Beckett learned what theatre itself had to offer him as an artist He quickly saw that his direct involvement in productions offered opportunities beyond authorial validation and textual fidelity. By the late 1950s, the physical theatre became a testing ground for him, an arena for creative discovery, even self-discovery. Krapp 's Last Tape seems to have been the watershed, as he realized that the creation of a dramatic text was not a process that could be divorced from performance, and that mounting a production brought to light recesses previously hidden, even from the author himself.

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