University of Cambridge Faculty of English
‘We are dealing with a given space and with people in that space’: Samuel Beckett’s Dramaturgy and the Necessity of Theatre
C54 Jesus College
A dissertation submitted in part-fulfilment of the regulations for the degree of Master of Philosophy 2019 Abstract
This dissertation discusses the necessity of live theatre to Samuel Beckett’s dramaturgy, drawing on the extensive archival material and published sources that detail Beckett’s direct work in the theatre. It therefore contributes a critical intervention into the literature to discuss the importance of Beckett’s work directing his plays for live production. It argues that this work was integral to his understanding of the theatrical conditions operating within a theatre space, in turn imparting the practical knowledge of theatre-making required for dramatic composition. In particular, the spatio-temporal dynamics and spectator-actor relations operating within the theatre space were necessary to the realisation and expressive force of his plays in performance. It further argues that he examines the conditions of theatrical representation in order to push at the limits of a specific theatre environment. This is an act of theatrical undoing to interrogate its underpinning ontology, opening up a space in which to create a drama that operates within the slippage of representation that is the affective power of the theatre. It therefore suggests that Beckettian drama is at once catastrophic and constitutive, a radical dramaturgy that reconfigures the theatrical.
1 Samuel Beckett directing Endgame at the Schiller-Theater Werkstatt in Berlin in 1967.
2 Contents
Introduction 4
I: Dramaturgy, Theatre, and Theatricality 6
II: Beckett directs Endgame (Schiller-Theater Werkstatt, Berlin, 1967) 17
III: Beckett directs Waiting for Godot (Schiller-Theater, Berlin, 1975) 30
IV: Beckett directs Happy Days (Royal Court, London, 1979) 43
Conclusion 52
Bibliography 53
3 Introduction
It will be a relief to leave the mental stage and get to grips with the thing.
~ Samuel Beckett to Rick Cluchey, 22 April 1979.1
In the above quotation, Samuel Beckett implies that the ‘mental stage’ is inadequate to the real
‘thing’. This ‘mental stage’ refers to the cognitive capacity to visualise a play, which demands intense concentration to picture the myriad components of theatre in process. To fully realise the potential of a play, the textual configuration that emerges from this ‘mental stage’ requires calibration to the specific space of the theatre. For Beckett, the theatre stage is a ‘relief’ from the ‘mental stage’, as it constitutes a definite shape and materiality within which to construct the dramatic performance. Beckett told the director Michael Haerdter in 1967 that ‘theatre for me is mainly a recreation from working on the novel. One has a given space to deal with and people in that space. That is relaxing’.2 This points to the significance of the live performance for Beckett’s dramaturgy, shaping the rhythms and relations of his plays as they are manifested on stage, in performance. Jean Reavey records Beckett’s unequivocal comment that ‘the use of stage space is primary in dramatic construction’.3 In order to critically examine the necessity of live performance to Beckett’s dramaturgy, this dissertation explores his directorial work in the theatre to determine the spatio-temporal dynamics of performance. It builds on the existing critical literature to argue that Beckettian drama is at once catastrophic and constitutive: a primal scene in which the potential of theatre is played out through the undermining and reconfiguration of the conventional spatio-temporal structures and audience expectations. This research is therefore grounded in the situation and specificity of performances directed by
1 Samuel Beckett The Letters of Samuel Beckett, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, IV vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), IV: 1966-1989, p. 502. 2 Quoted in Dougald McMillan and Martha Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre (London: John Calder, 1988), p. 237. 3 Quoted in Ibid., p. 15.
4 Beckett, examining the embodiment of the theatrical text played out in space and time.
Through a performance-orientated analysis, it provides an intervention into the critical literature on Beckett to suggest that such an approach reveals the necessity of recognising
Beckett’s work in the theatre.
5 I. Dramaturgy, Theatre, and Theatricality
If familiarity with mental stage, auditorium, lighting, acoustics, actors, set, etc. is indispensible to the writing of a play, the results are only valid in so far as they function satisfactorily under given real conditions.
~ Samuel Beckett to Christian Ludvigsen, 8 December 1966.4
It is a critical commonplace to comment on Beckett’s reticence regarding the exposition of his own work. Ruby Cohn points out that statements in which Beckett clearly posits an aesthetic theory have ‘been quoted and re-quoted as keys to Beckett’s work’,5 as a result of his refusal to give interviews or comment on his writings. Yet, in his correspondence and notebooks he often explored the practicalities of writing for the stage, indicating the importance of questions regarding theatrical situation and representation to his dramatic corpus. As the above quotation demonstrates, the ‘real conditions’ of the theatre were integral to the realisation of his plays, thereby placing value on the processes of theatrical becoming over the notion of a stable, ‘final’ play text. This demonstrates a kind of Beckettian overcoming of a strain of modernist anti- theatricality that privileges the play text over live performance. Emilie Morin notes that
Beckett’s plays ‘raise powerful questions about the nature of representation and of the theatrical event’.6 In order to raise such questions, they require the mechanism of theatre in which to interrogate such representation.
Beckett’s discussions regarding the practicalities of theatre are nowhere more in evidence than in the letters collected in Volume IV of Beckett’s correspondence, which covers his most active years in the theatre between 1966 and 1989. Dan Gunn comments in his
4 Beckett, Letters, IV: 1966-1989, p. 55. 5 Ruby Cohn, A Beckett Canon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), p. 3. 6 Emilie Morin, ‘Endgame and Shorter Plays: Religious, Political and Other Readings’, in The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, ed. by Dirk Van Hulle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 60-72 (p. 66).
6 introduction to this volume that ‘Beckett knows that writing for theatre implies working in theatre’.7 Accordingly, the practicalities of staging are a recurrent theme throughout this final volume: Beckett often wrote in these years to his collaborators in the theatre to determine the staging of his plays, developing a radical dramaturgy through this collaboration with directors, actors, scenographers, and lighting specialists to interrogate the particular spatio-temporal conditions of theatrical representation.
The term ‘dramaturgy’ is from the Greek compound word dramatourgos: the root word
‘drama’ comes from the Attic verb for ‘action’, while the second morpheme ‘tourgos’ comes from the Greek word ‘ergo’ which means ‘working together’.8 Magda Romanska notes that
‘dramatourgos simply meant someone who was able to arrange various dramatic actions in a meaningful and comprehensive order’, 9 a definition that underlies the modern sense of dramaturgy as the discernment and arrangement of the components of dramatic structure.
Dramaturgy seeks to give shape to the space, time, and relationality of drama by exploring the potential of a particular performance as it is manifested in the theatre space. These spatio- temporal conditions of theatre invite the spectator to focus their attention on a particular component of the performance, by defining the verbal and visual aspects of the stage space that are perceived from the auditorium. Notably, the complex dynamics that figure the space of dramatic performance were crucial to Beckett’s turn to the theatre with the composition in
French of En Attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot) in 1948, after writing his post-war series of
French novels Molloy, Malone Meurt, and L’Innommable: ‘I turned to the theatre as one turns to light, needing to write something with a limited shape and space instead of the blackness of a novel’.10
7 Beckett, Letters, IV: 1966-1989, p. xcii [emphasis in original]. 8 Magda Romanska (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 1. 9 Ibid. 10 Quoted in Herbert, A Theatre Workbook ed. by Cathy Courtney (London: Art Books International, 1993), p. 219 [emphasis added].
7 On 13 January 1961, Beckett wrote to the American director Alan Schneider, ‘I’m approaching […] end of 1st act [of Happy Days] – very rough version – and shall certainly go on.
But still don’t know if the thing is possible theatre or not’.11 This letter indicates how Beckett sought to examine the limits of representation in the theatre, undoing and frustrating its conditions to constitute a radically different form of live performance. He was concerned with the potential of the theatre space as a site in which spatio-temporal conditions are malleable and subject to the demands placed on them through the staging of a performance. For example, in
Godot dramatic temporality is warped through the play’s repetitions and faltering structure, which puts pressure on the temporal dynamics of the theatre space: ‘Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful’.12 In this way, Beckett’s dramaturgy redefines the theatrical through examining and troubling the underlying conditions of representation in the theatre.
The theatre scholar Nicholas Ridout suggests that the anti-theatricality of performance art ‘finds a strong and contemporaneous echo in the seemingly anti-theatrical theatre practices of […] the later work of Samuel Beckett’,13 locating Beckett’s theatre work in relation to the critical discourse of modernist anti-theatricality. Similarly, Jonas Barish’s key study, The Anti-
Theatrical Prejudice, argues that ‘most of the pioneers of modern drama […] were actively engaged in combatting [the] decaying [Victorian] theatricality’, building into their plays a
‘critique of theatre’. 14 Indeed, Ridout points out that modernist anti-theatricality has a significant inflection in the works of Beckett, the catastrophic component of his dramaturgy.15
The theatre scholar Martin Puchner further argues that ‘modernist anti-theatricality does not remain external to the theater but instead becomes a productive force responsible for the
11 Maurice Harmon (ed.), No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 78 [emphasis added]. 12 Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, pref. by Mary Bryden (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), p. 38. 13 Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 5-6. 14 Jonas Barish, The Anti-theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 450. 15 Ridout, Stage Fright, p. 1.
8 theatre’s most obvious achievements’.16 This study builds on Puchner’s claim to argue that
Beckett’s dramaturgy uses the underlying conditions of theatricality to constitute a radical form of drama. Beckett’s dramaturgy, it suggests, therefore reconfigures the spatio-temporal relations and co-presence of the theatre to constitute itself by exploring the limits of the theatrical.
Barish further argues that within Beckett’s drama ‘a new radicalism operates’ in which the conventions of theatre are ‘scraped down’ to leave only the essential components of theatre in play.17 Barish’s discussion of Beckett situates him within a perennial discourse regarding the theatre as a degraded art in Western culture, an anti-theatrical prejudice that reaches back from the modernists to Plato. This dissertation places Beckett within the specific context of twentieth-century anti-naturalism to examine the anti-mimetic structures of his dramaturgy and its constitutive elements. The term ‘anti-theatrical’ is thus taken in its strictest sense of an aversion to the aesthetics of live theatre, with the associated argument that the play text is a branch of literature and that the text constitutes the artwork. This anti-theatrical argument further contains the idea that the dramatic work is degraded by performance, rather than coming into completion, or its fullest being, when performed in the actual theatre. This study, in contrast, foregrounds theatrical process to argue the opposite for Beckett’s dramatic works: they exist in a state of becoming, only realising their fullest being within the mechanism of theatre. As Beckett wrote to Barney Rosset, his plays ‘can’t be definitive without actual work in the theatre’.18
In his reading, Beckett engaged widely with the modernist critique of naturalism and its restrictive dramaturgical framework. In particular, he studied key theorists who sought to
16 Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-theatricality, and Drama (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 13. 17 Barish, Anti-theatrical, pp. 457-8. 18 Quoted in S. E. Gontarski, ‘Samuel Beckett and the ‘Idea’ of Theatre: Performance through Artaud and Deleuze’, in The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, ed. Dirk Van Hulle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 126-141 (p. 126).
9 respond to the problems of mimesis in performance.19 Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon’s important study Samuel Beckett’s Library provides evidence that Beckett read the dramatist and theorist Heinrich von Kleist’s Über das Marionettentheater: Aufsätze und Anekdoten. 20 Beckett’s library contains a 1968 reprint of this essay collection published in Leipzig, which was given to him by the German actress Nancy Illig. It further contains Beckett’s reading traces on key passages.21 This text was a point of departure for many modernist and symbolist dramatists who were advocates of the marionette in performance, in an attempt to eliminate the surplus signification of the live actor’s body.22 Beckett sought to explore aspects of theatre that these theorists critiqued, to form a dramaturgy that is premised on the affective power of the theatre.
In his 1979 production of Happy Days, Beckett directed Billie Whitelaw as Winnie to ‘move her right hand in a kind of spasmodic twitch’, breaking the slumped marionette-like posture of the opening tableau.23
In the past three decades, ‘theatricality’ has been a pervasive term within theatre and performance studies.24 It is further used by scholars examining a variety of performance types in other disciplines, most notably in the visual and performance arts. Anti-theatrical modernism was integral to the emergence of this term in the understanding of postmodern aesthetic experiences,25 and its semantic scope is perpetually growing as scholars explore its critical application.26 Puchner, for example, adopts modernist art historian and critic Michael Fried’s
19 See Puchner, Stage Fright, pp. 157-172; see also, Anthony Paraskeva, The Speech-Gesture Complex: Modernism, Theatre, Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), pp. 162-171. 20 Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s Library (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 275. 21 Ibid. 22 Puchner, Stage Fright, p. 158. 23 Martha Fehsenfeld, ‘Unpublished rehearsal diary notes taken during May 1979 rehearsals of Happy days, Royal Court Theatre, London. Directed by Samuel Beckett’, UoR MS 2102, University of Reading Library, Reading, p. 11. 24 See Erika Fischer-Lichte, ‘Theatricality: A Key Concept in Theatre and Cultural Studies’, Theatre Research International, 20:2 (1995), 85-118. 25 Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and the Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkley: University of California Press, 1980). 26 See, for example, Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait (eds.), Theatricality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Josette Féral (ed.), Theatricality (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002); Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004).
10 negative critique of ‘theatricality’ in his significant study of resistance to the theatre by modernist artists and critics.27 The term further demonstrates the ever burgeoning sphere of performance studies and the inter-disciplinary character of the terminology it deploys within its analyses. In response to this expanded concept of the ‘theatrical’, the theatre and performance scholar Erika Fischer-Lichte notes that ‘it is crucial for scholars and students of theatre and performance studies to define our concept of theatre and thus the subject of our field’.28 The polyvalent terms ‘theatre’ and ‘theatricality’ demand close scrutiny to unravel the specific meanings relevant to this study of Beckett’s dramaturgy.
For Fried, ‘theatricality’ names a relational aesthetic that sets up a situation in which the artwork is partially constituted by the perspective of the viewer. ‘Theatricality’ thereby refers to a relationally determined ontology of the artwork, which for Fried is a condition of postmodern aesthetics. Indeed, Peter Brook argues that relationality is the fundamental condition of performance in the theatre: ‘in the theatre the audience completes the steps of creation’.29 For modernist dramatists such as W. B. Yeats and Stéphane Mallarmé, this relational ontology undermines the autonomy of the artwork; 30 it precludes a critical engagement with the work’s self-determining internal relations and difficulty by the individual viewer, due to their being explicitly implicated in the production of its meaning. In this argument, the way theatre depends on a relationship between audience and performance obfuscates and complicates the absorption of the individual in the internal relations of the supposedly autonomous artwork.
In Fried’s 1967 essay ‘Art and Objecthood’, in which he argues that the ‘theatrical’ is a characteristic of the minimalist artwork of Donald Judd and Robert Morris, there is only a brief
27 Puchner, Stage Fright. 28 Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Routledge Introduction to Theatre and Performance Studies, ed. by Minou Arjomand and Ramona Mosse, trans. by Minou Arjomand (London: Routledge, 2014), p. 10. 29 Peter Brook, The Empty Space (London: Penguin, 2008), p. 142. 30 See Puchner, Stage Fright, p. 10.
11 mention of the actual theatre.31 Fried argues that Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud worked toward a form of theatre that reconfigured the spectator-actor relationship in order to ‘defeat theater’.32 This is, however, a merging of Fried’s own anti-theatrical views with the theories of
Brecht and Artaud. These two theorists and practitioners explored the potential of live performance to create an anti-naturalist theatre aesthetic. To suggest that the ‘success […] of the arts has come increasingly to depend on their ability to defeat theater’ is to conflate a set of conventions regarding theatrical representation with the conditions of theatre itself.33 In line with Beckett, Brecht and Artaud sought to explore the co-presence and spatio-temporal conditions of live theatre, rather than ‘defeat theater’ itself.
‘Co-presence’ is a term developed from the theoretical work of the German theatre scholar Max Herrmann to discuss the live relations constituted through the theatrical event.
The co-presence of the actor and spectator in the theatre space was central to his understanding of performance: ‘The spectators are involved as co-players. In this sense, the audience is the creator of the theatre’.34 Drawing on this critical discourse, ‘theatricality’ in this dissertation refers to the relational dynamics of live performance. Integral to this definition is the embodied co-presence of the actor and spectator within the theatre that overtly implicates the viewer in the construction of the meaning of the work. Further, Fischer-Lichte draws a distinction between the spaces of the theatre: the architectural space pre-exists the performance, while the theatrical event itself interacts with this space to constitute the performance space of the stage.35 As Fischer-Lichte argues, ‘the spatiality of the performance is created in, through, and as the performance space and is perceived under the conditions set by the space’.36 This critical
31 Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 148-172. 32 Ibid., p. 163. 33 Ibid. 34 Quoted in Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 32; see also, Fischer-Lichte, ‘Shared bodies, shared spaces: the bodily co-presence of actors and spectators’, in The Transformative Power of Performance, pp. 38-74. 35 Fischer-Lichte, The Routledge Introduction, p. 23. 36 Ibid.
12 delineation of the spaces within theatre and their capacity to structure the performance can be described as a distinctly spatial dramaturgy.
Beckett pushed the theatrical to its limits in his attempt to dissect the ontological conditions of theatre. Following the opening of his production of Not I with Billie Whitelaw as mouth, he wrote to Sheila Page: ‘Astonished by reactions to Not I which I thought would be damned with faint praise by even the most open-minded as anti-theatre and unintelligible’.37
This suggests that Beckett sought to reconfigure the theatrical as opposed to create an ‘anti- theatre’, requiring the commitment of an ‘open-minded’ audience to exploring the questions of theatre raised by his plays in performance. As Beckett wrote to Schneider in 1961 regarding
Happy Days, the critic’s reaction only mattered in so far as ‘it will help me to decide whether this is really a dramatic text or a complete aberration and whether there is a justification for trying to push further this kind of theatre’.38 As it turned out, Happy Days was just the beginning of a dramaturgy that radically transformed theatre.
The performance scholar Gontarski writes that ‘Beckett spent his creative life chipping away at the inessential in theatre and narrative to expose a pared down, haunting image through which he evoked a sensation’.39 To achieve this affective image, Beckett worked closely with the scenographers Jocelyn Herbert in London and Charles Henrioud (known simply as Matias) in France and Germany, who adopted a style premised on the stage design of Edward Gordon
Craig. The Craigian style, in the words of Denis Bablet, ‘resides in the deliberate simplification of the scenic picture, an architecture reduced to elementary geometry’.40 Herbert and Matias therefore rejected the methods of naturalist stage design, instead adopting a geometric and minimalist approach to mise-en-scène. Mark and Juliette Taylor-Batty note that Matias ‘was a
37 Beckett, Letters, IV: 1966-1989, p. 325. 38 Harmon (ed.), No Author Better Served, p. 110. 39 Gontarski, ‘Samuel Beckett and the ‘Idea’ of Theatre’, p. 138. 40 Quoted in Anna McMullan, ‘Designing Beckett: Jocelyn Herbert’s Contribution to Samuel Beckett’s Theatrical Aesthetics’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts, ed. by S. E. Gontarski (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), pp. 409-422 (p. 410).
13 skilled visual artist, and was recognised for his ability to construct painterly atmosphere and location in his designs, rather than offer architectural context for actors’.41 Herbert herself stated that ‘the theatre need[s] a more abstract approach to design’.42 These two scenographers collaborated with Beckett to create his ‘haunting image[s]’ onstage, stripping back the stage design to expose the vulnerability of representative theatre through a minimalist aesthetic.
Beckett creates his dramaturgy by means of these slippages in representation, revealing the underpinning structures of theatricality through the fractures in mimesis. He wrote to
Schneider while writing Happy Days that he had the ‘same strange feeling of wrongness, but necessary wrongness’, a feeling that he experienced when writing his other dramatic works.43
On 5 January 1953, En Attendant Godot opened at the Théatre de Babylone in Paris.
Beckett wrote to Thomas MacGreevy on 19 September 1952 that it ‘will need all the rehearsing it can get’.44 He attended many of the rehearsals for the world première, directed by
Roger Blin – who would go on to direct Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape, and Happy Days. Jean
Martin remembers that Beckett ‘limited himself to telling Blin what he really did not like, and that was pretty rare’.45 Perhaps Beckett refrained from comment because he considered his play text of Godot to be ‘a mess’ with regards to the actual staging.46 Attending rehearsals allowed him to engage with Blin’s work of giving structure to the text in performance. As a result of his engagement with Blin and the actors during rehearsals, Beckett made considerable changes to his Les Éditions de Minuit version of the text which was used as the ‘prompt copy’.47 Mark
Taylor-Batty notes that Beckett’s presence at the rehearsals of Godot, Endgame and Happy Days
41 Mark Taylor-Batty and Juliette Taylor-Batty, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (London: Continuum, 2008), p. 68. 42 McMullan, ‘Designing Beckett’, p. 414. 43 Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, IV vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), III: 1957-1965, p. 391. 44 Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, IV vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), II: 1941-1956, p. 341. 45 Beckett, Letters, IV: 1966-1989, p. 56. Jean Martin played Lucky in the world première of En Attendant Godot. 46 Anthony Paraskeva, Samuel Beckett and Cinema (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), p. 126. 47 Dirk Van Hulle and Pim Verhulst, The Making of Samuel Beckett’s En Attendant Godot / Waiting for Godot (Brussels: University Antwerp Press, 2017), p. 80.
14 ‘contributed in some form to Beckett’s apprenticeship in the practice of stage craft beyond that of dramatic writing’.48 Blin gave shape and rhythm to Beckett’s play text of Godot through its manifestation in the rehearsal room and on the stage, which in turn imparted to Beckett the practical knowledge he required for his theatre work. In fact, Beckett thought it was ‘a mistake’ to have published the text before it was properly rehearsed,49 which suggests the necessity of working in and through theatre to his composition process.
Over the next decade, Beckett went on to attend many rehearsals as an advisor to Blin and other directors of his work such as George Devine, Donald McWhinnie, and Jean-Marie
Serreau. 50 On occasion, he unofficially took over directorial responsibilities for these productions. Then, in 1965, Beckett took on his first credited directorial role, working with the actor Pierre Chabert on Robert Pinget’s L’Hypothèse at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris.51
This was the only play by another dramatist that Beckett directed. He subsequently directed fourteen stage productions of his own plays, as well as seven teleplays in France, Germany, and
England.52 This dissertation discusses Beckett’s productions of Endgame in 1967, Waiting for
Godot in 1975, and Happy Days in 1979 to examine his developing dramaturgy in performance.
It draws on a range of material including correspondence, theatre notebooks, rehearsal diaries, images, and interviews with actors and other theatre makers. S. E. Gontarski has coined the term ‘grey canon’ to denote this vast cache of drafts, manuscripts, and correspondence that has become available to Beckett scholars since the publication of James Knowlson’s Damned to Fame in 1996, which meticulously footnoted this plethora of archival material.53 This dissertation
48 Mark Taylor-Batty, Roger Blin: Collaborations and Methodologies (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), p. 136. 49 Quoted in Van Hulle and Verhulst, The Making of Samuel Beckett’s En Attendant Godot / Waiting for Godot, p. 80. 50 See James Knowlson, ‘Beckett as director’, in John Haynes and James Knowlson, Images of Beckett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 97-147 (p. 97). 51 James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), p. 518. 52 For a list of productions directed by Beckett, see Gontarski, ‘Samuel Beckett and the ‘Idea’ of Theatre’, pp. 139-40. 53 See Matthew Feldman, Falsifying Beckett: Essays on Archives, Philosophy, and Methodology in Beckett Studies (Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2015), pp. 19-37.
15 engages with the more recent archival turn within Beckett studies,54 utilising the ‘grey canon’ of Beckett’s work to discuss the formation of his distinct dramaturgy in performance.
54 Ibid.
16 II. Beckett directs Endgame (Schiller-Theater Werkstatt, Berlin, 1967)
It is really impossible to tell before you get into the theatre with all the elements functioning.
~ Samuel Beckett to Christian Ludvigsen, 8 December 1966.55
In this letter of 8 December 1966, not long after first taking on the role of director, Beckett makes an emphatic statement regarding the importance of live staging for the realisation of his work. Although Beckett does not elaborate on what ‘all the elements’ refers to, Susan Sontag’s contention that ‘the director’s art is a material art – an art in which he deals with the bodies of actors, the props, the light, the music’, 56 is helpful, as it is these material elements that configure the relational dynamics of space in the theatre. The spatial contingencies of the
Schiller-Theater Werkstatt posed practical complications from the outset of rehearsals for
Beckett’s 1967 production of Endgame. He wrote the following to Barbara Bray on 23 August
1967: ‘Trouble with small stage. Have had to off-centre Hamm towards cans to give Clov playing space on other side, shorten ladder, lower windows and keep it all very quiet’.57 This demonstrates that Beckett was attuned to the aesthetic possibilities of the stage dimensions, adapting his meticulous planning and diagrammatic structuring of the stage in his director’s notebook to work with the architectural space.58 The position of the actors was changed to allow Horst Bollmann the space to play out the choreographed movements of Clov, while the mise-en-scène was adapted to articulate a smaller room. This letter also indicates that the tone of the performance was developed to make use of the acoustic dynamics of the Werkstatt.
Beckett therefore calibrated the staging and the continuities of the architectural space, developing a production that utilised the specific environment of the Werkstatt. This section will
55 Beckett, Letters, IV: 1966-1989, p. 54 [emphasis in original]. 56 Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Penguin, 2009), p. 167. 57 Beckett, Letters, IV: 1966-1989, p. 79. 58 See Samuel Beckett, The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, ed. S. E. Gontarski, IV vols. (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), II: Endgame.
17 Figure 1
discuss Beckett’s 1967 production of Endgame to explore the theatrical dynamics of this production, drawing on scholarship exploring the influence of the visual arts on Beckett’s work to examine its effect on his dramaturgy.
The stage design of the ‘refuge’ evoked an abrasive environment of isolation and abandonment in this production. The scenographer Matias created an empty floor-boarded staging framed by high walls, two window-like apertures, and a doorway sculpted in a style of architectural brutalism that suggests the cruelty of human suffering and the indifference of the physical space to life [see fig. 1]. Nicholas Grene remarks of the play that it ‘provides a drastically reduced version of the home on the stage’, and that it frustrates expectations of an
18 ability to ‘decode its mise-en-scène’.59 The formalist, geometric stage design and lighting for
Hamm’s ‘refuge’ places the staging in contrast with expectations of the naturalist architectural context to which Endgame gestures. The space appears to offer a version of the home, but the signifiers of this space do not fully cohere: the ‘two small windows, curtains drawn’, ‘a picture’, and the ‘armchair on castors’ all point towards a representation of the home, but this representational structure is undermined through the minimalist and brutalist aesthetic of the space: ‘bare interior’, ‘grey light’, and ‘two ashbins’.60 The mimesis of naturalism is further fractured through Hamm’s knocking on the stage set, revealing its attempt to construct an illusion of the domestic space: ‘Do you hear that? [He strikes the wall with his knuckles.] Do you hear that? Hollow bricks! [He strikes again.] All that’s hollow!’.61 The mise-en-scène of this production thus frustrates decoding in its gesture towards, yet refusal of, a naturalist stage setting, and instead asks to be read through the slippages in mimesis that constitute the stage space.
The recalcitrance of this staging thwarts the representational conventions of theatre, as the stage space folds its semiotics into itself – it fails to signify a space outside of the stage. In
Steven Connor’s discussion of Beckett’s dramaturgy, he argues that
No matter what is stripped away from character, plot and setting on the stage, there always persists, within the most reduced performance, a residual self-doubling – the stage representing itself as stage, as performance.62
This is the vulnerability of theatrical representation, the fractures in mimesis that reveal the underlying condition of theatre’s being. At the back of the stage in Endgame, a picture frame with ‘its face to the wall’ hangs in a synecdochical relation to the performance space, which itself creates an apparent domestic space yet undoes this representation through a refusal to fuse
59 Nicholas Grene Home on the Stage: Domestic Spaces in Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 132; 133. 60 Samuel Beckett, Endgame, pref. by Rónán McDonald (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), p. 5. 61 Ibid., p. 18. 62 Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (Aurora, CO: Davies Group, 1988), p. 203.
19 into a mimetic space. 63 The play thereby undoes the mimesis of naturalist theatre through exposing the frame within which it is constructed. This slippage in representation is itself exploited as the ‘self-doubling’ performance space of Endgame. It is the breach that Hamm’s opening actions and words witness as the space of the performance: ‘[He removes the handkerchief from his face. Very red face. Black Glasses.] HAMM: Me – [he yawns] – to play’.64 This enfolding of the moment of the curtain rising and the actor embodying the role into the performance is the fissure within which ‘something is taking its course’ on stage: Hamm raises the handkerchief from his face as though the curtain is raised on his theatrical play and steps into character during the performance.65
The lighting used for the 1967 production of Endgame drew on a number painterly techniques – Haerdter notes that ‘the darkness spills over the dark grey surfaces into the scene’,66 created through the interplay of light and darkness in Matias’s stage design. Knowlson writes that Beckett’s interest in this dramatic quality of stage lighting ‘may owe something to
‘spotlighting’ as a technique in painting’.67 Carvaggio and other seventeenth-century Italian and
Spanish painters were significant innovators of ‘spotlighting’, used to illuminate figures against a dark background, developed in a style of painting termed tenebrism, in which dark tones are contrasted with the dramatic use of light.68 Beckett acquired his knowledge of the painting techniques used in tenebrism from R. H. Wilenski’s An Introduction to Dutch Art, which he read in 1933, taking particularly extensive notes on the use of the ‘spotlight’ technique by Adam
Elsheimer, a sixteenth-century German artist.69 Wilenski argues that Elsheimer developed the
63 Beckett, Endgame, p. 5. 64 Ibid., p. 6. 65 Ibid., p. 12; p. 22. 66 McMillan and Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre, p. 237. 67 Haynes and Knowlson, Images of Beckett, p. 77. 68 Michael Clarke, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 244. 69 Samuel Beckett, Notes on the Visual Arts, Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading, UoR MS2901. Mark Nixon further notes that ‘the origin of the [spotlight] technique and its sophistication by painters such as the German Adam Elsheimer is duly recorded’ in Beckett’s German Diaries kept during his six month tour in 1936-7. See Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936-1937 (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), p. 133.
20 use of a night effect with visual contrasts of light and darkness to ‘symbolize a mood’.70 This argument resonates with Beckett’s own use of light and darkness in his theatre productions to create a particular tone in performance, especially in the shorter late plays, in which the stage space is condensed down to a single image, illuminated by a spotlight with the surrounding stage in impenetrable darkness.71
Beckett’s adept eye for the use of light and darkness in painting and an interest in the formal development of the ‘spotlight’ technique was crucial to his work in the theatre from the mid-1960s onwards. It is reasonable to further speculate that Beckett consulted his notes on the visual arts intermittently through his artistic life, given the number of visual echoes that reverberate through his work.72 For example, in 1966, Beckett cited the ‘spotlight’ technique in a change he made to Play in performance, while advising on rehearsals of Play and Come and
Go in September that year for a new season at the Odéon-Théâtre de France. The most significant of these changes is indicated in a letter he sent to Bray: ‘Comédie [is] improved with spot in trap on stage’.73 That Beckett found this lighting technique would ‘improve’ the performance indicates the development of his aesthetic by means of the ‘elements’ of theatre – he discovered this technique through experimentation with the theatre apparatus. The use of the onstage spotlight in Play illuminated the Dantesque characters trapped in their urns, with the light diminishing so that the shadows played on the three deathly faces. In this way it creates a spectral, cadaverous effect: ‘Faces so lost to age and aspect as to seem almost part of the urns’.74
It was perhaps this spectral effect on these ‘faces so lost to age’ that prompted Beckett to try lighting Nagg and Nell from within their bins in his Berlin production of Endgame the
70 R. H. Wilenski, An Introduction to Dutch Art (London: Faber, 1929), p. 64. 71 See, for example, Rockaby, Ohio Impromptu, and Catastrophe in Samuel Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 2006). 72 For a discussion of the specific links in Beckett’s plays and the visual arts, see James Knowlson, ‘Images of Beckett’, in Images of Beckett, pp. 43-95. 73 Ibid., p. 46. 74 Beckett, Dramatic Works, p. 307.
21 following year.75 The formal associations between the three faces in urns and the elderly parents in ashbins may also have motivated this experimentation with light. Either way, Matias disliked the ‘ghostly footlight effect’ of these lights, and so they were changed.76 In consultation with
Matias, Beckett instead opted for frontal lighting with spotlights, focusing them to illuminate the door, the armchair, and the ashbins. He further requested that the scene evoke a ‘coldness’, already emphasised in Matias’s stage design of a grey interior but enhanced through the addition of blue gels on the spots. 77 The effect of this frontal, filtered spotlighting was a bleak and melancholic tone evocative of Elsheimer’s use of light and darkness to ‘symbolize a mood’, which complemented the ‘dark grey carpeting cover[ing] the boards’ of the set.78 In addition, the curtains, picture frame, and sheets were sprayed with grey paint to give them a ‘dirty, used’ quality.79
Crucially, the frontal lighting and low-lit scenography denies depth, because the only light source is a frontal illumination of the actors bodies against the indistinct stage design. This flattens the stage image of Hamm in his armchair and the faces of Nagg and Nell in their ashbins. As Stanton Garner notes:
the pull toward two-dimensionality is heightened by the generally frontal posture of figure and object, by frontal illumination, and by the arrangement of the visual objects, all of which stress lateral configuration over configuration in depth.80
Thus produced, the stage image constitutes a tension between the thinned staging and the architectural space, as the image frustrates the material three-dimensionality of the space of the stage. This spatial flattening in the production of a stage image might seem to speak against theatre, but precisely requires the spatial dynamics of theatre within which to enact this
75 McMillan and Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre, p. 236. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid., p. 237. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid., p. 236; see also the photographic edition with revised text of the 1967 production, Samuel Beckett inszeniert das ‘Endspiel’ (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1967). 80 Stanton B. Garner, ‘Visual Field in Beckett’s Late Plays’, Comparative Drama, 21:4 (1987), 349-373 (p. 363).
22 compression. Beckett’s production of Endgame thus creates a tension between the live presence of the actors’ bodies with the flattening of their image. In performance, the lighting diminished the depth of the architectural space, the stage props, and the bodies on stage. Such an effect actively frustrates dramatic embodiment in its resistance to the architectural design of the space and the liveness of the actors’ bodies [see fig. 2].
The flattening of the stage image accentuates the framing and confinement of the performance space within the stage boundaries. This enhances the painterly atmosphere of the repeated tableaux that Beckett integrated as a structural motif in the play. His assistant director on the 1967 production noted that ‘over and over [Beckett had the actors] freeze for seconds at a time into a tableau which is to achieve its effect through repetition’.81 The longest of these tableaux were the opening, the prayer scene, and Nagg’s curse.82 Gontarski notes that this use
Figure 2
81 Beckett, Theatrical Notebooks, II: Endgame, p. xx. 82 McMillan and Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre, p. 185.
23 of tableau ‘suggests a series of still pictures or photographs more than continuous action or movement’.83 The deployment of tableaux in performance thus thwarts the temporality of theatre through resisting the continuous action of conventional dramatic structures, aligning the performance closer with the visual arts than theatre. Beckett enhanced this alignment by creating a painterly, visual contrast in these stage images through a chiaroscuro effect of unlit areas in darkness juxtaposed with the lighting – ‘light black’, as Clov terms this effect.84 This chiaroscuro effect was constituted by the use of spotlights refracted through the windows of the set design. Haerdter explains that ‘the left one, behind the ‘sea window’, has to be brought in a little stronger than the one on the right, which casts a weak gleam on the ‘earth window’’.85
This creates a diffuse lighting that is suggestive of seventeenth-century tenebrism in its play of shadows. The interrelation of light and darkness isolates the characters from one another through a fragmentation of the stage, while in conjunction with the sprayed grey paint it creates a grainy texture to the image. This texture is further evocative of the ‘frontal tableaux style of early cinema’ that so interested Beckett in the 1930s.86
In addition, light was given a tangible texture in the use of a spotlight focused through the geometric opening in Matias’s stage design [see fig. 3], commenting on the significance of light in Beckett’s dramaturgy. This foregrounds the painterly image, and references this style of lighting in Italian baroque and post-Raphaelite painting. It specifically echoes the use of the
‘spotlight’ effects in images by Elsheimer that depict a strip of light such as that in The Flight to
Egypt (1609) created by the Milky Way, which Beckett saw while in Munich.87 This lighting works referentially to formulate an image that aligns itself with the formal techniques of painting. Given that so many of the paintings depicted religious subjects, there is an irony in
83 Beckett, Theatrical Notebooks, II: Endgame, p. xix. 84 Beckett, Endgame, p. 21. 85 McMillan and Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre, p. 237. 86 Paraskeva, Beckett and Cinema, p. 19. 87 Joanne Shaw, ‘Light and Darkness in Elsheimer, Carvaggio, Rembrandt and Beckett’, in Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, 24:1 (2012), 219-231 (p. 220).
24 this citation of the ‘spotlight’ technique, as the divine is decisively withdrawn in Endgame, leaving Clov and Hamm isolated ‘in the old refuge’,88 Hamm exclaiming in response to the failed prayer scene, ‘The Bastard! He doesn’t exist’.89
In his director’s notebook for the 1980 Riverside Studio production of Endgame in
London, Beckett wrote that the potential for the ‘fatal grain added to form [the] impossible heap’ is what keeps Clov in the ‘refuge’, drawing on the recurrent motif of Zeno’s heap in the
Figure 3
88 Beckett, Endgame, p. 41. 89 Ibid., p. 34.
25 play.90 Likewise, it is the potential emergence of meaning from an absence that extends an invitation to the spectator to extract significance from the performance. The stage space becomes a site of attempts toward, yet frustrations of, representation, and requires the co- presence of actor and spectator for this to occur. The gestures toward signification must be first recognised by the spectator for the intended failure of synthesis to take place: ‘Hamm: What has happened? Clov: What for Christ’s sake does it matter?’.91 This particular moment encapsulates the structure of attempts to find meaning in the action of the play that are thwarted in the dialogue, which is characteristic of the larger structure of Endgame. This recurrent structure prises open the fissure in mimesis itself through the exhaustion of repetitive acts and questions: ‘[Imploringly] Let’s stop playing!’, exclaims Clov, embodying the space between representation and the real lived space of the actor.92 Theodor Adorno considered this negative form Endgame’s success: ‘understanding it can mean nothing other than understanding its incomprehensibility, or concretely reconstructing its meaning structure – that it has none’.93
This incomprehensibility creates the negative affective structure for Endgame. The apparent absence of a ‘meaning structure’ provokes anxiety and frustration; yet, the audience is bound up with a struggle to interpret the events on stage as shaped by their expectations of the theatrical event.
The dramatic structure of Endgame actively falters on the formal arc of a naturalist play through the repetitive obfuscation of meaning: ‘what’s happening, what’s happening?’, asks
Hamm.94 In this way, it is precisely structured to express incommunicability, invalidating any attempt by the audience to formulate a significant interpretation of the action onstage: ‘We’re not beginning to … to … mean something?’,95 enquires Hamm anxiously – a playful instance of
90 Beckett, Theatrical Notebooks, II: Endgame, p. 47. 91 Beckett, Endgame, p. 44. 92 Ibid., p. 46. 93 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, New German Critique, 26 (1982), 119-150 (p. 120). 94 Beckett, Endgame, p. 12. 95 Ibid., p. 22.
26 a character naming what is at stake in Beckett’s dramaturgy. The sardonic tone of this question mocks any desire or expectation to abide by the tacit rules of dramatic representation, in attempting to derive meaning from the conflict on stage. Like Clov’s seeds, any potential for meaning is exhausted through the obstinate structure of the drama and mise-en-scène: ‘They’ll never sprout’.96 This negativity is the underlying expressive force of the drama in its repetitive break downs in communication. As Shane Weller notes in his recent work on negativity in
European Modernism, the palindromic ‘on’/’no’ is inextricable from Beckett’s work.97
In his rehearsal diary for the 1967 production of Endgame, the assistant director Michael
Haerdter relates that:
All replies which refer to the public have been removed […]: the action is to be entirely concentrated on the dwellers of the lair. There is surprise when Beckett explains this by means of a principle of naturalistic theatre – ‘the play is to be acted as though there were a fourth wall where the footlights are’.98
Following Brook, Ridout writes that ‘the theatre is structured upon the face-to-face encounter’.99 It is this encounter that Beckett’s ‘fourth wall’ seeks to undermine through sealing off the stage space, framed by the proscenium arch. Although the terminology of the
‘fourth wall’ situates Endgame in relation to twentieth-century debates regarding the illusionistic principles of naturalist drama, Endgame refuses to conform to the principles that would be expected of this technique. The isolation of the actors from the spectator instead creates a performance space that is dependent on the denial of the face-to-face encounter with the spectator in the architectural space, an anti-social relationality that pushes the audience into a position of discomfort. This partition was manifested in the production through an internalisation of the face-to-face encounter, as only the co-dependent relation of Clov and
Hamm validates the existence of the dramatic action: ‘CLOV: What is there to keep me here?
96 Ibid., p. 12. 97 Shane Weller, ‘Humanity in Ruins: Samuel Beckett’, in Language and Negativity in European Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 90-124 (p. 72). 98 Quoted in McMillan and Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre, p. 204. 99 Ridout, Stage Fright, p. 29.
27 HAMM: The dialogue’.100 The structural components of the drama itself legitimise the act of theatre over and against any communication of meaning to an audience.
When Beckett worked as an assistant director on the play in 1964, the actor Jack
MacGowran said the following of Beckett’s central interpretation of Endgame:
Interdependency – that man must depend upon his fellow man in some way no matter how awful; a love-hate relationship between Hamm and Clov which exists right through the play.101
Beckett cut all reference to the audience from the dialogue in his annotated text for the 1967 production, and the actors were asked to refuse any acknowledgment of their co-presence with the spectator in the theatre.102 For example, Beckett simplified the telescope scene, cutting the following ironic reference to the audience in performance: ‘([Clov] gets down, picks up the telescope, turns it on auditorium.) I see … a multitude … in transports … of joy’.103 These cuts enhance the interdependency of Clov and Hamm. The anti-relational structure of the drama is, therefore, emphasised through a refusal to engage the spectator in the act of creating meaning.
Nonetheless, it is this resistance that constitutes the actor-spectator relation of Beckett’s production of Endgame.
The frustrated interdependency of Hamm and Clov is replicated in the structure of
Endgame’s relation to the audience in the theatre space. The refusal of meaning denies the actor- spectator relation, in turn having specific effects on the actual audience; this is crucial to the affective state of Beckett’s theatricality. For despite this refusal, Beckett structures attention around the ‘dwellers in the lair’ through the repeated motifs and the gestures towards potential meaning. ‘What does that mean? [Pause.] That means nothing’, Nagg laments, inviting the spectator to try and interpret Hamm’s pain.104 ‘Perhaps it’s a little vein’, he suggests with
100 Beckett, Endgame, p. 36. 101 McMillan and Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre, p. 173. 102 Beckett, Theatrical Notebooks, II: Endgame, p. xviii. 103 Ibid., p. 56. 104 Beckett, Endgame, p. 15; p. 14.
28 regards to ‘something dripping in my head’, though the source of this pain is never established.105 The struggle to construct an interpretation keeps the spectator dependent on the performance, inducing a kind of pathetic hope – the audience are invited to resist the reiteration that meaning is withdrawn from the structure of the play. This re-structures the relation between Clov and Hamm as a kind of relation between spectator to actor:
CLOV So you all want me to leave you. HAMM Naturally. CLOV Then I’ll leave you. HAMM You can’t leave us. CLOV Then I shan’t leave you.106
Although the paternal Hamm ‘naturally’ wants Clov to leave the home, they are bound to each other through their interdependence. In the re-iterations of Clov’s line ‘I’ll leave you’, Hamm often responds with a question that keeps Clov in the play of dialogue; alternatively, Hamm frustrates Clov’s exit through interrupting him at a point specified by Beckett in the Schiller
Notebook.107 This relation is re-structured as the spectator-actor relation through the recurrent proffering then collapse of meaning, and is dependent on the liveness of theatre, which implicitly demands that the audience give themselves over to the performance for the duration of the work. Once seated in the proscenium arch theatres that were Beckett’s preferred theatre space, any attempt to leave induces embarrassment for the spectator as they have to disrupt others’ attention as they negotiate their way out of the auditorium.
105 Ibid., p. 14. 106 Ibid., Endgame, p. 24. 107 Beckett, Theatrical Notebooks, II: Endgame, pp. 43-4.
29 III. Beckett directs Waiting for Godot (Schiller-Theater, Berlin, 1975)
To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.
~ Samuel Beckett to Tom Driver.108
Beckett wrote Godot in 1948 after emerging from hiding in the unoccupied Southern region of
France, where he had waited out the uncertainties and traumas of the war.109 Political, social, and economic instability was still felt as a daily reality across Europe, and throughout the post- war years Beckett was in a precarious financial position due to inflation rates across the continent.110 It was against this European context that Godot was written, a play that seeks to inscribe the pervasive confusion of the post-war condition in the formal motifs and structure of the play. Mary Bryden writes that ‘its crafted indigence [is] consonant with the background of both the war and its aftermath’.111 In the above quotation, taken from an interview in 1961,
Beckett argues that existing representational forms are inadequate to the task of expressing this post-war condition. ‘The task of the artist’ in this context, he argues, is to find a form able to give expressive force to the ‘mess’. Beckett wrote in a preliminary notebook for his 1975
Schiller-Theater production of Godot that he sought ‘to give form to the confusion’ that the text encodes.112 This section discusses Beckett’s attempt to ‘find a form’ to accommodate the ‘mess’ in the performance of Godot, in which ‘one has a given space to deal with and people in that space’.113 It argues that the play was able to come into its fullest being through the processes and configurations of the spatio-temporal conditions in performance, specifically through the
108 Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (eds.), Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1978), p. 219. 109 Beckett, Waiting for Godot, p. vii. 110 Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 366. 111 Beckett, Waiting for Godot, p. viii. 112 McMillan and Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre, p. 88. 113 Ibid., p. 230.
30 use of tableaux to give shape to the text of Godot. This shape distorts the representational conditions of theatre to give form to a radically different theatrical expression.
Beckett integrated twelve precisely constructed tableaux into the fabric of the performance as a key structural device in his production. Consequently, time is out of joint in
Godot: ‘VLADIMIR: [(Motionless, looking at the sky)] Time has stopped’.114 The performance stalls on the image, forming an exhibit of the situation that structures the discontinuous, fragmented texture of the drama. He referred to this dramatic technique in conversations with actors and in his director’s notebook as Wartestelle.115 Knowlson translates this German word as ‘waiting point’ in his discussion of Beckett’s use of this technique.116 These Wartestelle were significantly extended pauses that configured meaning through the internal relations of the live stage image, in contrast to implicating the audience in the production of meaning. The actors were asked to subject their bodies to Beckett’s demands as director, holding a position to configure internal relations while their living, breathing bodies, however tightly controlled, threaten to disrupt this stasis. This creates a tension between embodied co-presence and a withdrawn formal structure in the theatre space.
Dougald McMillan and Martha Fehsenfeld write that these Wartestelle ‘define the circumstances pictorially’. 117 In his director’s notebook, Beckett listed sixteen ‘possible’ moments that define the circumstances of the play at which these tableaux could be used, but he did not make a decision until they had been tested in the theatre space during rehearsals [see fig. 4].118 He was exacting in the composition of these static moments in rehearsals, to ensure that the position and gesture of each actor was controlled and precise. For example, in the production, a Wartestelle came just after Lucky’s dance: ‘The net. He thinks he is entangled in a
114 Beckett, Theatrical Notebooks, I: Waiting For Godot., p. 34. 115 Ibid., p. 327. 116 Ibid., p. xiii. 117 McMillan and Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre, p. 115. 118 Beckett, Theatrical Notebooks, I: Waiting For Godot, p. 327.
31 net. <> ([Long] silence. <>)’.119 At this moment, Lucky is centre stage in ‘his place’, Vladimir has approached Lucky, Estragon ‘cranes forward from the stone’, and Pozzo is sat on his stool leaning towards Vladimir and Estragon.120 This Wartestelle establishes the social relations of the characters through a Brechtian gestus: Pozzo is whispering to Vladimir and Estragon from a seated position, excluding the dancing Lucky from the dialogue. Further, Vladimir and
Estragon both dictate the spectator’s attention by directing their gaze towards Lucky. Lucky is confined to ‘his place’ – as Beckett wrote in a change to the stage directions – made to perform for the audience of characters on stage and the spectators in the auditorium.
In the 1960 German Suhrkamp edition of the text that Beckett annotated for this
Figure 4 119 Ibid., p. 38. 120 Ibid., p. 223.
32 production, the printed play begins with Estragon sat alone on a mound.121 He struggles to remove his boot after a short moment of stasis.122 Vladimir enters in the second iteration of this tiresome, repetitive action at which point Estragon laments, ‘Nothing to be done’.123 In performance, this textual configuration sets up a situation in which the spectator is initially brought into relation with the lone figure on stage, as in the first production of Godot directed by Blin in Paris at the Théâtre de Babylone in January 1953.124 Estragon’s futile actions in this version solicit an emotional response from the spectator, perhaps one of pity for this ragged, struggling man. This establishes a relational dialectic with the spectator that is inherently theatrical, in the sense given to this term by theorists of the theatre such as Brook: ‘the theatre is relativity’.125
In this formulation, Estragon’s being is legitimised by the spectator’s gaze, and the spectator is brought into relation through the affect of this co-presence. As discussed previously, this is the sense of theatricality to which modernist anti-theatrical writers and theorists objected; of ‘an object in a situation – one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder’, as Fried writes.126 A key aspect of this argument is that when the beholder is
‘included’, the artist is unable to use their material for the purposes of abstraction and estrangement, for the artwork is expressly dependent on its audience for the production of meaning. Puchner notes that this ‘keeps the artwork from achieving complex internal structures, distanced reflectivity, and formal constructedness’.127
121 Samuel Beckett, ‘Warten auf Godot / Samuel Beckett; Deutsch von Elmar Tophoven, with author’s handwritten alterations and notes made in preparation for a performance of Waiting for Godot in 1975’, BC 30 ENA/GER, University of Reading Library, Reading. 122 Samuel Beckett, Warten auf Godot (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1960), p. 1. 123 Beckett, Waiting for Godot, p. 5. 124 Blin worked from a French play-script that Beckett sent him for the production, and this text was the version that Beckett sent to Jérôme London at Les Éditions de Minuit for the 1952 edition. For more on the texts used in performances of Godot, see ‘1.5 Playscripts, Acting Copies and Broadcasting Scripts’ in Van Hulle and Verhulst, The Making of Samuel Beckett’s En Attendant Godot / Waiting for Godot, pp.146-165. 125 Brook, The Empty Space, p. 19. 126 Fried, speaking of minimalist art, in ‘Art and Objecthood’, p. 153 [emphasis in original]. 127 Puchner, Stage Fright, p. 5.
33 In the 1975 production, Beckett made a crucial directorial intervention; he broke from the printed stage directions. What this indicates is a dramaturgy that sought to problematise the relationality of theatre. Unlike in the stage directions of the published text, Vladimir is already present onstage when the curtain rises, positioned ‘upstage right by the tree, half in shadow, listening’, while Estragon is ‘seated on a stone […] downstage left, still, bowed’.128 The other variant in the opening of this production compared with the published text was a ‘long silence’, the first Wartestelle of the production.129 Through Vladimir’s presence on stage in the opening, the relational structure of the gaze is internalized into the work’s formal relations, with
Vladimir and Estragon legitimising one another’s being within the aesthetic structure. This integrates the necessary conditions for theatre, as formulated by Brook, into internal relations within the stage image: ‘A man walks across this empty space while someone else in watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged’.130 Unlike the staging described in the printed text, this opening Wartestelle prevents the spectator from being drawn into a relation with Estragon on stage.
Roland Barthes argues in ‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein’ that ‘the work only begins with the tableau, when meaning is set into the gesture and the co-ordination of gestures’.131 In the opening Wartestelle, Vladimir is aligned with the vertical axis, associating him with the tree and the sky, while Estragon is aligned with the horizontal axis, associating him with the stone and the ground. These connections are created through the positioning of Vladimir ‘upstage right by the tree’ in a ‘listening’ posture and Estragon ‘downstage left, still, bowed’ on a stone. This tableau establishes a co-ordination of gestures that gain force through their repetition, creating a kind of ‘subliminal stage imagery’ in Beckett’s words. 132 Moreover, this tableau is a
128 Beckett, Theatrical Notebooks, I: Waiting For Godot, p. 9. 129 Ibid., p. 9. 130 Brook, The Empty Space, p. 11. 131 Roland Barthes, ‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein’, in Image, Music, Text: Essays, sel. and trans. by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), pp. 69-78 (p. 76). 132 McMillan and Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre, p. 99.
34 découpage of the actors against the black backdrop; it aspires to the condition of the etymological root of ‘tableau’ in French: a ‘picture’ or ‘painting’.133
Walter Asmus, the assistant director on the 1975 production, records the following comment Beckett made during rehearsals: ‘To give confusion a shape […] a shape through visual repetition of themes. Not only themes in the dialogue, but also visual themes of the body’.134 Beckett used the artistic medium of the theatre to create an abstract and estranged cruciform shape by constructing the vertical and horizontal plane with the actors bodies, a repeated motif in the dialogue and visual themes of the play, such as Vladimir’s confusion over the veracity of the story of the ‘two thieves crucified at the same time as our Saviour’.135
Beckett further integrated movements and positions that enhance this image in performance through ‘visual themes of the body’: Lucky and Pozzo fall ‘perpendicular across each other midstage off-centre right’ and Vladimir and Estragon exit the stage simultaneously for a moment and then meet in the centre to define a cross.136 In his director’s notebook, Beckett drew a small image of the cross on the page that he defines the precise movements of the actors across the stage [see fig. 5]. This is an example of the ‘subliminal stage imagery’ that Beckett incorporated into the production.
The importance of this framed, internalised relationality is demonstrated in Beckett’s comment that he did not think Godot would work in the round, writing to Schneider on 15
October 1956: ‘I don’t in my ignorance agree with the round and feel that Godot needs a very closed box’.137 In Beckett’s direction of the opening scene, the theatrical situation that includes the spectator as beholder is subsumed in the internal relations of the play. This approach is a force for theatrical innovation through reduction, as it opens a space in which the material of
133 Oxford English Dictionary, (Oxford University Press, 2010)
35 theatre can be used for abstraction. The representational relation of theatre is therefore estranged from the spectator to create formal relations within the work.
Beckett’s production utilised the architectural space of the Schiller-Theater’s main stage, with its large proscenium arch to frame the frozen images of Estragon and Vladimir. This emphasised their isolation in the under-determined scenography.138 At Beckett’s request,
Matias was once more employed to design the set and costumes for the production.139 The
Figure 5
138 McMillan and Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre, p. 149-50. 139 Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 606.
36 staging consisted of a round playing space on a raked stage with a stone and skeletal tree placed precisely on the stage. Beckett was determined to ensure that the rehearsal space was the same size as this stage space: ‘it is very important because of the distance between stone and tree’.140
His diagrammatic rehearsal notebook indicates the reason for this: he established the actors’ positions in the squares of the notebook and precisely reproduced this in the stage space.141
Perhaps something of Beckett’s love of chess and its logic of movement is in play here, as in
Endgame: ‘There, for me, lies the value of the theatre. One turns out a small world with its own laws, conducts the action as if upon a chessboard’.142 This evinces what Blin called Beckett’s
‘fussy desire for precision’, including mapping the number of steps and defining the path taken between the stone and tree in order to control every movement of the actors. 143 In so doing, he was able to create formal, internal relations in the production to structure Godot in performance, giving expressive force to the uncertainty of waiting.
Matias’s sparse set took on further significance in Beckett’s composition of formal parallels between the mise-en-scène and the characters. In the production, he pursued the following aesthetic relations: ‘Estragon is on the ground; he belongs to the stone. Vladimir is light; he is orientated towards the sky. He belongs to the tree’.144 The use of tableaux enhanced
Beckett’s composition of the stage image to produce such geometric, visual associations. It allowed him to position his actors in a precise Wartestelle, holding a specific gesture. Their figures were pushed towards the condition of being as inanimate as the objects around them in the stasis of the tableau, partially foreclosing the excess of meaning created by the presence of a live actor’s body. Martin Puchner articulates this excess of meaning on the live stage as follows:
140 McMillan and Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre, p. 137. 141 See, for example, Beckett’s diagram for the opening tableau of Godot in Beckett, Theatrical Notebooks, I: Waiting For Godot, p. 180. 142 Quoted in McMillan and Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre, p. 231. 143 Ibid., p. 68. 144 Beckett, Theatrical Notebooks, I: Waiting For Godot, p. xiv.
37 From the point of view of reception […] we will never quite know which gestures and movements are part of the artwork and which ones are the result of accidents on the stage.145
Though it may be argued that the integration of tableaux allows for full directorial control over the emission of signs in theatrical conditions, the live embodiment of theatre undermines this.
The actors’ bodies still twitch with potential, emanating the affective signs of theatre that cannot be precluded. The tension of these tableaux therefore encapsulates the structural motif of stasis and motion, demonstrated in this moment of Godot:
(They [huddle together and] listen, grotesquely rigid.) ESTRAGON: I hear nothing VLADIMIR: Hssst! {(They huddle closer together, still listening.)} Nor I. (Sighs of relief. They relax and separate).146
Estragon and Vladimir come together and freeze into ‘grotesquely rigid’ forms, an uncanny distortion of the live embodiment of the actors. This is followed by a sundering, a relaxation of the body that sets the performance into action. As the actor Stefan Wigger comments, ‘like a rubber band, they come together time after time’,147 tightening and releasing the tensions of the play.
The use of tableaux further manifests an anti-representational attitude toward the structure of the dramatic arts, as they resist the teleological drive of drama and the construction of meaning through the unfolding of action. In the Poetics, Aristotle states that ‘the things that representative artists represent are the actions of people’.148 Beckett’s Wartestelle resist the representation of ‘the actions of people’; they supplement the already fractured dramatic form of Godot through an arrested image, a moment of inaction. This develops a set of formal motifs that reverberate through the dramaturgy, such as the cruciform shape discussed above. In so
145 Puchner, Stage Fright, p. 6. 146 Beckett, Theatrical Notebooks, I: Waiting For Godot, p. 18. 147 Quoted in McMillan and Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre, p. 140. 148 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p.18 [emphasis added].
38 doing, they open up a fertile performance space, in which the material units of the theatre demand to be deciphered through their relations to each other.
This aligns the interpretation of meaning in performance with the visual arts. Mark
Nixon writes the following of Beckett’s appreciation of this interpretive modality: ‘He explicitly understood that paintings were readable texts, which both transmitted and absorbed an entire array of interpretive possibilities’. 149 The referentiality of the performance demonstrates Beckett’s skill for determining Wartestelle that capture a dense and complex symbolism that echoes through the performance, giving form to the confusion of meaning in the dialogue and situation of the play: ‘Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come’, Vladimir says.150 The purpose of their waiting is deferred, yet the tableaux give shape to this waiting. The isolation of these images sets up a complex dynamic of internal relations, withdrawing the stage into itself in a refusal of co-presence with the audience in the architectural space. The use of tableaux therefore left the spectator in the condition of a future-orientated ‘waiting-for’, inducing a state of angst due to the immersion in extended, silent inaction. In this way, the ‘waiting’ of the title refers to the condition to which the audience is subjected: they are held in temporal suspension within the fundamental condition of the play. The significance of these static moments thus lies not in the subject matter, but in their formal associations and existential condition of waiting.
Beckett introduced a ‘long silence’ – the last Wartestelle – at the end of his production of Godot to extend the final tableau. In this Wartestelle, the rupture between words and gesture is pronounced through the stasis that leaves the audience waiting for the curtain longer than expected: ‘Vladimir: Well? Shall we go? Estragon: Yes, let’s go. [They do not move.]
CURTAIN’.151 This moment of waiting parallels the tableaux that begin and end each act, creating a warped temporal condition for the spectator, in which waiting becomes the
149 Nixon, German Diaries 1936-1937, p. 145. 150 Beckett, Theatrical Notebooks, I: Waiting For Godot, p. 73. 151 Beckett, Waiting for Godot, p. 87.
39 predominant experience through temporal distortions. The tableaux contort and fold the dramatic form into itself, unsettling any desire for closure by formally disallowing any distinctive indication that the evening’s performance is at an end. The frame of the tableau was maintained in this last image beyond the end of the performance, with the actors remaining within the ontologically distinct world of the performance, rather than appearing for a curtain call and to receive applause. As such, the performance inscribes a particular image and condition on the spectator’s mind, while withholding the closure of meaning brought about by the actors stepping out of their roles. Godot gives the impression of perpetual waiting, the characters stuck in a distinct ontology from which, night after night, they struggle to escape; the spectator can only watch their desperate attempts to find the comic in such a tragic situation, epitomised in the moment that Estragon’s trousers fall down when he releases his belt as a possible aid to suicide.
Barthes considers the use of the tableau, its formal relations, and reliance upon the positioning of artistic material, to be the condition that underlies the arts which take geometry and the theatre as their model:
The scene, the picture, the shot, the cut-out rectangle, here we have the very condition that allows us to conceive theatre, painting, cinema, literature, all those arts, that is, other than music and which could be called dioptric arts.152
As discussed in relation to his directorial decisions in the 1967 production of Endgame, Beckett drew widely on the ‘dioptric arts’, using paintings and textual motifs to suggest images for depiction in tableaux. In 1975, the scholar Ruby Cohn was in Berlin for the rehearsals of
Waiting for Godot, and accompanied Beckett to a collection of paintings by the German
Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich.153 Beckett pointed out the painting Mann und Frau den
Mond Betrachtend (Man and Woman Observing the Moon) and stated, ‘This was the source of Waiting
152 Barthes, ‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein’, p. 70 [emphasis in original]. 153 Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 378.
40 for Godot, you know’.154 Beckett had developed a fondness for the paintings of Friedrich during his six month tour of Germany in 1936-7, during which he saw the painting Zwei Männer
Betrachten de Mond (Two Men Contemplating the Moon) at the Atle Akademie.155
Knowlson argues that Beckett confused the two paintings referred to above, as at other times he drew attention to Two Men Contemplating the Moon as the source of the play.156 There is a reference to this painting in his theatre notebook, when Beckett considers the staging of the rising moon. The notebook reads: ‘
Boot, stands with boot in each hand contemplating V. Tableau’ [see fig. 6].157 On the verso page, Beckett has written ‘K. D. Friedrich’ to indicate the image that this tableau draws upon,158 again positioning the actors precisely and presenting a static image that conveys
Figure 6
154 Ibid. 155 Ibid., p. 254. 156 Ibid. 157 Beckett, Theatrical Notebooks, I: Waiting For Godot, p. 239. ‘
41 interdependence in the bleak setting of the play. However, unlike in other Wartestelle in the play, here companionship is foregrounded, creating an image of ‘waiting-with’ in this moment of contemplation, as opposed to an uncertain ‘waiting-for’. This reference to a specific painting testifies to Beckett’s interest in the visual medium as an art form that depends upon a framed and static moment as the condition for its conception, drawing upon the idea of a framed moment that internalizes relations to create an isolated image. This form of anti-naturalism that elongates a moment of stasis is an aspect of the modernist critique of theatrical mimesis that is
‘a productive force responsible for the theater’s most obvious achievements’ through reinvigorating the tableau form.159 It was an important device for Beckett in his directorial work, a reduction of the circumstances of the play into an extended moment of theatrical inaction.
159 Puchner, Stage Fright, p. 13.
42 IV. Beckett directs Happy Days (Royal Court, London, 1979)
Someone is looking at me still. [Pause.] Caring for me still. [Pause.] That is what I find so wonderful. [Pause.] Eyes on my eyes.
~ Samuel Beckett, Happy Days, 1961.160
Beckett instructed Whitelaw as Winnie in his 1979 production of Happy Days to ‘use the eyes’.161 Happy Days is structured around ocular gestures and the interplay of gazes. Winnie
‘raises her head, gazes front’ at the opening of the play, and in Act II the stage directions state
‘Movements of eyes as indicated’.162 Beckett choreographed these ‘movements of eyes’ in performance to structure the attention of the audience, whilst simultaneously using the dynamics of looking to trouble the co-presence of spectator and actor in the theatre. Winnie ‘cranes a little further back and down’ to look at Willie, which draws the spectator’s attention to there being another, albeit concealed, character onstage.163 In this way, the actor playing Willie refuses the face-to- face encounter of theatre. As Beckett wrote to Schneider, ‘I think it must be obvious from outset (p. 2, “hoo-oo” … “poor Willie”) that someone is there behind mound’.164 Beckett also directed Whitelaw to ‘remember that [Winnie] is absolutely alone. Talking to empty space, moving before unseeing eyes. She’s not speaking to anyone’.165
Anna McMullen argues that ‘the play […] draws attention to the limits of the visible, what is hidden, withheld, unseeable or unreadable from the audience’s perspective’.166 Beckett structures this attention through an interplay of concealment and visibility that directs the spectator’s eyes: Willie remains obscured by the scorched earth of the mound, Winnie is buried
160 Samuel Beckett, Happy Days, pref. by James Knowlson (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), p. 29. 161 Fehsenfeld, ‘Unpublished rehearsal diary’, p. 15. 162 Beckett, Happy Days, p. 5; p. 29. 163 Ibid., p. 6. 164 Beckett, Letters, III: 1957-1965, p. 428. 165 Fehsenfeld, ‘Unpublished rehearsal diary’, p. 15. 166 Anna McMullan, Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Drama (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 55.
43 up to her waist and then neck in the play, and the scenography is an anti-naturalist, abstract expanse of earth and sky. Beckett found this determining of attention integral to the live dramatic arts, as this letter to Jacoba Van Velde evinces: ‘For me what matters more and more is knowing at every moment exactly what is happening on stage, and seeing and hearing exactly, from the auditorium’.167 This indicates the importance of visual and verbal structures of attention in Beckett’s dramaturgy. He further emphasises the structuring of relationality through the architectural space in this letter: the ‘auditorium’ defining the perceptual field of the spectator.
The mise-en-scène of Beckett’s production was designed by Herbert, who, as previously discussed, was one of Beckett’s long-term designer-collaborators. In an interview,
Beckett said: ‘She has great feeling for the work and is very sensitive’.168 Herbert had trained at the London Theatre Studio, where students studied ‘the varying demands made by a text […] and how to find a style that would be good for the text’.169 She had already designed the scenography for a number of Beckett’s plays, and was adept at creating a subtle, evocative stage setting to construct the central image for each production.170 Contrary to the play text of Happy
Days, Winnie was not positioned ‘in exact centre of mound’ for the 1979 production, but was moved slightly to stage left.171 This allowed both Winnie and Willie to occupy centre stage, focussing attention on the interplay of visibility and concealment at the centre of the play. The mound was not smooth as it had been in the world première directed in the U.S.A. by
Schneider;172 instead, it was ‘more broken up with bits coming off it’.173 As Fehsenfeld notes in
167 Beckett, Letters, III: 1957-1965, p. 481 [emphasis in original]. 168 Quoted in Herbert, A Theatre Workbook, p. 219. 169 Herbert, A Theatre Workbook, p. 15. 170 Herbert had designed the scenography for the 1958 double-bill of Krapp’s Last Tape directed by McWhinnie and Endgame directed by Devine, the 1962 production of Happy Days directed by Devine, the 1973 production of Not I directed by Beckett, and the 1976 production of Footfalls directed by Beckett. See Herbert, A Theatre Workbook. 171 Beckett, Happy Days, p. 5. 172 Beckett wrote to Schneider that the mound should be ‘smooth, , i.e. no stones sticking up or such like, nothing to break the monotony of symmetry’, Beckett, Letters, III: 1957-1965, p. 428. 173 Herbert, A Theatre Workbook, p. 54.
44 Figure 7
an unpublished rehearsal diary: ‘It was represented by pieces of canvas, netting and dried flora glued to large set pieces, fit together to form the mound’.174
In addition, the lighting designer Jack Raby used powerful ‘Par 64s’ – that is, lights designed for aircraft of 1Kw each – focussing fourteen tight spotlights on Whitelaw in the mound.175 Sixty other lights hung from the grid over the stage, moving from yellow light closer to the mound towards oranges as they expanded across the stage space.176 The heat from the lamps was such that the stage crew had to arrange for a fan to be positioned under the mound to keep Whitelaw cool while performing.177 This scenography directs attention to Winnie stuck in the mound, the intense white spotlights and articulation of the mound drawing the spectator’s gaze to this point of intense focus on stage. In addition, the curved cyclorama dominated by an
174 Fehsenfeld, ‘Unpublished rehearsal diary’, p. 9. 175 Samuel Beckett, Happy Days, The Production Notebook of Samuel Beckett, ed. James Knowlson (London: Faber and Faber, 1985), p. 22. 176 Fehsenfeld, ‘Unpublished rehearsal diary’, p. 10. 177 Ibid.
45 orange sky articulates the performance space and directs the spectator’s attention to the visible
Winnie in this ill-defined expanse [see fig. 7].178
In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault discusses the power dynamics of the gaze in disciplinary institutions that seek to control individuals through a dispersed power structure. In his discussion of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, Foucault describes ‘visibility’ as ‘a trap’:179 the dynamics of the gaze established by the architectural structure of the Panopticon renders the individual seen but unable to see.180 This interplay of looking resonates with Happy Days, in which Winnie is aware that ‘someone is looking at me still’.181 This positions the spectator as the disciplinary agent who elicits information through exposing the individual to intense scrutiny, while Winnie herself is unable to identify the subject of the gaze. The power disparity of this gaze is strengthened by the intense lighting and entrapment of Winnie in the mound. She is held in a position of intense visibility. For McMullan, this ‘stage apparatus forces Winnie to perform’.182 Further, the stage apparatus subjects Winnie to the intense scrutiny of the spectator, as her ensnarement in the scenography positions her as the object of attention. In this way, she is under the control of a tortuous regime of piercing bells, unrelenting heat, tight earth, and isolation that constitute the conditions of her performance. It is an unremitting violence that is inflicted upon her body: ‘the earth is very tight today, can it be I have put on flesh, I trust not. [Pause. Absently, eyes lowered.] The great heat possibly’.183
These associations of torture and control in relation to dramaturgy that preoccupied
Beckett have been discussed by a number of critics.184 In particular, Morin discusses the representation of torture in draft works by Beckett during the Algerian war in Beckett’s Political
178 Beckett, Happy Days, The Production Notebook, p. 22. 179 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1991 [1975]), p. 200. 180 Ibid. 181 Beckett, Happy Days, p. 29. 182 McMullan, Performing Embodiment, p. 54. 183 Beckett, Happy Days, p. 17. 184 See Tyrus Miller, ‘Beckett’s Political Technology: Expression, Confession, and Torture in the Later Drama’, Samuel Beckett / Aujourd’hui, 9:1 (2000), 255-278; McMullan, ‘Beckett as director’, pp. 196-208 (p. 204); Katherine Weiss, The Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2013), p. 47.
46 Imagination.185 Drawing on Morin, Julie Bates suggests in a recent article that a euphemism for torture used by officers who led the Battle of Algiers in 1957 may underlie the central image of
Happy Days: ‘‘Sunbathing’ designated the ‘burning of flesh’’.186 Winnie refers to just such a horrifying situation in the play: ‘the happy day to come when flesh melts at so many degrees’ and ‘shall I myself not melt perhaps in the end, or burn’.187 The subjection of Winnie to the spectator’s gaze, mediated by the unrelenting scenography, replicates the power dynamics of torture, in which the individual is put under intense scrutiny and pain to elicit information.
What is more, there is an uncomfortable slippage of mimesis in Happy Days that creates the affective current of the play. The actor performs for the spectator under uncomfortable performance conditions, with the theatrical performance legitimised by the spectator’s co- presence. The spectator is therefore put under pressure to recognize their collusion with the dramaturgy in the violence inflicted on the actor/ Winnie. Indeed, Whitelaw, Peggy Ashcroft,
Eva Katharina Schultz, and Irene Worth have all spoken of the discomfort experienced in performing the role.188 This redoubles the situation of Happy Days as the situation of the actor, performing her lines to ‘Begin, Winnie. [Pause.] Begin your day, Winnie’.189
Writing of the tone of voice that Beckett directed Whitelaw to adopt for the role,
Fehsenfeld reports the following:
“one cannot sing just to please someone, however much one loves them…”. ‘The dark begins here,’ Beckett remarked, ‘there should be a bit more gravity. You are working up to a still darker passage: “strange feeling that someone is looking at me…” A strangeness in the voice is needed. Perhaps try thinking, -- is there someone behind me --?’.190
185 See Emilie Morin, ‘Turning Points: Torture, Dissent and the Algerian War of Independence’, in Beckett’s Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 184-237. 186 Julie Bates, ‘The Political and Aesthetic Power of the Everyday in Beckett’s Happy Days’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 28:1 (2019), 52-66 (p. 62). 187 Beckett, Happy Days, p. 11; p. 22. 188 Fehsenfeld, ‘Unpublished rehearsal diary’, pp. 2-3. 189 Beckett, Happy Days, p. 5. 190 Fehsenfeld, ‘Unpublished rehearsal diary’, p. 23.
47 This ‘darker passage’ conveys the discomfort of the gaze that traps Winnie in visibility, while her myopic vision and failing eyesight renders her unable to peer beyond the confines of her mound: ‘Old things. [Pause.] Old eyes. [Long Pause.]’. 191 Winnie’s discomfort taints her comments on the stage apparatus that confines her within the spectator’s gaze: ‘I am clear, then dim, then gone, then dim again, then clear again, and so on, back and forth, in and out of someone’s eye [Pause. Do.] Strange? [Pause. Do.] No, here all is strange’.192 Beckett aligned the lighting of the 1979 production with this structure of visibility of ‘clear, then dim, then gone’.
The ‘blazing light’ of the stage directions began on a low reading at the curtain rise and then was raised to full intensity after the first bell. The full lighting was then fixed on Winnie until the curtain at the end of Act I when it was cut off. This lighting pattern was repeated in Act II.193
Winnie’s comment on the changing perceptual awareness of the spectator therefore registers the slippage in mimesis. Winnie recognises the lighting structures of the theatre that render her visible. However, she also signals to the audience that she does not see the auditorium, which enhances the spectator’s position of power as an observer-voyeur of Winnie’s predicament.
They see but are not seen, which reinforces the torment of the actor/Winnie. It is for them that she performs. This intensifies the gaze of the audience as it anonymizes their identity, further augmented through the dimming of the house lights in the auditorium that obscure the spectator’s face. Schneider reported of the first performance that there was ‘complete attention
– even in intense heat – absolute silence’.194 This attention is attained through the acute interplay of the gaze that Beckett built into the situation of the play.
However, the power play of the gaze is frustrated in Happy Days through an ambiguity of meaning. Morin notes that ‘ambiguity in terms of location, referent and interpretation was
191 Beckett, Happy Days, p. 7-8. 192 Ibid., p. 23. 193 Fehsenfeld, ‘Unpublished rehearsal diary’, p. 10. 194 Harmon (ed.), No Author Better Served, p. 106.
48 the crux of the matter’ in Beckett’s dramatic situations.195 Beckett wrote to Schneider that ‘if people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin’.196 He insisted on his own ignorance concerning the dramatic situation, saying that he knew no more than was encoded in the text.197 To achieve this ambiguity of situation, Beckett removed almost all localised references when revising Happy Days, in a process that Gontarski has termed ‘creative undoing’, whereby Beckett excised any material that gave a locality or psychology to the play.198 On a draft of Happy Days Beckett wrote ‘vaguen’, an injunction to remove any information in excess of the dramatic situation.199
Beckett intensified the ambiguity of the ending through this process of ‘creative undoing’ by revising Winnie’s dialogue. In the earliest version, Winnie says to Willie, as he ascends the mound, ‘Is it the revolver you are after, dear, or me?’.200 The explicit reference to the gun in this dialogue defines the tragic component of the final moments for the audience.
This reference to the revolver was removed over the course of Beckett’s revisions, with the version used in performance as follows: ‘is it me your after, Willie …. or is it something else?’.201 In rehearsals, Beckett acted out the movement for this final tableau on his hands and knees.202 Fehsenfeld reports that in acting out the section, ‘Beckett reache[d] his hand to a place about midway between Winnie and revolver’, demonstrating to Leonard Fenton who played
Winnie the precise positioning for the tableau.203 The revision to the text in conjunction with
Willie’s hand placed ‘midway between Winnie and revolver’ creates an ambiguous, threatening
195 Morin, ‘Endgame and Shorter Plays’, p. 65. 196 Harmon (ed.), No Author Better Served, p. 24. 197 Morin, ‘Endgame and Shorter Plays’, p. 65. 198 Beckett, Happy Days, p. viii; S. E. Gontarski, The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). 199 Rosemary Poutney, Theatre of Shadows: Samuel Beckett’s Drama 1956-76 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988), p. 149. 200 Gontarski, The Intent of Undoing, p. 77. 201 Beckett, Happy Days, p. 37. 202 Fehsenfeld, ‘Unpublished rehearsal diary’, p. 28. 203 Ibid.
49 tone to the end of the performance. This frustrates the power dynamics of the actor-spectator gaze through denying the audience access to stable closure.
Foucault argues that the individual exposed to the interrogative gaze ‘is seen, but [s]he does not see; [s]he is the object of information, never a subject in communication’.204 Although
Winnie appears to be the ‘object of information’ through the dynamics of the gaze structured by the scenography and architectural space of the theatre, the performance appears to withhold information from the audience. In her story of Mildred, she cuts off before she can conclude the story: ‘Suddenly a mouse – [Long pause.] Gently Winnie. [Long pause. Calling.] Willie’.205 Even when Winnie does conclude the story, its ending is ambiguous. Winnie leaves the audience wondering as to the significance of the story, implicating them as voyeurs: ‘… What on earth could possibly be the matter. [Pause.] Too late [Pause.] Too late’.206 Her ‘sudden piercing scream’ suggests that the narrative relays a traumatic event that has been encoded into ‘my story’. She gestures towards the trauma that is enfolded in the story, but this is displaced onto the narrative of a young girl.207 The spectator is invited to confront a failed position as interrogator of Winnie through the complexity of meaning communicated in her story. This undoes the power relation as the attempt to unravel the semiotics of Winnie’s body and speech falters on the incommunicability of her trauma, inscribed in an ambiguous, allegorical mode. It forces the audience into a position of discomfort, confronting their own unintentional complicity in
Winnie’s situation in the theatre space itself.
Winnie’s narrative of the ‘last human kind – to stray this way’ further troubles the gaze of the audience through the interplay of visibility and concealment:
204 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 200. 205 Beckett, Happy Days, pp. 32-3. 206 Ibid., p. 35. 207 Ibid.; p. 32.
50 What’s she doing? he says – What’s the idea? he says – stuck up to her diddies in the bleeding ground – coarse fellow – What does it mean? he says – What’s it meant to mean? – and so on – 208
Mr. Shower, or is it Mr. Cooker (?), registers a frustration in the face of incomprehensibility.
The dramatic situation of Happy Days remains ambiguous. It is an ‘extreme simplicity of dramatic situation and issue’, as Beckett put it.209 The audience does not know anything of the motives, background, or what is at stake for the characters, apart from what is manifested on stage. As such, the spectator is aligned with the position of Mr. Shower/Cooker, asking
‘What’s she doing?’ and ‘What does it mean?’. Winnie mocks this attempt to puzzle out the meaning of her dramatic situation, undermining the structural domination of the gaze: ‘lot more stuff like that – usual drivel’.210
In response to Schneider’s question as to ‘how […] you want us to pronounce Shower?
Show-er, or Sho-er?’, Beckett wrote:
Shower (rain). Shower and looker are derived from German “schauen” & “kuchen” (to look). They represent the onlooker (audience) wanting to know meaning of things. That’s why (p. 17) she stops filing, raises head & lets ‘em have it (“And you, she says…”).211
Mr. Shower/Cooker stands in for the gaze of the audience, demanding that the trapped Winnie reveal herself to his gaze. This gaze is instead turned back on the audience, as Winnie ‘lets ‘em have it’: ‘And you, she says, what’s the idea of you, she says, what are you meant to mean?’.212
Beckett’s phrasing in the letter to Schneider suggests that the tone of this moment is direct and interrogative. The woman with Mr. Shower/Cooker returns the question of meaning, which is articulated by Winnie in this moment. It confronts the audience with her own gaze and interrogation of meaning. This troubles the dynamics of looking that Beckett sets in play, undoing the audiences supposition of occupying a position of power within the theatre.
208 Ibid., p. 25. 209 Quoted in Morin, ‘Endgame and Shorter Plays’, p. 65. 210 Beckett, Happy Days, p. 25. 211 Harmon (ed.), No Author Better Served, p. 95. 212 Beckett, Happy Days, p. 25.
51 Conclusion
This dissertation has examined the significance of live performance to Beckett’s dramaturgy by discussing how he worked in, through, and against the mechanism of theatre. In so doing, it has drawn on a diverse range of sources from the Beckettian ‘grey canon’ to demonstrate Beckett’s exploration of the practical components of theatre. This material indicates the necessity of theatre itself to Beckett’s plays, as the theatre space becomes a site in which to interrogate representation and the theatrical event. Further work on this aspect of Beckett’s oeuvre would constitute an important development in the understanding of his approach to performance, thereby contributing to the resources for theatre-makers and scholars to draw upon. There is a plethora of published and archival material that could be studied in this further analysis – most excitingly, there is a wealth of unexamined material in a number of archives. Dirk Van Hulle notes that ‘Beckett’s manuscripts are now dispersed over several holding libraries on both sides of the Atlantic’.213 This material is integral to developing the field of Beckett studies, and provides a source of material for years to come. In relation to this performance-oriented approach to Beckett, there is also a need to examine the re-inscription of these processes in the textual composition of Beckett’s plays. As such, a framework that incorporates the conditions of theatre and textual processes examined respectively in performance theory and genetic criticism requires developing to articulate this aspect of Beckett’s work.
213 Dirk Van Hulle, ‘Notebooks and Other Manuscripts’, in Samuel Beckett in Context, ed. by. Anthony Uhlmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 417-427 (p. 418).
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and Lois More Overbeck, IV vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014),
III: 1957-1965.
---, The Letters of Samuel Beckett, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn
and Lois More Overbeck, IV vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016),
IV: 1966-1989.
Works about Beckett
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Faber, 2004).
54 Adorno, Theodor W., ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, New German Critique, 26 (1982), 119-
150.
Anderton, Joseph, Beckett's Creatures: Art of Failure after the Holocaust (London: Bloomsbury
Publishing, 2016).
Bates, Julie, Beckett’s Art of Salvage: Writing and the Material Imagination, 1932-1987 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2017).
Bates, Julie, ‘The Political and Aesthetic Power of the Everyday in Beckett’s Happy Days’,
Journal of Beckett Studies, 28:1 (2019), 52-66.
Bradby, David, ‘Beckett’s Production of Waiting for Godot (Warten auf Godot)’, in A Companion
to Samuel Beckett, ed. by S. E. Gontarski (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 329-
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Brater, Enoch, Ten Ways of Thinking About Samuel Beckett (London: Methuen, 2011).
Carville, Conor, Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
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Cohn, Ruby, Just Play: Beckett’s Theater (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).
Connor, Steven, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (Aurora, CO: Davies Group, 1988).
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University Press, 2014).
Fehsenfeld, Martha, ‘Unpublished rehearsal diary notes taken during May 1979 rehearsals of
Happy days, Royal Court Theatre, London. Directed by Samuel Beckett’, UoR MS
2102, University of Reading Library, Reading.
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(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 301-311.
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55 Garner, Stanton B., ‘Visual Field in Beckett’s Late Plays’, Comparative Drama, 21:4 (1987),
349-373.
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Gontarski, S. E., The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts (Bloomington: Indiana
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Deleuze’, in The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, ed. by Dirk Van Hulle
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 126-141.
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2003), p. 77.
Kalb, Jonathan, Beckett in Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Knowlson, James, Light and Darkness in the Theatre of Samuel Beckett (London: Turret Books,
1972).
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73-83.
Knowlson, James, and Elizabeth Knowlson, Beckett Remembering/Remembering Beckett: Uncollected
Interviews with Samuel Beckett and Memories of Those Who Knew Him (London: Bloomsbury,
2007).
McMillan, Dougald, and Martha Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre (London: John Calder, 1988).
McMullan, Anna, Theatre on Trial: Samuel Beckett’s Later Drama (London: Routledge, 1993).
56 McMullan, Anna, ‘Beckett as director: the art of mastering failure’, in The Cambridge Companion
to Samuel Beckett, ed. by John Pilling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
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McMullan, Anna, Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Drama (London: Routledge, 2010).
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Theatrical Aesthetics’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts, ed. by
S. E. Gontarski (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), pp. 409-422.
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New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, ed. by Dirk Van Hulle (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 60-72.
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Paraskeva, Anthony, The Speech-Gesture Complex: Modernism, Theatre, Cinema (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2013).
Paraskeva, Anthony, Samuel Beckett and Cinema (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).
Poutney, Rosemary, Theatre of Shadows: Samuel Beckett’s Drama 1956-76 (Gerrards Cross: Colin
Smythe, 1988).
Price, Alexander, ‘Beckett’s Bedrooms: On Dirty Things and Thing Theory’, Journal of Beckett
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(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 173-182.
57 Van Hulle, Dirk, ‘Notebooks and Other Manuscripts’, in Samuel Beckett in Context, ed. by.
Anthony Uhlmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 417-427 (p.
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Samuel Beckett, ed. by Dirk Van Hulle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015),
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58 Brecht, Bertolt, Brecht on Theatre, trans. by John Willet (London: Methuen and Co., 1964).
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61