Rockaby, and: Ohio Impromptu, and: Eh Joe, and: Pas Moi (Not I), and: Krapp's Last Tape (review)

The Beckett Centenary Symposium, held at Trinity College Dublin's Samuel Beckett Centre, celebrated one hundred years of the author's history by posing that legacy's most pertinent question: what of the future of Beckett? Many of the world's leading Beckett scholars gathered to discuss, and at times interrogate, the current state of Beckett scholarship, as it pants its way into the twenty-first century.

The symposium coincided with the Gate Theatre's own celebration of the playwright, Beckett on Stage, in which ten Beckett works have been staged at the Gate and at London's Barbican Theatre. While the Gate's festival is significant for its new versions of some of Beckett's major works, including Endgameand Krapp's Last Tape, its key contribution to the centenary may be its production of some of the later or shorter works, which are rarely produced outside of academic settings, in large part because of the commercial implications of their brevity. Three of these shorter pieces were presented during the week of the symposium: Rockaby(1980) and Ohio Impromptu(1981), together in a single evening, and Eh Joe(1965), originally written for television.

Beckett's later works for the theatre—including Rockabyand Ohio Impromptu—produce particularly challenging limitations for a director, in that they seem to defy the possibility of interpretation. Rather more like musical scores than plays, these pieces represent the extreme logical development of a body of work devoted to the possibility of finding the maximum dramatic and philosophical substance in a single, sustained image. As critics (such as Michael Billington in his recent review of the Gate's productions) continue to voice their frustration with the inelastic quality of Beckett's late writing for theatre, these pieces continue to challenge our assumption that theatre must always be a collaboration between at least two sensibilities (even if those two are comprised of the split function of a single author / director). When the logic underpinning this assumption is shaken, too often theatre itself is seen to be under threat, as if the openness of the written word for interpretation by the director is theatre's sole raison d'être, rather than the deep interrogation of the presence of the live human actor onstage.

For the actor, Beckett's late pieces are unique in their demands for an absolute surrender to the precisions of form. In contrast to most living Western theatre traditions in which the actor is seen as an independent psychological agent who makes choices and builds a character, these pieces force the actor to discover what remains when she is denied recourse to her customary tools and techniques. What is left, however, is often a revelation, as Billie Whitelaw has so articulately described after her experience performing Not I. Faced with a virtual straitjacket regarding the manipulation of her own body and voice, the actor is instead given another insight—that of the freedom and energy that comes with giving herself over to an image that is, in its formal completeness, both bigger and more profound than her individual performance. I would suggest that Beckett's microscopic instructions to the actor in his late works might constitute an attempt to embed the training required to perform these pieces into the pieces themselves. Our own Anglo-American traditions of actor training have taken us far away from this lesson of gaining freedom through the submission to the mastery of a form. For Whitelaw, the task of performing a Beckett piece is never, in any sense, boring. Rather, it replaces the emphasis on choice, coming as it does from a...