"Everything Out but the Faces": Beckett's Reshaping of What Where for Television

"Everything Out but the Faces": Beckett's Reshaping of What Where for Television MARTHA D. FEHSENFELD All That Fall is a specifically radio play. or rather radio text, for voices, not bodies. ... I am absolutely opposed to any fonn of adaptation with a view to its conversion into "theatre." It is no more theatre than End-Game [sic) is radio and to "act" it is to kill it.... Now for my sins I have to go on and say that I can't agree with the idea of Act Without Words as a film. It is not a film, not conceived in tenns of cinema. H we can't keep our genres more or less distinct, or extricate them from the confusion that has them where they are, we might as well go home and lie down. This statement from a letter by Beckett to his American publisher Barney Rosset, dated 27 August '957, certainly makes the author's position clear. And yet since then, Mercier and Camier, Imagination Dead Imagine, The Lost Ones, All Strange Away, and Textsfor Nothing, to name a few, have allfound their ways from page to stage; EhJoe has moved from television to stage. All of these transitions happened with Beckett's permission - if sometimes reluctantly given - and recently the author himself advised on a staged version of Company, directed by Pierre Chabert in Paris and Stanley Gontarski in California. One might be tempted to dismiss these apparent anomalies by claiming Beckett's legendary generosity as the cause; or individual circumstances of particular talent, as in the case of David Warrilow, "since The Lost Ones was originally intended as a reading-demonstration.'" Personal affection and professional admiration for Joe Chaiken led to Beckett's permission to adapt and perform Texts for Nothing; friendship, loyalty and admiration for Jean Reavey and Alan Schneider overcame reluctance to allow Eh Joe to be staged, once in New York City and laterin Paris, with David Warrilow. Again, special circumstances resulted in Gerald Thomas's staging of All Strange Away; and the evidence of stage potential to be found in the early manuscript of Company 230 MARTHA D. FEHSENFELD is unmistakable and cannot be ignored',' However, Beckett's decision to rework his published text of What Where for television stands as a unique choice in his long career as author-director of his own work. In light of all this information, it is certainly interesting and probably valuable to examine with some care and in detail the evolution of this play, written originally in French; translated by Elmar and Jonas Tophoven into German as Was Wo; staged in 1983 by Alan Schneider as part of an evening of three plays; and finally directed by the author in a completely revised form for German television in Stuttgart in the summer of 1985. Beckett sent me a photocopy of the text of What Where in July, 1983. I had not yet seen the play staged, but as soon as I saw the typewritten text, it seemed to me that he had conceived it not for the stage, but for television. His diagram for the arrangement of the stage - with indications for lighting, shadow, playing'area, positions for Voice and the three players - was unlike any I had seen on one of his prepared texts for a play designed for the theatre, but it was very like other diagrams he had made for his television pieces: Ghost Trio, But the Clouds, EhJoe; and those for Film, both in manuscript and published form. And it was reminiscent ofdiagrams I had seen in rehearsal notebooks prepared and used by Beckett when he directed his plays for the theatre. After reading the text, I was even more certain that he had somehow had the small restricted space ofthe television screen in mind as the setting for this play. My subsequent viewing of the production strengthened this fust impression. When I fmally saw What Where on stage later in 1983, the fust thing that struck me was the presence ofthe megaphone downstage right, suspended from the flies. It seemed to assume a meaning, an importance, which I could never completely either erase from mind or integrate into...