Beckett's Play Between Poetry and Performance

BECKETT'S PLAY BETWEEN POETRY AND PERFORMANCE WHEN VIEWING BECKETI'S PLAYS IN chronological order, one notices that the characters' mobility and the impact of natural lights tend to decrease. This points not only to a diminuendo of dramatic illusion and realism but also to a gradual moving towards the zone where death impinges on life. Hamm, Clov, Nell and Nagg are more severely handicapped than Vladimir and Estragon, or even than Pozzo and Lucky during the second act of Godot. Hamm of Endgame can be moved around in his wheelchair whereas Winnie of Happy Days is buried up to her waist in Act I, up to her neck in Act II. In Play only the heads of the three nameless characters M, WI and W2 emerge from the urns which suggest death even more than the scorched land of Happy Days. The predominant atmosphere in Waiting for Godot evokes a natural twilight. Dimness increases in Endgame, which takes place inside a room with two small windows, a room that may symbolize the brain. A blinding light, scorching all vegetation, dazzles in front of a backdrop in Happy Days. This perpetual sunlight possesses some of the infernal qualities which characterize the spotlight in Play, a spotlight which arouses the characters from complete darkness and provokes reluctant confessions. Light produces unrelieved torture in Play as in Sartre's No Exit. In both plays, two women and a man, presumably dead, are forced to face their past. Inez, Estelle and Garcin are cast together forever, a punishment which reproduces the false situations they had created for themselves. They do not want to reveal their life stories, their failures, their meaning. Beckett's M, WI and W2, in contrast, make no attempt at misrepresentation. Within the narrow limits of their verbal capacity or memory, they recount what happened. The one-act play can be divided into three parts differing in verbal technique and poetic suggestiveness. First, a prologue: moments of half-light and half-coherent reflections; then, a first part: an intense light calling forth fragments of precise revelation and remembrance; finally, a second part: under a new half-light emerge commentaries, where past and present interpenetrate. The sketchy scenes reported by the man and two women, a banal triangle, reveal suspicion, complaints, hesitations leading from one false step to another, such as: M, not knowing how to escape from or answer a reproachful wife or mistress, 339 340 MODERN DRAMA December embraces her and swears he cannot live without her. These false situations lack the moral and criminal dimensions of those in No Exit. They merely form elements in a poetic creation. As the French title Huis Gtos suggests, Inez, Garcin and Estelle participate in a trial, performing in turn the parts of accused, plaintiff , witness and judge. Beckett's characters also speak as if they were being interrogated, if not judged: W2. Her parting words, as he could testify, if he is still alive, and has not forgotten ... or W2. One morning as I was sitting, stitching by the open wind ~w, she burst in and flew at me. Give him up, she screamed, he is mme. During the second part, when the protagonists cease to recall their partners' stale words, the implicit plea of innocence is replaced by desire for pardon, mercy, peace and atonement. The judgment takes on a religious meaning: the news-in-brief is transmuted into poetic plea. Neither plea in Sartre's nor Beckett's trials come to a definite end. "Let us continue" are the final words of No Exit. The characters, after denuding each other, cannot refrain from mutual torture. Beckett suggests continuation not in the dramatic sense but in a poetic or musical sense, for it is clear that the characters will not enact further scenes: the characters will repeat what they have already said in a different key or a different rhythm. In Waiting for Godot and Happy Days, the first and second act, however similar, are not identical; in Play, however, the entire drama is repeated verbatim. The author does not indicate, like Sartre, that we cannot easily escape the pervasiveness of our bad faith, but that our human condition remains...