"Faint, though by no means invisible": A Commentary on Beckett's Footfalls

"Faint, though by no means invisible": A Commentary on Beckett's Footfalls R. THOMAS SIMONE In June of 1976 I had the good fortune to see in London the Royal Court Theatre's premiere productions of Samuel Beckett's stage plays That Time and Footfalls. Although I had seen fine productions of Waiting for Godot, Happy Days, and Endgame, I was not prepared for the brilliant technical presentation of That Time, nor for the emotional impact ofFootfalls with the gray intensity of Billie Whitelaw, for whom the play was written. The measured but iron pacing of Beckett's own direction helped to create a dramatic experience beyond any I had previously known in the theater. This strange, obsessive play of a woman pacing a gray path of light, talking with her mother, explaining her life through story and fitful movement, and then finally disappearing, created heart-stopping pity in me, and an inexplicable terror. I felt and continue to feel that Beckett has created a distilled but potent tragedy in Footfalls that is equal in resonance and power to Godot orEndgame. In this essay I would like to explain what seem to me the sources ofpower in this play and to claim for it a significant place in Beckett's career. Footfalls shows us May, a middle-aged woman dressed in gray, pacing up and down a path of light three feet wide and nine paces long. I We see and hear this woman in dialogue with the voice of her unseen mother, and we see her during monologues ofboth the mother and herself. Each ofthese three episodes is punctuated by near darkness and a faint chime marking scenic division. In a final tableau we see against the darkness only the even fainter path of light, which itselffades at the end. Aural imagery, while muted, is extremely rich and detailed. A chime that echoes introduces each of the four scenes, and the insistent footsteps of May sound out against the surrounding silence. The contrast between the voices,and the rhythm of speech and pause of the two women, also make up a large part of the aural impact of the play. The central meditation ofFootfalls is May's attempt to penetrate the mystery of the beginnings and, consequently, the endings of existence. The specific R. THOMAS SIMONE image of obsession derives from May's belief that she has come into existence without spiritual or emotional birth: thus the imagery of mother and daughter is charged with a terrible irony. The particular failure of procreation - with its focus on female images and despair - helps to create a mood of tragedy, when all of being stands accused by the woman who exists physically outside the miracle of birth. The failure of birth or birth as the original sin is a recurring theme in Beckett from his Proust essay on, but the stark treatment ofthis idea in Footfalls is especially impressive. For May the inefficacy ofbirth becomes the failure of "it all," of all beginnings and endings whether of an individual life or of the supposedly created universe itself. The play is an unfolding of the circumstances of May's despair and her own comprehension of the anguish of her life, an unfolding which Beckett himself referred to in his Berlin rehearsals as "the visionary development of the story."2 The inward movement of the play, however, suggests possibilities beyond May's knowing; the work "has a visionary character ... it is an image which develops gradually."3 Beckett's powers of dramatic imagery reach a remarkable level in Footfalls, and the increased vividness of the play may be judged if we compare it to his preceding dramas. (The Royal Court production emphasized this intensification by presenting first Play of 1964 and then That Time, both directed by Donald McWhinnie, before Footfalls, directed by Beckett.) In That Time of 1975 we see the head of an old man and hear a recorded voice shifting between three points on the stage. In Not I of 1972 we see a mouth faintly lighted and the indistinct form ofthe Auditor. Except for the opening and closing ofthe eyes of the Listener in That Time and the muted...