Beckett's Actor

Beckett's Actor WILLIAM B. WORTHEN In performance, Beckett's drama makes extensive demands ofthe actor, and of the spectator as well. Emptied of psychological motivation, of setting, of spectacle, and often apparently of action, Beckett's plays challenge actors and· audiences to create theater from the tatters of the traditional stage. From this extreme, as Jonas Barish has noted, Beckett's theater seems so markedly "eviscerated of everything the world has always thought of as theater," that it sometimes appears designed to frustrate theatrical enjoyment, to be calculatedly "antitheatrical" in attitude. I And yet, in many respects Beckett's drama seems less to negate theater than to distill it. Although Beckett's plays eschew the allied diversions of the stage - no scene painters or fencing masters, please - they do so not to impress us with the poverty ofthe theater, but instead to rivet our attention to the theater's essential means: the actor. Beckett's drama scrupulously clarifies the actor's art, and substantially reconsiders the modem actor's complex enactment. Beckett is, of course, a remarkably literal playwright in his use of the materials ofdrama. As many critics have suggested, he repeatedly forces actors and characters to share the painful and apparently arbitrary circumstances of their common stage.2 The actors in Play, for instance, face specific physical requirements. Bottled in narrow urns, the actors must either kneel or stand in a grave trap throughout the performance ("The sitting posture results in urns of unacceptable bulk and is not to be considered"),3 their cramped fatigue exacerbated by the irritating glare of a spotlight intermittently trained on their faces from very close range ("The optimum position for the spot is at the centre of the footlights, the faces being thus lit at close quarters and from below" [p_ 62]). The stage rigidly contains the actors, holding their bodies in uncomfortable postures, bracing their necks against the slightest movement, forcing their eyes "undeviatingly front" (p. 45) into the bright light. The actors' facial expressions must remain absolutely "impassive," and with few exceptions their 4 16 WILLIAM B. WORTHEN voices speak tonelessly, varying neither pitch nor emphasis. On the rack, the actors must still overcome the considerable demands of the text itself, for without the reinforcement ofcoherent dialogue, only intense concentration will enable them to deliver their fragmentary monologues completely and accurately . And, naturally enough, the performance holds a final, dismaying peripeteia for its performers; for in the place of the promised end, Beckett asks them to "Repeat play," to reenact an already tiring performance, risking in weariness a higher probability of failure. 4 Play deftly reifies the conditions of stage acting. The actors are sealed "in character," speaking in their turns as the spot discovers them, overheard by an audience they seem not to perceive. In an important sense, Play invites us to hold M, WI, and W2 in this double perspective, to see them simultaneously as attenuated characters and as constricting yet evocative dramatic roles. Many dramatic parts enforce on an audience the dual awareness ofthe role's histrionic dynamics and of the character's represented attributes, but Beckett's meager roles fashion this relation with telling resonance. Comparison with a more evidently "theatrical" role is instructive. The role of King Lear, for example, continually astonishes us through the renewed and increasing demands it makes of the actor. As Michael Goldman argues, Shakespeare magnifies the dimensions of Lear's suffering by making the histrionic obstacles that the actor must articulate and overcome palpable to the audience. Having forced Lear to appear to transcend the full reach of his passion several times in the course of the performance, Shakespeare tests the actor finally in Lear's terrible speech over the body of Cordelia, beginning "Howl, howl, howl, howl!" The actor's technical resources for discriminating and intensifying the four beats of the line must not only be commensurate with the powerful emotional resources of the role, but also appear to enlarge suffering that has already seemed to lie on the extreme verge of his histrionic capacity.5 Shakespeare realizes the extremity of Lear's feeling by forcing us to attend to the extremity of the actor's task; the...