Beckett's Catastrophe

Beckett's Catastrophe ANTONI LIBERA All the world's a stage, ... The title of Samuel Beckett's recent play Catastrophe has a number of meanings. First and foremost, however, it retains its original ancient Greek sense, namely, "the final event of a dramatic action, especially of a tragedy." As the title of a play, then, "catastrophe" indicates not only that the symbolic theme of the play is a catastrophe, in any sense of the word, but also that the play itself is, as an independent work, a catastrophe, and hence, that it is but one element of a greater whole which is the tragedy. Four characters appear in the play: the Producer, his female Assistant, Luc, and the actor known as the Protagonist. "Protagonist," like "catastrophe," also had two senses in the ancient Greek: it could refer both to the actor playing the main role in a theatre and to the central hero of any given work. The setting of this play, however, is contemporary and not ancient. If the actor is called the Protagonist; therefore, the appellation could mean that he is not only the principal actor in a theatrical group, but also the principal hero of Beckett's work. Had he not been so called - had he been called, for instance, the Actor, or even the First Actor - the chief hero (the protagonist) of Catastrophe could have been taken to be the Producer. After all, the Producer is the first person mentioned in the cast of characters and has much to say, whereas the Protagonist is mentioned only in the third place, utters not a single word and does practically nothing. The action is a rehearsal which takes place on a theatre stage and comprises the setting up of some sort of scene. The Producer, in a fur coat and head-covering appropriate to it, sits in his chair to the left of the stage. Next to him, in a white shirt and with a bare head, stands the woman Assistant. The Protagonist, wearing a wide-rimmed black hat and a black bathrobe which 342 ANTONI LIBERA reaches down to his ankles, is standing barefoot, his hands in his pockets, his head bent down, on a forty-centimetre cube placed in the middle of the empty stage. The electrician, Luc, is not present on the stage. The rehearsal consists in the Producer's making alterations to the image of the Protagonist prepared by the woman Assistant. The Producer orders his hat and bathrobe to be removed. (The Protagonist is left wearing grey pyjamas; he is nearly bald; he is clenching his fists and begins to shiver from cold.) The Producer then orders the Protagonist to unclench his fists, clasp together his now relaxed hands and lay them at the level of his chest; he further orders his pyjama top to be opened and the trousers to be rolled up to just above the knees; and he finally orders him to bend his head still lower. In addition, all those parts of the Progaonist's body which are bare, that is to say, his skull, arms and legs, must be whitened. During the rehearsal, the woman Assistant makes three hesitant suggestions. The first of these (to join the Protagonist's hands) is accepted by the Producer; the other two (to place a gag in the Protagonist's mouth and to have the Protagonist raise his head for a moment) are decisively rejected. Ultimately, the Producer sets up the lighting; he asks the electrician first to black out the surrounding areas, then to black out the figure of the Protagonist with the exception only of his head. When this exercise has been repeated in the final version, distant applause is heard. At this point, the Protagonist unexpectedly raises his head and stares motionless at the house. The applause immediately lessens and stops; the Protagonist's head disappears slowly in the darkness. The point ofthe depicted event is a conflict between the aims of the Producer and the attitude of the Protagonist; it ends in a fiasco caused by the Producer's behaviour and the Protagonist's refusal to conform to his will by means of a gesture which has been...