Catastrophe: Beckett's Laboratory / Theatre

Catastrophe: Beckett's Laboratory / Theatre BERT o. STATES How would an artist like Samuel Beckett, whose work instinctively avoids the timely, write a political play? Or, more explicitly: how would the man who wrote the opening line of Murphy (,The Sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new") deal with a "relevant" issue? Barring a radical shift in vision, Catastrophe is as close to an answer as we are likely to come. Technically, Catastrophe is neither a political play nor a protest play. But it is a play about human rights and inhuman wrongs, and there is no doubt about where it stands on these matters. It is of course dedicated to Vaelav Havel and was premiered in 1982 during Havel's imprisonment in Czechoslovakia for "subversive activities against the Socialist state." Catastrophe is a play about the making of a Havel - that is, as Peter Handke might put it, a man who speaks by being made to not speak. Curiously - no doubt in respect to Havel's silenced craft - Beckett links the theme of human victimization to the paradox of theatre preparing unpleasant subjects for the pleasure of its audience. The result is far from a simple advocacy of a cause in which we all believe. This is not one of those plays written for an audience of the already-committed. In Catastrophe, I suggest, Beckett went beyond his wish to honor a courageous fellow-artist to a critique of the artist's weapon. In short, he introduces the question of the means into the pursuit of the well-justified end. Even apart from its timeliness, Catastrophe is an unusual Beckett play. It is set in an explicit place, a theatre stage, and though in Beckett's theatre the stage tends to become "all the world," and vice versa, in this case it advertises itselfas little more than a theatre in the world on the evening of a dress rehearsal. The characters - all but one - are gainfully employed, in good health, and unacquainted with the metaphysical. To this degree, the play is "realistic." Reading it quickly, you might miss Beckett entirely; in fact, in view of a certain stiffness in the style, you might think it had been done by an amateur (nine in ten Catastrophe: Laboratoryrrheatre 15 students find it a bore the first time around). On closer reading, however, it is unmistakable Beckett. The absence of the muckheap, the void, or the terminal room in the ex-world is all an illusion of the eye. Catastrophe is a play that can best be studied through its language. For one thing, it has an almost biblical economy: nothing in it serves only a local or a descriptive purpose; everything calls into "play" its other, thus allowing us to speak, figuratively, of there being two plays in one (just as we can eventually speak of two audiences). More specifically, the play is a dialectic between language as speech and language as gesture. Words, in this play (as so often in Beckett), refuse to settle into a servitude to purely semantic meaning. Words carry worlds in their sounds. A word like "plinth", for instance, is a quintessential Beckett word (like "spool" or "viduity" in Krapp's Last Tape): the sound of it gives away the Beckett space, like water dripping in a deep cavern. The assault on the soul here, then, is logo-rhythmic - overall, an odd syncopation of exoteric and esoteric language. On one hand, there is an idiomatic strain consisting of slang or "trade" language: Step on it; No harm trying; Bless his heart; Every i darted to death; Get going!; Is Luke around?; Where do you think we are? In Patagonia?; In the bag!;Lovely; Terrific! He'll have them on their f eet. This is "urban contemporary." By itself you would think you were hearing Neil Simon dialogue - or, if not that contemporary, Kaufman and Hart. Here, howeverI it is not "atmospheric" speech but a particular species of vocality. Idiomatic speech, for all its local color, is impersonal speech, the speech of the others into which "one" disappears. It implies the security of class membership. To say "Lovely," or "Terrific!" (at least here) is to...