In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • "Someone is looking at me still":The Audience-Creature Relationship in the Theater Plays of Samuel Beckett
  • Matthew Davies

SECK: Unique, oblique, bleak experience, in other words, and would have had same effect if half the words were other words. Or any words. (Pause.)

SLAMM: Don't stop. You're boring me.

SECK: Not enough. You're smiling.

(Kenneth Tynan 234)

Though Kenneth Tynan was a self-declared "godotista" (161), his skit-review of Endgame and Krapp's Last Tape for the Sunday Times in 1958 articulated what has become received wisdom: whatever their literary merits, Beckett's "dramatic vacuums" (159) are difficult for audiences to digest. From his earliest full-length texts with the power to confound or to "claw"1 through the increasingly eviscerated dramaticules delivered at often incomprehensible tempos—rapid (Play, Not I), slow (Footfalls), or hardly at all (Breath)—and culminating in What Where's "Make sense who may. I switch off" (504),2 Beckett's dramaturgy of developing "impoverishment" approaches a "zero degree theater" (Duckworth 45) that seems "to be an assault on itself, an assault on theater" (Gontarski xvi), an assault on the audience that sustains it.

Yet in spite of Beckett's "pivotal" role in this "tradition of sometimes disdainful sometimes disconcerted ambivalence toward the audience" (Blau 34), his works were embraced by large sections of the public from the outset. Godot's 1952 premiere ran for over three hundred performances in Paris and, with Endgame, "enjoyed enormous success in Europe" (Tynan 160) before reaching England or America. Over the following decades every addition to the canon was greeted by the swelling ranks of Beckett's "adoring congregation" (Blau 32). His assertion that, done his way, Godot "would empty the theater" (Knowlson 379), seems as contradictory as it is self-defeating. As Blau writes, "The more synoptic and extrusive [End Page 76] [the plays], the more there is a sense of playing into a void, all the more when there is an audience . . . in respectful or even ritualistic attendance" (34). Clearly the relationship between Beckett's "creatures of illusion on stage" and the audience is, in Duckworth's understatement, "a confused one" (49). The playwright seems to have discovered "a new type of audience/ stage transaction that does not fit either side of the traditional Stanislavsky/Brecht dichotomy" (Kalb 39). In this essay I will explore the nature and development of this new transaction.

Though constantly vexed, the relationship between Beckett's creatures of illusion and the audience altered over the course of a career that spanned four decades. I conceive this development in three chronological movements corresponding to Beckett's exploitation of the relations between the auditorium and the stage. The "proscenium arch" plays (Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Happy Days, and the transitional Krapp's Last Tape) have fixed, if increasingly indefinable, settings. In the "elliptical light" dramaticules (Play, Not I, Footfalls, Come and Go, . . . "but" the clouds . . .) location disintegrates into pools of light surrounded by an encroaching offstage darkness. Finally, in a small but significant pair of metatheatrical plays (Catastrophe and What Where) Beckett diverts or explodes the pools, forcing the light back into the auditorium and ultimately extinguishing the stage. Such categories are neither neat nor firm, and bleeding occurs across boundaries and time-lines. Yet, these movements suggest three veins of inquiry, each embedded in its appropriate substratum: the relationship between the audience and the onstage characters, the interaction between the audience and the offstage world of the play, and how that relationship mutates when the auditorium becomes host to the playmakers.

I

It might seem misleading to apply the term "proscenium arch" to Beckett's early plays, many of which were designed for, and began life in, studio theaters. Nevertheless, photographic evidence and Beckett's own stage directions demonstrate the requirement for traditional theater architecture3—wings (Godot), flats with a door and windows (Endgame), raised stages (Krapp), footlights (Play), curtains (Not I)—that distances the audience from the stage in a relatively conventional pursuit of sustained theatrical illusion. Throughout his early period Beckett experimented within inherited theater practice. He hugged the walls of his atrophied theatrum mundi, exploring the limitations of his environment, testing for chinks in...

pdf