Light, Sound, Movement, and Action in Beckett's Rockaby

Light, Sound, Movement, and Action in Beckett's Rockaby ENOCH BRATER Rackaby,.which had its world premiere performance in Buffalo, New York on 8 April 1981, continues Beckett's recent preoccupation with a small-scale play written specifically for a prerecorded voice in conflict with live stage action. A strange mixture of the carefully controlled and the spontaneous, the drama, whose sole protagonist is a woman dressed in black and whose only scenery is a rocking chair, restricts its subject matter and directs our attention instead to the formal elements of the playas performance. Light, sound, movement, and action therefore must be understood within the context . established by this deliberately circumscribed stage space, an acting area in which a single image is expressed, explored, and advanced. Clear, articulate, definite, and precise, the visual impact becomes progressively haunting in its lonely simplicity. Simultaneously remote yet urgent in its personal appeal, a human shape is transfixed by the strong and pitiless light of a cold lunar glare. Much is made out of almost nothing. What Rackaby gives up in breadth it makes up in fineness. The closely valued harmonics in the interplay ofall that is visual and verbal, the use oflight, the rocking ofa chair that is controlled mechanically, the function ofmovement to emotionalize meaning, and the incorporation of electronics in the form of a magnetic recording tape are developed tactfully and richly. Beckett has employed elements of this strategy before, most notably in the two plays immediately preceding Rackaby, ThaI Time and Foaifalls. Yet the technique crafted here has its roots much earlier in his repertory. As far back as All ThaI Fall, the radio play written in 1956 "to come out of the dark,'" Beckett experimented with the purity of sound as something uniquely recorded, an art, as the Italian futurist Marinetri predicted, that will imitate electricity. Beckett was in Paris when All ThaI Fall was broadcast on BBC. Across the English Channel, he could hear it only poorly. He then wrote to the BBC Radio Drama Division in London asking for a tape of the show. This was soon followed by Beckett's Rockaby 343 another letter requesting an instruction manual on how to operate a tape recorder.' The rest is familiar history: Krapp's Last Tape had its primary inspiration in a situation not so much romantic as it was mechanical and technological. Although in Krapp's Last Tape Beckett had found a practical stage device for demonstrating the past's effect on the present as well as the present's commentary on the past, he did not in that work concern himself with the physical materialization ofthe inner voice central to so much ofhis writing. It is not until another play for radio, Embers, and especially his work for television, plays like Ehloe and more recently Ghost Trio and ... but the clouds ... , that inner voices achieve electronic audibility in performance. Yet the voices we hear in these media, typically (though not always) signified by a dynamic switch in gender, are clearly not the protagonist's own. In radio and television Beckett's characters are usually obsessed by voices heard as identifiably "other." 3 It is only in Beckett's new work for the theater that voice and protagonist finally become one. In order to understand what is new in Rockaby there are some additional distinctions which must be made. In Footfalls, a play, like Rockaby, which features a female protagonist, May engages in a formalized duet with her mother's voice (another m-"other" = "mother"), even though the dramatic development ofthis work consists in demonstrating how these two voices come to resemble each other. In That Time, on the other hand, an "Old whiteface" hears but does not seem likely to control voices A, B, and C, which are, as the stage directions indicate, "his own comingfrom both sides andabove."4 Unlike May, a faint though by no means invisible "tangle ofpale grey tatters,"S a head suspended in space is by no means a complete human figure, surrealistic overtones and relationships to Not I notwithstanding. And unlike May, the fragmentary and disembodied Listenerof That Time does not talk, though he is, of course, a heavy breather...