A Footnote to Footfalls: Footsteps of Infinity on Beckett’s Narrow Space

A Footnote to Footfalls: Footsteps of Infinity on Beckett's Narrow Space Enoch Brater Footfalls, "a very small play" with "a lot of problems con­ cerning precision,"1 had its world premiere performance on May 20, 1976, as part of a triple bill with Play and That Time at the Samuel Beckett Festival celebrated at the Royal Court Theatre in London. Beckett, who directed the British produc­ tion starrin g Billie Whitelaw as May, staged a new German version several · months later at the Schiller-Theater Werkstatt in Berlin. The English version was performed again that same year at the Kreeger Theatre in Washington, D.C., and late in 1977 Alan Schneider re-interpreted his original American pro­ duction for the Manhattan Theatre Oub in New York. Even after four major productions of this thirty-minute work, Foot­ falls continues ·to aff ect its audiences as a theatricalized enigma. What · are we to make of the seemingly endless pacing . of a female protagonist wearing "the costume of a ghost"2 on the narrow strip of space suddenly illuminated before our eyes? Let us consider for a moment the pure value of the visual element in this play: Beckett projects an image, a moving, lyrical spectacle tracing the footsteps of a lonely human being. The lighting is a major feature in the visual impact; "dim," it is "strongest at floor level, less on body, least on head."3 Beckett's emphasis, as his stage directions imply, is on the "clearly audi­ ble rhythmic pad" of a finite number. of steps on a tiny strip downstage. Uie width is only "one metre, a little audience right," but growing shorter and narrower following each fade­ out. Although footsteps can be heard, no feet are to be ·dis'.' cemed: a "worn grey wrap" enshrouds May quite literally from tOp to toe. The curtain rises slowly; May fades-in before our 35 36 Comparative Drama eyes as "a faint tangle of pale grey tatters." It is her endless pacing and, above all, the sound of her footfalls, which interrupt the silence, stillness, and darkness of the "faint, though by no means invisible" substance of this play. During rehearsals for the Berlin production, Beckett empha­ sized the importance of those footsteps: "The walking up and down is the central image." The script for the play, he continued, was "built up around this picture."4 In the text Beckett puns, asking us to watch "how feat" (neat, dexterous) May "wheels" when she moves "rightabout at L, leftabout at R." Yet our perception of movement depends here on something even more basic than the coordinates Beckett specifies as relative right and relative left. For in Beckett's world movement is often a tricky business. "What ruined me at bottom was athletics," we read in one of his eight recent prose "fizzles."5 Long before this we have been literally overwhelmed by the variety of "funambu­ listic" staggers encountered in his work. In the unpublished l. M. Mime, sketched on two pages from a Herakles notebook, Beckett's two actors begin their progression at a central point on stage.6 The entire action consists of the greatest number of permutations and combinations within the framework of a large square blocked on the same stage floor. "That's not moving," we read in "Whoroscope," "that's moving." Maddy Rooney in All That Fall, Winnie in Happy Days, and Hamm and Clov in Endgame have run (usually in slow motion or in no motion at all) into similar problems. For the direction of movement on Beckett's stage depends not necessarily on left and right, but on the particular vantage point from which it is being perceived. Maddy Rooney's heavy movement is, for example, not seen at all, merely heard: she is a figure in a radio-play ''written to come out of the dark."7 In Footfalls Beckett introduces still another challenge to his audience's power of perception. Observed from our seats in the theater, May's pattern of movement is "parallel with front" and appears to be singularly linear. She moves back and forth, from right to left, "like one of Dante's damned." Metaphorically cir­ cular...