". . . imagine! . . . what position she was in! . . .": Revealing the Female Form in Samuel Beckett's Not I

In Samuel Beckett's 1972 play Not I, an actress whose mouth is tightly and exclusively lit delivers a rapid, incessant, long stream-of-consciousness monologue as the protagonist Mouth. Mouth undergoes a desperate struggle to articulate a traumatic narrative of female identity, all the while "vehement[ly] refus[ing] to relinquish the third person" as Beckett describes it, seemingly incapable of acknowledging that the narrative is indeed her own (Beckett 405). She avoids saying "I" during five marked moments of crisis in which her monologue becomes a question and answer with an unheard interlocutor: ". . . what? . . . who? . . . no! . . . she! . . ." (406, 408, 411, 412, 413). The staging of Not I requires Mouth to be suspended eight feet above stage level, upstage and audience right, "faintly lit from close-up and below" with the rest of her face and body obscured in darkness (405). For most of the piece the audience stares intently at the pinprick of light that Mouth occupies at the back of the large, dark stage.

In Enoch Brater's article "The 'I' in Beckett's Not I" (1974), he explains how this staging affects the play: "if we concentrate too steadily on Mouth, we begin to discern in the stage darkness the actress behind the Mouth" (195). Brater's comment alludes to the phenomenon of dark adaptation in the human eye. Our eyes can reach a certain level of dark adaptation—the process by which eyes adjust to enable further vision in dim lighting—in approximately five to nine minutes, although full adaptation takes approximately twenty minutes (Kalloniatis and Luu). Brater's assessment of the stage lighting suggests that, in Not I, if audiences focus on Mouth for an extended period, their eyes can start to adapt to the dark, begin to penetrate the darkness of the stage, and potentially see the blacked-out figure of the performer. That level of dark adaptation would essentially undo the effect of a floating and disembodied mouth upon which Beckett's play entirely relies. In this essay, I attend to the darkness that so frames Mouth and its effects on spectators. What role, I ask, does darkness have on the play's presentation of female experience, and how have different productions used darkness as a staging technique to shape audiences' views of Beckett's disembodied protagonist?

Lighting was (and is) a principal concern for the staging of Not I; to be more specific, the absence of lighting was a sticking point for Beckett and early productions of the piece. At the first Royal Court production of Not I in 1973, for instance, Billie Whitelaw remembers the impenetrability of the darkness in the theatre. It extended beyond a darkened stage to include the entire theatre space: "we killed all the lights, we broke all the rules, and took the lightbulbs out of the exit lights and took the lightbulbs out of the ladies' loo-lights because people tried to escape into the loo" (1990, n.p.). This left Mouth on the stage as the primary focal point for audiences, an anchor in the dark, as Beckett intended.

While Beckett and his directors never specifically mention "dark adaptation" as motivation in their staging and lighting of Not I, I see a central tension in the way the play develops technical (staging) and verbal (in Mouth monologue) lighting in relation to the disembodied female body. For example, Beckett also added the figure of Auditor to the play:¹ a hooded figure who stands "fully faintly lit" downstage left and diagonally positioned from the upstage right Mouth (Beckett 405). Auditor never speaks, only making slight arm movements at the first four intervals of Mouth's denial [End Page 97 ] of the first person. The dimly lit presence of Auditor and, more importantly, the small gestures Auditor makes create a distraction from Mouth at crucial moments in her narrative. Audiences shift their attention from the small, far-away Mouth to the larger and closer figure. In this fleeting moment of distraction, the eye is forced to change its level of dark adaptation. The eye can relax its...