Beckett as Director: The Manuscript Production Notebooks and Critical Interpretation

Beckett as Director: The Manuscript Production Notebooks and Critical Interpretation JAMES KNOWLSON This essay does not attempt to capture the extraordinary fascination, the atmosphere of keen concentration and the unusual "feel" of rehearsals when Samuel Beckett is directing his own plays. It seeks rather to provide an over-view of some of the ways in which Beckett's directorial notes can occasionally initiate, but, more often, assist or confirm critical interpretation. It also sets out to consider how these notes pose some rather taxing problems for the critic who is seeking to make significant use of them. First of all, for those unfamiliar with this material - which is after all for the most part still unpublished 1 - what are these manuscript notebooks? They are notes prepared by Beckett when he is about to direct his own plays; they are consulted by him prior to, but not normally in the course of, actual rehearsals and they are sometimes (though not always) corrected by him in the light of rehearsal changes. They figure, ofcourse, only as a part, although a major one, of the material that is available to anyone working on the topic of Beckett as director of his own plays. The notebooks are numerous, very detailed and, as one would expect, extremely meticulous: "practically Cartesian in [their) organization ofinforrnation and insight" wrote Alan Schneider.2 There are twelve separate notebooks in Reading University Library's Beckett Archive relating to Beckett's own productions of seven different stage plays3 (plus one, Come and Go in Berlin: when Beckett advised the director, Walter Asmus), and of the television play He Joe (Eh Joe) and the televised version of Was Wo (What Where) for Siiddeutscher Rundfunks In addition, at last count there were, in the same collection, eleven texts annotated by Beckett with his various cuts, changes, notes and queries, and guides to himself as director. Of the four plays with which I shaJl primarily be dealing, Beckett has directed Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape and Happy Days several times, but Waiting for Godot only once, until his recent "supervision" of the San Quentin Drama Workshop production, 452 JAMES KNOWLSON directed initially by Walter Asmus, then rehearsed jointly by Beckett and Asmus in London for performance in Australia and Europe.6 In critical writing about Beckett's theatre, the notebooks have so far been used by a mere handful of scholars7 Beckett's director's notebooks are, first and foremost, practical , working notebooks. They deal frequently with precise, immediate problems of staging: the various positions of Estragon and Vladimir in Wailing for Godol vis avis each other, the tree and (in the Schiller Theater and San Quentin productions) the stone; how Pozzo and Lucky should lie when they fall from the vertical; how many paces Clov should take in Endgame when he is "having an idea," or May when she is "revolving it all" in her "poor mind" in Footfalls;and so on. They also identify specific problems for the director, the actors, the lighting engineer or the stage manager: should Clov's response to Hamm's whistle be "instantaneous like jinni to Aladdin or time lag?"g (answer: instantaneous); should the song in Endgame or the hymn in Krapp's LaSI Tape be cut? (answer: recently, yes on both occasions); should the discarding of the mirror be removed from Happy Days? (answer: no); how will the cuts that Beckett wants to make in the parasol text of the same play synchronise with the slow consuming of the canopy? (answer: try it and see). These are a few of the questions that Beckett poses in the pages of the various notebooks and mostly (though again not always) manages to solve after further consideration or following practical trials on stage. But after working very closely on most ofthese notebooks myself- and after reading with profit two excellent chapters on Wailing for Godol and Happy Days in Dougald McMillan and Martha Fehsenfeld's forthcoming book Beckell at Work ill the Theatre - it seems to me that the distinction between practical staging (what has been called "the local situation")9 and issues ofvision, theme and structure is a purely artificial one that for much of the...