The Plays of Samuel Beckett PDF
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THE PLAYS OF SAMUEL BECKETT Katherine Weiss is an Associate Professor of English at East Tennessee State University. She and Seán Kennedy are the editors of Samuel Beckett: History, Memory, Archive published in 2009 by Palgrave Macmillan. Additionally, she provided the notes and commentary to Methuen Drama’s student edition of Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth (2010) and has published several articles on Samuel Beckett and Sam Shepard, among other modern and contemporary playwrights. In the same series from Methuen Drama: THE THEATRE AND FILMS OF MARTIN MCDONAGH by Patrick Lonergan THE PLAYS OF SAMUEL BECKETT Katherine Weiss Series Editors: Patrick Lonergan and Erin Hurley Methuen Drama Methuen Drama First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Methuen Drama Methuen Drama, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Methuen Drama Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP www.methuendrama.com Copyright © 2012 by Katherine Weiss The rights of the editor to be identified as the editor of these works have been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 ISBN: 9781408145586 Available in the USA from Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 175 Fifth Avenue /3rd Floor, New York, NY 10010. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Caution This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means --- graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval systems --- without the written permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. CONTENTS Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 1 The Stage Plays 14 Waiting for Godot 15 Endgame 26 Krapp’s Last Tape 31 Happy Days 39 Play 47 Come and Go 53 Footfalls 57 Conclusion 64 2 The Radio Plays 66 All That Fall 67 Embers 74 The Old Tune 79 Words and Music, Cascando, Rough for Radio I, Rough for Radio II 87 Conclusion 95 3 The Teleplays 97 Eh Joe 98 Ghost Trio 104 . . . but the clouds . . . 110 Nacht und Träume 117 Quad 123 What Where 127 Conclusion 134 v 4 Critical Perspectives 135 Xerxes Mehta Ghosts: Chaos and Freedom in Beckett’s Spectral Theatre 135 Nicholas Johnson A Spectrum of Fidelity, an Ethic of Impossibility: Directing Beckett 152 Graley Herren Beckett on Television, Beckett on Love: A Response to 165 Badiou Dustin Anderson Krapp’s Last Tape and Mapping Modern Memory 178 5 Interviews 193 Wendy Salkind on Not I 194 Bill Largess on Ohio Impromptu 204 Wendy Salkind, Peggy Yates and Bill Largess on Play 210 Sam McCready on That Time and Ohio Impromptu 224 Conclusion 236 Notes 239 Chronology of selected events, performances and publications 261 Further reading 271 Index 278 Credits 286 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to the Department of Literature and Language at East Tennessee State University and, especially, to Dr Judith Slagle, the department’s chairperson, for the support provided to research this book. I would like to thank Ashley Fox for her help with transcribing the interviews and other laborious tasks I asked of her. Additionally, I extend my gratitude to my students at ETSU for their classroom discussions that helped to make this book possible. I gratefully acknowledge the funding I received by the Research Development Committee (RDC) at ETSU. The support of the RDC made it possible for me to travel to Stuttgart, Germany, to dig through the Südwestrundfunk (SWR) archives and to travel to Baltimore, Maryland, to interview Wendy Salkind, Sam McCready, Bill Largess and Peggy Yates. Special thanks to Xerxes Mehta who helped me set up the interviews with the Baltimore actors, who advised me on the interview questions and who provided captions to the photographs in this book. Thanks to the SWR archives and the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading, UK. My gratitude goes to Drs Matthew Roudané, Elizabeth Weiss and Tom Laughlin for their willingness to listen to and comment on my ideas for the book. This book is dedicated to Dr Jutta Brederhoff, whose friendship and mentorship mean more to me than words can express. vii This page intentionally left blank INTRODUCTION Samuel Beckett began his career as a poet and novelist in the late twenties. However, it is his theatrical work, in particular his first performed stage play, Waiting for Godot, that brought him world recognition. Originally conceived of in French as En attendant Godot, Beckett’s play was not seen by its first audience until 1953, four years after its completion. The difficulty in finding a stage for this remarkable play was undoubtedly the result of both post-war economics and the challenges the play asks of its performers, directors and stage technicians. Waiting for Godot, more than any other play before its première, challenges the conventions of theatre, and does so without a clear political aim. Beckett had no manifesto, no aim to get his intellectual audience to discuss the current political issues as do the plays of the German dramatist, Bertolt Brecht. Despite often being labelled apolitical by scholars and students, Beckett was deeply involved in fighting the political injustices of his time. He was staunchly against censorship as is evident in his 1934 essay, ‘Censorship in the Saorstat’. Moreover, he was opposed to injustices carried out against any group of people. While travelling through Germany in the thirties, Beckett was all too aware of the Third Reich’s political tyranny. By studying the diaries Beckett kept during his travels through Germany, Mark Nixon and James McNaughton have shown that Beckett often ridiculed German authorities.1 Later, he joined the French Resistance, ‘translating, collating, editing and typing out scraps of information brought in by agents about German troop movements, information which was then microfilmed and smuggled out of France’.2 In recognition of his important work with the Resistance, the French government awarded Beckett the Croix de Guerre3 and the Médaille de la Reconnaissance.4 His involvement in politics continued throughout his life, as is evident in his 1982 play Catastrophe, dedicated to the Czech writer Václav Havel, who was under house arrest for his advocacy of free artistic expression. 1
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