In Play and Not I, in the composition involves a narrative that is delivered under constant pressure, both of time and, brilliantly conceived, of reception. In either instance there is a formulation of the actual pressure that every actor feels, in which ultimately every aspect of the performance is subject to acceptance by the audience. Both plays introduce via the actor the criticism of the narrative as it is being delivered. This reflects equally the tentative nature of the rehearsal as it is carried forward into performance. The spotlight that actually provokes and cuts the narrative in Play has the physical effect of disrupting or disappointing the player. This contrasts with the conventional idea of drama, in which the unrestrained expression of personal feeling and experience is thought to be dramatic when it is, in fact, lyrical. Here the account is scarcely begun, but the performance is interrupted, either by the spot leaving the face, in Play, or by the “inner voice” arresting the flow, in Not I.   This leads to a structure of action, resistance, and reaction within the performer, whereby he experiences the space and time of the theater as charged with significance. It is axiomatic now that this is directly felt by the audience by the operation of empathy, and this invests the time and space of performance with its fundamental capacity to act as a medium of symbolic performance.

Again let me remark that no possible idea can intervene to suggest that the actor imitates. Whichever Beckett role one considers, an examination of the physical, temporal, and mental constraints reveals ways in which the actor encounters and experiences his actions played out in the medium of the lived environment of raw space and time. The austerity of the procedure produces an absolute truth of experience. This is the feeling of life, augmented and pinned down so acutely as to assume that value of a determined artistic symbol. If “meaning” is thought unclear because we imitate no given observation or particular occasion taken from mundane life, this is of no importance. Such meanings establish superficial resemblances that leave the existential fundamentals as obscure as ever. In this respect Pinter is quite right when he asks whether the character that can deliver a lucid account of a life is not surely a frightening and inhuman construct, being endowed by the writer with the capacity to explain the meanings and conditions of the individual existence, which no human possesses. The actual condition of life is to search for meaning; plays in which meanings are easily explained and demonstrated, above all by directors, ought to alarm us. Viewed from this standpoint, interpretations that emerge clearly by critics, of the external resistance being “part of the fiction” seems to me irrelevant, or at least insufficiently specific to the processes of performance to admit of a sensible answer. The actor is called on to go through a process of confabulation with the apparent object of telling “how it was.” The rehearsed blocks and the outside inquiry they represent is not “invented” by the actor, nor does she imitate a person who is interrupted. She is interrupted. She responds, and another block interrupts her response.

This process is comparable to the effects in Play in which narrative is subject to a combined internal rhythmic interruption and the cuing of the outside light. The combination is particularly difficult and imposes a horrific responsibility on the operator of the traveling spot, which provokes the continuation of the three narratives. If there is any serious hesitation in this, the fourth performance, the three actors are left physically heaving with effort and unable to play. From a simple professional point of view Beckett’s invention takes up an important aspect of acting and elevates it to the status of a dramatic metaphor. For every actor the spontaneous and sensitive response to cues is part of a creative technique: action deriving from the dramatic context prevailing at the time and the forms of action earlier played. Beckett isolates the phenomenon, and one sees the cue as an evident event in the delivery of a text that aspires to recollect the past. The effect is to throw the actor into the present and onto a crux in which he cannot ever know that the text is such and such but, instead, must know how it goes at a given point through the operation of the bodily forms of speech.

Such effects demonstrate the integrity of Beckett’s conception and invite the director to assume some of his traditional functions. The professional way to know a text is to do it, and, as the doings proceed, the structural implications emerge. The director must identify the physical and mental struggles of the artistic personality engaging in the ritual examination of itself. Like the musical director in performance, the theater director in rehearsal must integrate himself with the performers, the so- called interpretation emerging as the form of the playing. In the concert hail results are achieved organically at the point of playing by the empathic participation of the conductor. The musical soloist both responds to the execution of demanding musical passages by adopting physical forms and also discovers the significance of such physical experience. Moreover, in an intriguing way the musician is “characterized” by these various efforts. In all this the conductor empathically accompanies. If one can dissociate the dramatic director from the fictions in his head, the comparison becomes clear, lie shapes dramatic form by attending to its necessary disposition in performance and by aiding in the realization of what is innate in the actor’s work.

The resistance of the Beckett “character” to being treated as a naive imitation of an imagined person is strong evidence of what we, in fact, expect of the performer: that the human self is questioned through a process of action. The fiction is no more than the creative hypothesis, the equivalent of the sonneteer’s “Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day?” It is certainly not a magical world to be transferred to the stage. The implications for the performer are rigorous. Terrifying aspects of stage performance are no longer to be glossed over: the invasive sense of personal exposure; the embarrassment of physical and spatial life; the sense of time passing and the demand for action; the threat of meaninglessness and breakdown. This is the stuff that make the structures of experience and the structures of Beckett’s quintessentially existentialist drama. All drama carries the threat of performance, but more often than not the loose fictive world of the play coaches the actor’s responses and preserves the sense of integration without which the performance cannot proceed. Beckett writes plays that make states of disintegration performable and then calls on the actor to play out the disintegrating self in the full apprehension of a personal collapse.

The role, then, becomes the occasion of the purest expression of a human dilemma, as the hunt for explanations draws the mind into a consciousness of the ultimate folly of the enterprise and of the temporary nature of the structures that hold the inquiry together and avert disaster. Following my actors I have witnessed the real process of acting, which starts and ends with the actor’s self. It involves the careful synthesis of the role out of the actions of the drama and the realization that these are played as an artistic process that cannot immediately reintegrate the actor as “another,” a character. As rehearsal proceeds, the disintegrative effect of the role has to be accepted and the conditions for its reintegration built up from within. Gradually, the inner coherence of the role establishes itself. It is the director’s job to know how this happens, because the performer develops a fragmentary experience of the life of the role. The completion of this effect gives the coherence of a process of symbolic composition, a symbolic reintegration of the personality. This is entirely different from the creation of a spurious emotion that gives the impression of a change.

The sense of the individuality of the performer is extremely powerful, and it is, I think, the reason why occasionally Beckett’s acting style is likened to that of Brecht and discussed as a species of alienation. I am never too happy about this, but I understand why the comparison should be made. The reason is to be sought in the inability of many actors and most critics and directors to get away from characterization as a sort of fantastic transubstantiation out of the real self. The true mode of acting in any style requires the exposure of the self to the experience of the actions of the self and a confrontation with the embedded knowledge that results. Beckett’s unerring artistic sense not only seizes upon the fundamentals of drama but focuses performance itself as the source of a dramatic inquisition into the forms of life.