Eye

In my view, Beckett’s stage works since Play are ghost-plays, hauntings, their spectral quality lying at the heart of their power. What the spectator sees appears to come swimming out of blackness, near yet far, floating yet fixed, obsessively present in the manner of visions and nightmares. To achieve this quality requires control of darkness and light. Darkness in these late, short works is, I suggest, of a different order than the normal theatrical blackout. Darkness here is part of the weave of the work, the most important single element of the image. It should be as absolute as can be managed. Darkness at this level becomes a form of sense deprivation. Its effect is to cancel the group existence of theater; to cancel the awareness of surrounding space, to throw the spectator into a physical void, and thus to create in the spectator a psychological dependency on the image that finally appears. If that image, then, is itself disturbing, unbalancing, assaultive, or recessive, the spectator topples into a world of nightmares, will-less to resist, on the edge of sanity.

The image that finally appears is spectral, wraithlike – from the floating heads and funeral urns in Play, to the floating mouth in Not I, to the lower-body apparition in Footfalls, to the white heads and hands in Ohio Impromptu, to the residual skull in Rockaby. These images immediately reinforce the assault on reason: the heads in Play appear and disappear with bewildering speed and randomness; the mouth in Not I, eight feet off the ground and thus decisively dematerialized from any possible connection to a human form, seems to move around in a kind of optical illusion, although it is in fact quite fixed; the rocker in Rockaby starts to rock on its own, silently, without apparent human agency. All of these images float. All are white or gray, except for the red of the mouth in Not I. Finally, all are fixed, with a fixedness that goes far beyond their fixedness onstage. They have the force of the unchanging, the eternal, there before the light finds them, there after the light departs, there as in nightmares, with no beginning and no end.

In the effort to summon such dreadful ministers – in rehearsals, in design sessions, in private communings – the production team begins to intuit their sources of power. Our quotidian nightmares attack us when we are most vulnerable – in sleep, in exhaustion, depression, or weakness. Therefore, to successfully subvert an alert and normally sanguine theater audience Beckett’s ghosts must first create states of susceptibility. As already suggested, the ghost’s first great weapon is its inky domain, a blackness that, if held long enough, will destroy time, place, and community and force each spectator into herself. Abetting inwardness and further loosening her grip on reality is her inability to ground the image. Her eye cannot find its source or complete its outline. Even such apparently solid objects as the rocker or the white table and chairs fade into the night, their lower parts invisible, they and their occupants suspended in dim and fitful light. Light, in turn, intensifies destabilization by offering the viewer little comfort or guidance. Beckett light does not shape action, define space, cue mood change, or focus meaning; nor does it collaboratively lead the viewer through the work’s ebb and flow, beginnings and endings. Not only does it not help the viewer to receive, respond to, or understand the image; it seems to have no source outside the image. It seems, in fact, to emanate from the image toward the viewer, rather than the reverse. The result is that Beckett’s ghosts glow in the dark, dimly or blindingly, and when they cease to glow one is left with the near certainty that they are still there, near us, always with us, capable of reappearing at any moment, as in Play and Footfalls they do.

Brought low by radically original and ruthlessly assaultive treatments of darkness and light, the viewer now drifts into timeless realms. The burning image begins to be felt as unshakable. Time stops. Pressed in by a seemingly endless and hellish present, the viewer is without control, without rescue, desperate for rest but unable to wake up. This experience, of course, exactly mirrors the experience of the performer, of the anonymous (and usually partial) being ghosting the performer, of the “he” or “she” ghosting that being, of the whispers, rustles, and murmurs ghosting the “he” or “she,” and so on across “all the dead voices” to the beginning of time. I shall return to some of the implications of this extraordinary equation. For now perhaps it is enough to dwell briefly on one other aspect of the image, as I see it.

It is intellectually nonconvertible. By this I mean that it cannot be understood, and thereby denatured, with reference to something else. The image does not enter, exit, move, change, interact with other images, or partake of larger symbolic visual patterns. It does not draw from our image bank or our well of cultural memory and so cannot be assimilated to visual habit or tamed through visual association. By forcing confrontation with itself and nothing else, it defeats meaning. It is just there. It is.

Ear

So far I have spoken only of the visual image in Beckett’s later short plays. The sonic image is, if anything, even more problematic and terrifying than the visual, grounded in silence as the visual is in darkness – the silence both a threatening presence and a palpable absence, again destroying communion, concentrating being, yawning like a pit, creating extreme anxiety, and giving the sound that finally breaks it a mythological force. These sounds tend to be one of two kinds. Like the visual image, the sonic image is either assaultive or recessive. Sound is either used in furious and relentless attack, as a kind of racing, dazzling, shrieking, laughing, mesmerizing logorrhea, or it is used as a receding presence, an evanescence, a slow, quiet, even, toneless murmur, like the wraiths that twist through grief-stricken dreams, leaving traces on the heart but not on the memory.

Sound coalesces into language, and the language is of the simplest kind – unliterary, stripped of rhetoric, without metaphysics, with barely a nod to the great tradition, uninterested in ideas or ideals. In concrete words of one or two syllables the plays speak of love lost, love never gained, abandonment, death, the search for self, the torment of consciousness, childhood memories, the yearning for rest. But Beckett asks his performers to speak of these things without expressed feeling, and I would now like to offer a few thoughts on his request.

“Voices toneless.... Rapid tempo.” This direction, for Play, also sets the pattern for the works that follow it. Beckett’s wishes are not always made clear on the page; sometimes they have to be discovered from the production history. In every case, however, it becomes apparent that the voice the audience hears, whether live or taped, is to speak faster than normal or slower than normal and is to remain – brief, specified moments excepted – “toneless” or “expressionless.” I think the success of the plays depends on these directions being respected. Whether one agrees with this view or not, it is undeniable that such drastic limitations evoke anxiety in performers, shock in audiences, and confusion in critics, perhaps because they fly in the face of the central performance tradition of Western theatre, the expressive actor.

The first comment I would make about imperatives such as “expressionless” and “toneless” is that they are less absolute and less lucid than they seem. Just as no person can rest a perfectly neutral gaze on another’s face, no speech can be perfectly toneless, if only because there are two subjectivities involved. Similarly, rapid and slow are elastic terms. In order not to lose itself in a maze of seemingly equally valid rehearsal choices, the production team must therefore ask itself what these rather clumsy directions are trying to achieve.

As more productions have emerged and our experience with these plays has grown, the answer to this question becomes clearer. I think that Beckctt is moving toward a treatment of sound-as-image that will exactly parallel and complement the visual image that each play sets before us. Sound-as-image should be distinguished from the notion of text-as-music, commonly used to describe Beckett’s language. The latter carries with it overtones of cost-free eroticism, and, while eros is amply present in these works, it is not cost free, nor does it stem from a direct response to the performer’s voice but, rather, from the sense of surrender that the inescapability of the work, as a whole, compels in the spectator. In my view the core purpose of Beckett’s use of sound is to strike ear and brain with a sonic image as hard, fixed, and relentless as the visual image that accompanies it. Sound becomes an icon.

To realize the icon the performer’s verbal delivery must acquire three characteristics: it must become an abstraction; it must be felt as possessing enormous magnitude; and it must cancel the audience’s sentimental response to individual suffering. Sonic abstraction is achieved in one of two ways: through delivery so constantly rapid that it is initially unintelligible (Not I, Play) or through an even, unchanging rhythm slightly slower than normal (Footfalls, Ohio Impromptu, Rockaby). Magnitude is achieved more variously: the assaultive amplification in Not I; the unlocalized voice from the dark that becomes a racial memory of loss and desire; the instantaneous, puppetlike response to the demonic light in Play; and, in several works, the stillness and catastrophic silences that make us cling to sound as to a lifeline. Finally, even as the spectator begins to understand and react to the ghastly human story bleeding through each work’s formal brilliance, the icon’s relentless rhythms and underinflected voice enforce distance, reject sympathy for the speaker’s plight (strictly, for the plight of the creature the speaker is describing), and so turn grief that is flowing toward the stage back upon the sender. In the process, sound-as-image/sound-as- icon desentimentalizes, universalizes, and focuses suffering, and therefore the awareness of suffering, away from a particular and perhaps dismissible life onto the life that each of us holds most precious, that each of us is condemned to live.

Once these essential structural dynamics are intuited in rehearsal it is not difficult for director and performer to arrive at decisions about intonation and tempo. A key to such decision-making is the gradual awareness, more instinctive than deductive, that the scripts are misleading us by asking for a negativity in the performer – absence of expression/tone – whereas what Beckett is after is a positive and active creation, a mask of diamondlike hardness, brilliance, depth, and mystery.

The type of alienation achieved by this mask is, in my view, entirely original in the history of our medium. Unlike Brecht’s distancing devices, which gather strength in proportion to the clarity and breadth of social vision and judgment they solicit from the viewer, Beckett’s masks lead us inexorably inward and downward into darkness and personal chaos. How this sense of chaos is achieved I will speculate on in a moment. For now it is enough to see that, by first using image and narrative to invite sympathy for human distress and then, by formal means, blocking the release of that emotion, Beckett locks the spectator to his own consciousness. The spectator falls into a kind of horrified trance, trapped in a world not of his making but one in which he is absolutely implicated.