Beckett’s Stage Directions

… I have seen no production of Play or any work written after it that has been improved by a significant departure from the writer’s wishes. The reason for this, in my view, is unique to late Beckett, unique to the nature of these particular works. While directors and performers have no option but to respond freshly and personally to any script, they encounter in these scripts formal and structural devices that are, as far as I know, entirely new in the history of theater. The central difference, as I see it, is that in theater as we have known it so far, including Beckett’s own before Play, reality onstage is coextensive with reality offstage, the reality of the world, whereas in late Beckett reality onstage is itself and nothing else, sealed off from the world. Characters do not enter from somewhere and leave to go somewhere else; stage space does not connect in mind’s eye with the world’s space; stage sight and sound are not experienced as fragments of, referents to, or even symbolic stand-ins for, the sights and sounds of the world. On the contrary, the visual and sonic images that appear in late Beckett seem to me to be the first wholly successful examples in theater of the great modernist project: to make art that, in formal terms, is not about life but, rather, in Flaubert’s words, “about nothing but itself.” These images – parts of the human body, light, darkness, sound, silence – appear to us as flat, opaque, nonreferential, defiant of interpretation and void of meaning. They are simply and completely present, sealed with the audience in the here and now.

If one accepts this view, its most obvious implication is that the stage directions, which solicit the images, are the play and that a director or performer who adds to, subtracts from, or alters them in any appreciable way is not tinkering with interpretation but, rather, creating something different, not by Beckett. So, certain prerogatives are undeniably sacrificed. However, far profounder in my view than such a loss of freedom are the new freedoms Beckett offers in exchange, freedoms that flow from the type of interdependence between performer and spectator that he enforces, an interdependence that I think has no parallel in modern theater and that lies not only at the core of these works but at the core of theater itself.

Implicated in an emotional field of suffering, loss, terror, and death – denied release of those feelings, stripped of character, stripped of identity, stripped even of the act of imitation, yet condemned to remain exposed in front of another – the performer lives only through the spectator. Hallucinatedly fixed on shimmering ghosts, forbidden understanding by self-consuming narratives, cut off from community by darkness or silence, unbalanced by the sub-rosa treachery between sight and sound, prevented from thinking through, with, or about the work, denied any form of message, extractable idea, or separable content, locked to the image in an inescapable embrace, the spectator lives only through the performer.