Marek Kędzierski

Texts for Performance :
Samuel Beckett's late works and the question of dramatism, performability and genre .

In Dublin , last October, strangely enough, I found myself in the position of an advocate of Beckett the playwright against Beckett the prose writer. In the seminar held on the final day of the Beckett Festival, appropriately entitled "Beckett's Legacy", two speakers predicted that -against the now prevailing sentiment- Beckett's prose would become increasingly important to posterity and eventually eclipse his drama. Two things occurred to me instantaneously. Firstly, that to a reader of Beckett's French Trilogy the prose of Ill Seen Ill Said probably seems more alien than to someone reading -or seeing on stage- A Piece of Monologue . And that both Beckett's late prose and late drama could be viewed as texts equally dramatic, when compared to En attendant Godo t (or un-dramatic if you prefer). Secondly, that his prose is dramatic to a comparable degree to which his late drama may be labelled non-dramatic.

We know that Beckett himself wanted to keep the genres separate and that he opposed a great many projects of staging his prose or radio plays. But we also know that he endorsed -actively, as the people involved claim- many other projects which implied changing genres. True, he often did it through weakness of heart, being too generous to refuse friends his permission; clearly, he was not satisfied with many such adaptations. Yet, at the same time, he wasn't satisfied with many stagings of his strictly dramatic works, either. But fortunately, his was, above all, a pragmatic mind, and occasionally he himself engaged in transferring his work into another genre (e.g. the German TV version of What Where ).

Let us take the example of A Piece of Monologue , the text of which was included in his volume of plays. Among these, it seems strikingly undramatic. Its static stage business vaguely (and only in part) doubles -or should one rather say follows- the words (story line of the narrative). Those who have studied the manuscripts at Reading University know that A Piece of Monologue literally was born of the [textual] body of Compan y - a prose work. That Company can be staged with theatrical effectiveness no lesser than that of A Piece of Monologue has been proven by Pierre Chabert's and Stanley Gontarski's adaptations. The situation described in Company shows great affinity with That Time , a dramatic work which stages the concept of a voice from the past coming to one in the dark, which is what Company is about. Speaking of That Time , Beckett has remarked that "it is on the edge of what is possible in the theatre".

A good staging of That Time and A Piece of Monologue makes for a profound theatrical experience in the same way watching the text of Ill Seen Ill Said or Company performed does. On the other hand, doing A Piece of Monologue without the stage business is entirely possible. Indeed, David Warrilow, on a variety of occasions "merely read the text", eventually with a companion piece like Stirrings Still - which was enough for a complete evening of Samuel Beckett.

Indeed, the play A Piece of Monologue is Beckett's own adaptation of a text that had been written as prose and later shaped to fit the stage needs of Warrilow. And Beckett shows here how to "adapt" prose for stage - he makes it performable in a relatively simple way. His method in this case is not to try to recreate the dramatic within the prose, not to create the stage situation out of the narrative, but rather to add a new dimension: to place the prose text within the co-ordinates of the stage. He supplements the text with a specific stage situation. This situation bears a certain resemblance to the one described in the text, a resemblance that cannot be ignored. Yet, what we see on stage does not simply illustrate the scenes from the narrative. The two -stage business and the generated text- remain to a great extent in a contrapuntal relation.

But, of course, illustrating the already written text requires less authorial power than creating the new dimension by writing a non-existent addition to the text. Beckett himself had the authority, no one among the living can claim this power now. This is why stage versions of late works are not likely to flood our theatres.

The impact of a well-produced Piece of Monologue proves that theatricality does not have to go hand in hand with dramatism. In fact, in my view, it is almost a rule that a well-made, carefully presented work by Beckett becomes a theatrical event without having to show a single dramatic occurrence. By the same token, most of the non-dramatic texts, when presented by skilled actors, become a theatrical event.

When asked for permission for a public presentation of a non-dramatic work, Beckett was almost always ready to endorse it on the condition that it be done "without dramatisation", the usual suggestion being "a simple reading". Beckett's late works rely on the power of the text to create striking images which are intensified by what we see on stage. Performed on stage, but not necessarily something with dramatic impact.

In my view, most of Beckett's late dramatic works are, to a great extent, audiovisual projections of the Text which in the course of the performance is being generated on stage, often strenuously, in elaborate patterns. What takes place on stage is the Text being made to appear in space and time. The figures on stage are primarily embodiments of such projections. If in Beckett's drama the whole stage microcosm stands for an individual consciousness, then the primary vehicle for the consciousness is the Text. Concerning the nature of the Text which is being generated, there is little difference between the so-called dramatic works and those classified as prose. Their organization may differ in that on stage some of them are more discontinuous.

Thematically, there is a common pattern in both late prose and drama - to put it rather simply, we have to do with a process of intertwining elements pertaining to memory and imagination. In both genres, relations between personae and the author are no sooner established (or rather: suggested) than they are obscured by doubts and incertitudes. It is as difficult to determine the relationship between the speaker and the protagonist as is would would be to draw a line between memory and imagination. While memories fade into figments, the autonomy of the figments and their creative character are obfuscated -and flawed- by memories.

In the late works, we witness Beckett's dearly cherished dream of the end to come coming true, or rather just about to come true. All is calm and almost serene and as in No theatre, everything begins when all has ceased. We witness a séance of quiet contemplation rather than a dramatic event, and see or hear a pale appearance. This quiet contemplation of the place where the Text takes place always has to do with hearing and seeing, or: listening and watching, frequently with the eye and ear turned inward. The lid of the mind close - Beckett says in Dream of Fair to Middling Women . In most of the late works we have a portrait of a solitary visionary, with a fragile corporeal presence and clear suggestions of séance, performance.

Beckett abandoned most of the dramatic support of a theatrical production, leaving only a few physical resources indispensable for an act of performing. The degree of dramatism in the late pieces might vary considerably- with works like Catastrophe and That Time at opposite poles. We should not overlook the tremendous importance of the stage images the stage pieces provide, but, on the whole, theatricality, if not dramatism, remains a great potential of the late prose and can be brought to the fore usually with the help of relatively simple operations, or at least, could have been brought there by the author.

Performing a Beckett text lends it a full dimension which is overlooked in the reading. It makes it possible for the text to have a direct impact on the reader, and not only because it comes in the fullness of articulation (superb masters of voice like Warrilow or Magee have taught us not only how to remember these texts, but also how to understand them in the light of their articulation). The impact is all the greater because we are forced to take the text without interruption. Beckett himself, when speaking of Not I, preferred the physical impact of the unmediated voice over, and even at the expense of, intelligibility.

Throughout Beckett's work, one can detect a persistent yearning. A modernist yearning, we are tempted to say, a yearning for the moment, for one moment of truth, the truth about the nullity of our endeavours, the Beckettian gloom that dawns on the hero in a moment that can reconcile him with and tie him to death. A moment of illumination that redeems the suffering of being. Belaqua's bliss, Murphy's contemplation, Krapp's experience on a jetty, and in later works Amy's "I was not there" in Footfalls , "never the same after that" in That Time and "till in the end/ the day came" in Rockaby , all belongs to this category.

Throughout his entire canon we find examples of the emotional valorization of that privileged moment, especially when it brings back a past experience. In his essay on Proust, Beckett wrote "what is common to present and past is more essential then either of them taken separately". For Proust, the identification of the immediate with past experience brings with itself the promise of time regained. For Beckett, out of the final, fundamental, unadorned experience of time unregained there comes a consolation, a vague promise of relief in the future. We shall be able to accept death more readily.

Once a freshly perceived vision of the past, it now becomes a manifestation of a repetitive and repeated ritual - performed directly on stage or depicted in prose. In order to give the relief, it needs to be articulated and repeated. It is in performance that this pursuit of the unmediated experience frees us from the tyranny of day-to-day reality. For a moment of performing its own truth, it becomes a powerful, if instantaneous, usurpation of reality. But as soon as the pretenses of the immediacy are exposed, both life and art are revealed as "equal liars." "Real and - how ill say its contrary? The counter-poison." The ideal performance is without actors. The ideal performance is without theatre.

David Warrilow, in his account of staging A Piece of Monologue , gives us an interesting example of the opacity of the spoken word that results in the eclipse of the visual. "Dans Solo, j'ai essayé [...] d'avoir un autre aperçu de ce qui est familier, de parler de langue comme si je la découvrais pour la premiere fois. J'ai voulu que mon visage soit caché pour que le public puisse savourer les mots. [I wanted to cover my face so that the audience be able to savour the words.] J'ai cherché a apporter le plus de précision possible a la diction..."

"La diction". I would like to think of Beckett as a Wordman who wants to see to it that his words take place, as in this one sentence in A Piece of Monologue : "Parts lips and thrusts tongue forward. Birth", where in the articulation of the word "birth" the process of birth is reflected, thus equating dictio with action.

This formidable sense of the articulatory aspect of the word accounts for the spell Beckett's texts cast on the imagination of so many actors and directors. It also accounts for the actors' and director' fascination with what was published as prose. Virtually all of Beckett's late works will tempt many to try their hand at performing them. Because they are equally dramatic as "dictio ", in other words, equally performable. And here we should be aware of an important distinction between their dramatism and their performability.

I think that time will show whether texts like A Piece of Monologue will be considered drama in the shape of poetry or poetry in the shape of drama (Enoch Brater).I predict that we will be faced with the following alternative:

If it is drama in the shape of poetry, we are dealing with works which seriously modify our notion of theatricality, with a theatrical form in its own right, the modus existentiae of the drama of the mind (embodied thought). In this case, one might say that, in order to solve his all-time dilemma of how to present the inner reality, Beckett subverts and deconstructs (systematically, so to speak) the principles and categories of our dramatic convention (such as character, dialogue, spacio-temporal referentiality and of course plot).

f it is poetry in the shape of drama, we are dealing with lyrical stage visions, extremely compressed in form and full of universal compassion, mutations of the soliloquy (Andrew Kennedy), wonderfully performable, yet un-dramatic. A last ditch effort to do away with mimesis but one that defies categorization.

Texts for Performance: S.Beckett's late works and the questions of dramatism, performability and genre . Samuel Beckett Festival, The Hague April 1992. Published: Beckett in the 1990s : Selected papers from the Second International Beckett Symposium, held in The Hague , 8-12 April, 1992.

David Warrilow La musique, pas le sens , in: Revue d'Esthétique , numéro special hors série, 1986 p. 253