Do we grade Beckett's plays on a curve? I teach Beckett--have done so off and on for years--and run into a basic problem: that I feel I can explain what's going on in about an hour's class, and then am left bereft of other things to say about it. This isn't really a criticism. I will watch Godot over and over again, although what I find myself telling people who don't know the playwright is that you go for things that have nothing to do with why you go to the theatre much of the time. You go to be bored; you go to zone in and out of focus, while nothing happens; you go to have a few doofy laughs, as trousers fall down and hats are exchanged. No-one, whether they realize it or not, starts with Beckett fresh. Beckett looks and sounds like what parodic drama in a sitcom, say, looks like: the bare stage, the opacity, the willed difficulty. Teaching it, you hear yourself saying Little Mr. Professor things: you spend a lot of time talking about the thinginess of the thing--the theatricality of the theatre--rather than, you know, actually describing anything. The ad copy for this falls into the same mode, calling it "an extraordinary journey into the heart of Beckett, unlocking his contemporary relevance to gender, identity and the human condition." Fair enough--but you could say that about Eat, Pray, Love, too. What, as it were, does this give you to hold on your mental fork?
The truth is that Beckett isn't new, isn't unlike everything on stage, any more; and hasn't been for much longer than I've been alive. He's one of those writers who has become so much a part of the plumbing of the theatre that he seems not just incomprehensible and boring, but rather incomprehensible and boring in exactly the way everyone expects "difficult" theatre to seem. So I do my little spiel--notice the leaves on the trees, notice the hats, notice the differences with Pozzo--and then I sort of end. I have a harder time making distinctions within his drama: with saying for example what happens, minute to minute, in Godot, beyond the merely factual. The space of this repetition, the time it takes in performance, is part of what seems to me the point; and of course you can't directly teach that time, but can only sort of gesture towards it. So Beckett's plays are a bit like rituals, then? A set of repetitions, pointing to the human love of repetition. My cat's breath smells like cat's food.
This was a new adaptation to the stage of some of Beckett's prose works, delivered amidst Big Startling Sets. And this did indeed sound like more Beckett: you wouldn't mistake this for any other writer. I spent the first couple of pieces sort of fighting to interpret it, as though this were Ibsen or something: is the first piece about an undead body, buried in the ground, as the set (sort of) suggests? Well, fair enough--but then what on earth is the second piece, amidst a bunch of scattered rocks? The production baffled the sort of questions one wants to act about plays: why have four of these pieces--why not two, or seven? The actor's body, bleeding from the waist down, suggested (you can see my desire to say anything non-obvious here) embodiment; the third piece (or was it the second?) suggested a not-yet-incarnated soul thinking about what it would be like to have a body. That seemed to be a consistent concern running throughout the evening. Several of the speakers referred to the passing of seasons--there is, as often in Beckett, the cycling of nature standing as possible progress, but also (perhaps) totally disinterested in human life or our attempts to order it with speech. I swam in and out of being able to follow what was going on, in a sort of meditative fashion.
Many of Beckett's most famous prose pieces--the novels in particular--preset this sort of extreme close focus on characters with little control over their lives, who gradually reveal little crumbs of their surroundings. An unsympathetic reading of this would say that, by taking these prose pieces out of these little madhouse cells, this presentation was doing something mostly needless--indeed, harmful to the material, in the manner of Molloy on Ice. This did indeed wrench Beckett's characters out of their trapped settings and, again, put them up on a great big stage, being delivered by a dynamic performer amidst giant rocks. I don't quite know what to think about this. Certainly, this gave an opportunity for a female performer, something that Beckett's plays are not exactly replete with. I'm just not sure I could finally pull, or start to pull, all of this together; at moments this felt like endless monologues into the void, but only that. This is again one of my points about Beckett that I'm tired about making, since it sounds like back-of-book copy: Beckett's plays are about the hopelessness--but also the necessity--of hope; his characters all speak into emptiness, but he values that speaking; can you guys make sure you only take ten minutes for break?
So, I'm still not what I thought about this. The effect it produced on me afterwards, when I stepped out of the theatre, was to make me feel like all human speech was a bit arbitrary: like we're just sort of saying these things to make conversation, but that it's all (speech? existence?) a bit imprecise and banal. So that's something. At the same time, this also felt, god help me, a bit boring: not good-Beckett-boring, hinting at profundities, but just kind of dull. What was the purpose of the exterior voice in the third piece? Why did the pieces take the amount of time they did, and not less or more time? I was intriguingly, and even agreeably, baffled; but no more.
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