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Monday, 05 May 2008
Play by Samuel Beckett
According to Ruby Cohn, Samuel Beckett's 1963, 15-minute
Play was the first of his own theatre pieces that he personally
directed, stepping in for the unreliable Jean-Marie Serreau to
oversee rehearsals for a 1964 Paris production (French title:
Comédie). As Cohn notes, it's a key dramatic text in Beckett's
body of work. Abandoned now are the vaudevillian gestures of Waiting
for Godot, Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape and Happy
Days; for the final 25 years of his career, Beckett would work in more
seemingly hermetic lyrical forms, disdaining not only vaudeville but also
the gestures to conventional theatrical time. No longer was Beckett
concerned with the length of his pieces (whether a play would go a full
evening, or as half of an evening of one-act plays). Beckett had
written to director Alan Schneider that Endgame's intended
reception depended on "the power of the text to claw." Beckett
increasingly saw burlesque and comedy as a manicure upon those nails, and
although the later plays and prose have their comic moments, they can no
longer be mistaken for poignant (not with the old woman's curse "Fuck
life" in Rockaby or the unsuccessful torturers of What
Where), or hysterically funny. (I wonder sometimes about this need to turn Beckett into some kind of
hail-fellow-well-met who'd be delightful to share a few
drinks with at a local pub, or to think that the trio of Play is
some version of an existential Three Stooges, as if he never really
intended the darker implications of his work. To each his own, of course,
and I find the stones of Molloy's pockets and the Lynch family of
Watt funny too, but not rolling-on-the-ground,
screaming-with-laughter funny.) Instead, they resemble more the
fictions after The Unnamable, reaching a nadir of blackness with
How It Is before the gentler but still torturous remembrances of
Company.
Play, as its title indicates, is ironically self-conscious
as to its form (the story itself is a melodrama about adultery), and it
was, to date, the most technically ambitious and demanding of Beckett's
career. Anthony Minghella's film adaptation, too, is profoundly
self-conscious as to its medium, and because Roy Walker's production
design and Hauke Richter's art direction helpfully locate the setting in a
gray expanse reminiscent of Gustave Doré's illustrations for Dante's
Inferno and Purgatorio, they are justifiable if unnecessary
graftings onto what is a very plain theatrical vision.
I disagree with Cohn, though, when she asserts, "For all the brilliance
of performers who have to subdue their theatricality, only readers can
appreciate Beckett's dramatic skill in Play. ... Play is not
only to be looked at and listened to, but it is also to be read." Of
course this play, as well as Not I, makes extreme demands upon both
performer and audience when it comes to the communicability of the text,
but this demand is a necessary and sufficient part of the theatrical
experience here, however helpful a familiarity with the text might be. The
demand is a component of the work's urgency. Gone are the pratfalls,
falling trousers and banana peels of Beckett's middle career plays and
novels. We're left now with the use of a can opener (and not the electric or rotary-style can opener
either) in performance of an anal rape (How It Is) and the impulse
to human expression itself as a device of torture (Not I).
Semi-paralyzed bodies that do not or cannot move cannot comically
fall; instead they embody souls for whom the fall into damnation is far
from comic.
More on Samuel Beckett here.
Posted at 9.01 am in /Videos
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