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Tuesday, 22 July 2008
Samuel Beckett: Medium Cool?
Garrett Eisler mulled over the economic presumptions of the Lincoln
Center Festival's Samuel Beckett series at The Playgoer yesterday; it seems that, where
Samuel Beckett is concerned, the stars come out in New York. Lincoln
Center boasts Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes. Last season, of course, there was
Mikhail Baryshnikov in a Beckett evening at the New York Theatre Workshop,
and next season, according to this Theatermania story, Bill Irwin will appear
in a Gerry Hynes-directed Waiting for Godot on Broadway.
In all this, the real news might be the addition of a new play to the
Beckett stage canon – Eh Joe, originally written for
television in 1965. In the past few years there have been no fewer than
three productions of the work onstage: Joanne Akalaitis's production at
the NYTW last season, the current New York staging, and Atom Egoyan's staging with Michael Gambon in the role
of Joe at the Gate Theatre in 2006 (this production the basis for the
Lincoln Center presentation, which Obscene Jester reviewed
yesterday here).
This points to a development in stage technology that permits a
crossover from video to theatre. The original Eh Joe was an
intimate chamber drama, the camera focusing on Joe's face, the
communication one-to-one with the viewer sitting alone at home;
the extreme close-up was impossible to reproduce onstage in 1965.
Now, with real-time video technology and projection methods, the same
intense focus on the character's face can be reproduced onstage, before an
audience of hundreds. The unusual result has been to broaden, ever so
slightly, the Beckett stage canon (and focus attention on the
physiognomies of popular Hollywood, Broadway and West End actors). One
more Beckett stage play, after we thought we'd seen them all? Well, no
harm there, and the addition is welcome.
I wonder, though, whether the progress of technology may have the
effect of rendering some of Beckett's other plays anachronistic. When
Beckett wrote Krapp's Last Tape in 1958, the personal, portable
reel-to-reel tape recorder was a recent enough invention that
Beckett felt the need to obviate the wobbly time scheme of the play (for
Krapp would have been unable to dictate his thoughts into a similar
recorder in 1928) with a stage direction: the play is set during a "late
evening in the future."
Even now, it's unlikely that audiences will come across a portable
reel-to-reel tape recorder anywhere except a stage production of
Krapp's Last Tape; in just a few years, it will be an undeniably
moribund medium, the machine itself less and less recognisable, its place
having been taken up by iPods and digital voice recorders. Seeing
Krapp's Last Tape now, it's just as easy to imagine the play set
during a late evening in the past. How directors and actors approach this
aspect of Krapp's Last Tape will introduce a new, unexpected
dimension to the play's staging and reception. Will it become a period
piece as prone to nostalgic sentiment as second-rate productions of
Chekhov, the tape recorder as polished samovar, or will we have new
approaches to the matter? Thirty years from now, will audiences be buying
tickets to Krapp's Last .mp3?
The status of Beckett's work in a technology-rich theatre, as well
as the rapidly evolving technologies of mass media, has led to a certain
anxiety of genre. The Beckett on Film project captured all 19 of
Beckett's stage plays for film (or high-definition video), but
perversely exempted from the project all of Beckett's work written
specifically for television and film, an odd choice given the very title
of the effort. None of the three stage works at Lincoln Center originated
in Beckett's imagination as stage plays: Barry McGovern presents a staged
reading of portions of the Molloy trilogy, and Fiennes reads
First Love, a short prose work. Although there have been one or two
other productions of Film since the Alan Schneider/Buster
Keaton effort of 1965, few of Beckett's later video plays, like ... but
the clouds (1976) and Nacht und Träume (1982), are readily
available for viewing in any form in the United States, leaving our
conception of his later career quite incomplete.
That Beckett himself was not averse to moving his work from one medium
into another is demonstrated by his own oversight of the film of his 1972
play Not I as well as his permission to Mabou Mines to produce a
stage adaptation of the short novel Company during his lifetime. As
Eh Joe demonstrates, the canon of Beckett's work continues to
challenge theatrical innovators and audiences – a mark of the unique
nature of his work, and an indication that Beckett's modernist stage
practice will continue to infest the postmodern era. As Garrett notes, his
work also challenges the imaginations of the Lincoln Center marketing and
development office; but this is the lesser part of the story.
More on Samuel Beckett here.
Posted at 8.52 am in /Drama
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