Superfluities Redux

by George Hunka
Artistic director, theatre minima

A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater

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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.