Dr David Pattie, Reader in Performing Arts, University of Chester.
Beckett’s Theatre.
Stream: Repetition and Embodiment

Near the end of the printed edition of Beckett’s 1963 theatre piece, Play, there is a famously laconic stage direction: ‘repeat play.’[1] One can imagine the discomfort this direction has caused generations of actors, condemning them as it does to at least twenty more minutes of acute physical discomfort, on their knees, gabbling a text at the prompting of an insistent spotlight. If this was not bad enough, after the first production Beckett instituted a subtle change in the nature of this repeat; the light was to be dimmer, the text to be delivered even more quickly, as the cycle of action the play described began, perhaps, to spiral toward a possible ending. This varied repeat might be difficult for the performers, but it does seem to bring Play into line with other Beckett texts; as Steven Connor argued-
Repetition in Beckett’s work does not just involve the mirroring or duplication of situation, incident and character. From the beginning, repetition has been the dominating principle of his language: repetition of words, of sounds, of phrases, of syntactical and grammatical forms…[Where] repetition begins as a supplementary feature of language, secondary to and derived from the uniqueness of particular utterances, it comes to occupy the centre of his work. Repetition comes to be all there is, the only novelty being the variations in the forms of sameness.[2]

Connor’s study (Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text, Oxford: Blackwell 1988) along with other critical texts from the same period (most notably Stan Gontarski’s The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Works, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1985) has, it is fair to say, established a particular way of reading repetition in Beckett’s work. Repetition is an exercise in practical deconstruction: the repeated text firstly stands next to the original, and then replaces it; in doing so, the repetition wears away at the original, revealing aporias and inconsistencies in what initially appeared to be a seamless whole. The varied repetition of Play shows the carefully constructed mechanism of the play’s first half winding down; an incisive interrogation becomes a routinised exchange of cues and responses, moving ever further away from a finished version of the truth.

Such a reading has a particular place in critical history. I’ve argued elsewhere (2001, 2004) that Beckett’s writing is a useful bellwether for the state of critical discourse both in literature and in the performing arts. His work is sufficiently capacious to function both as an exemplar of last-ditch liberal humanism and as a demonstration of post-modern uncertainty in action: Connor’s reading occurs at the point at which the second of these readings wins out. The late 1980s and the early 1990s were the high-water mark of post-modern Beckett criticism; and, unsurprisingly given the implications of repetition in a post-modern cultural environment, it is not surprising that its position in Beckett’s work should come in for detailed scrutiny. As Connor put it-
…While to a large extent repetition determines and fixes our sense of our experience and representations of that experience, it is also the place where certain radical instabilities in these operations can reveal themselves. It is therefore no accident that Samuel Beckett, the writer who this century has most single-mindedly dedicated himself to the exploration of what is meant by such things as being, identity and representation, should have at the centre of his work so strong and continuous a preoccupation with repetition…[3]

In other words, Beckett operates as a quod erat demonstrandum for certain cherished notions of the death of the auratic, the death of narrative coherence, the erosion of the authentic, the erasure of meaning, and, finally, the death of humanism itself- all because of the inexorable operation of the logic of repetition in his work.

Here, though, it is worthwhile making a commonsensical observation. Connor is not overly concerned about performance: the fact that, in the creation and realisation of a performance, the role of repetition might be rather different (and that Beckett’s work in this medium might reflect this difference) is something that the study does not touch on. Put simply, in performance, repetition is the means by which the original is created. The performance only comes into existence after a period in which the raw material from which it is formed is worked and reworked; each revision- each repetition- obeys the logic that Connor describes above. It is both a fixing of the sense of the material, and a means through which radical instabilities reveal themselves. However, rather than leading toward the inevitable moment of incommensurability, during rehearsal these instabilities are used creatively to form a unique whole; this new reading is then repeated in front of a number of audiences, each time as if it were an original text. Beckett was very aware of this aspect of performance; he had been involved in the original rehearsals for Roger Blin’s Godot at the Theatre de Babylone in 1953, and had taken an increasingly active role in rehearsals of some of his key works in the late 1950s and 60s. Although he did not direct his first play officially until 1966 (The Hypothesis, by his friend Robert Pinget) he had, for example, undertaken most of the directorial work on the London production of Endgame with Patrick Magee and Jack MacGowran in 1964. From 1966 to a few years before his death (the last production wholly credited to Beckett as director in the theatre was a version of Endgame, presented by the San Quentin Drama Workshop in 1980; his last directorial role in any medium was a radically reworked version of the late play What Where for German television in 1986), Beckett amassed considerable experience in directing his own work- and, indeed, it has been argued that in this time he developed a coherent theatrical praxis which bears comparison with any of the canonical directors of the period. From the moment, therefore, that Beckett’s work was first produced, he was intimately involved in the mechanics of their realisation; Beckett scholarship (the series of theatre notebooks edited variously by James Knowlson and Stan Gontarski: the recent study of the production history of Godot by David Bradby; et al) is now able to provide a comprehensive picture of the rehearsal techniques that Beckett employed. Interestingly, these techniques foreground the process of repetition that I have described above: Beckett worked his way through the play in detail before rehearsal, defining in particular a series of repeated actions that would structure the work. This was especially important for Beckett during the 1975 Schiller Theatre production of Godot, generally reckoned (by Bradby et al) to be the most significant of his productions; returning to the text after a long period of immersion in the practical business of staging, Beckett found the original text to be a mess- at least, in his own, exacting opinion; repetition was a way of imposing order on a text that he considered unfinished (at least in comparison to his later work)-
… At the beginning of the play Estragon is struggling to remove his boot. When he finally succeeds, he searches in a puzzled way for foreign bodies which might be lodged inside, but can find nothing. While he is engrossed in this, Vladimir removes his hat (as he later says, ‘it itched me’) and feels around inside, also finding nothing. These two simple actions are repeated throughout the play and seem to echo, in a minor way, the two characters’ fruitless quest for Godot. Beckett’s notebooks show that the movements were designed to echo one another…[4]

It was not that the choices Beckett made before rehearsal were fixed, and the actors simply had to conform to his choreography; rather, they formed the basis for the detailed exploration of the text during the pre-production period. Beckett did discuss the meaning of his texts with his actors, at least, as far as he felt able; but the learning process undertaken during rehearsal was one that based itself firmly on the practical exploration of repetitive movement and delivery. As his most frequent American interpreter, the director Alan Schneider, put it, ‘theatrical truth… is concrete’[5]; for Beckett, to move in rehearsal directly to the physical realisation of the text, and to consider that realisation as a series of varied repetitions, was to engage practically in the creative understanding of the text.

There is a paradox here; on the one hand, it is abundantly clear that the world that Beckett describes tends toward entropy- toward a state in which, to adapt the repeated phrase from Endgame, there is no more. At the same time, to create that world, Beckett and his actors have to work in the opposite direction- from the unrealised text toward a complex, unified and, above all else, a theatrically effective series of actions. In both, repetition plays a crucial role: firstly, it wears away at what seemed to be immutable; secondly, it helps realise and fix the text - at least, as far as this is possible in a performance which, like any other, has to be re-created, apparently ab ovo, each time. In what follows, I will argue that Beckett’s theatre does not resolve this contradiction: rather, his theatre is founded on these two irreconcilable types of repetition- repetition as destruction, and repetition as creation. In fact, his work increasingly comes to resemble a specific part of the production process- one in which the process itself is neatly poised between realisation and fragmentation: a point at which the constituent elements of the production have not attained a final form, but, rather, exist in an unfixed but linked relation to each other.

 

 

 

2.

A: (Gently) Be reasonable, Fox. Stop… jibbing. It’s hard on you, we know. It does not lie entirely with us, we know. You might prattle away to your latest breath and still the one… thing remain unsaid that can give you back your darling solitudes, we know. But this much is sure: the more you say the greater your chances…[6]

A: that time you went back that last time to look was the ruin still there where you hid as a child when was that ([Listeners] eyes close) grey day took the eleven to the end of the line and on from there no no trams all gone long ago that time you went back to look was the ruin still there where you hid as a child that last time not a tram left in the place only the old rails when was that [7]

These two quotes seem to pull in opposite directions: the Auditor in Rough for Radio II holds out to the captive Fox the hope that his experience can finally be said, whereas the first voice in That Time hunts through potential memories that could perhaps be assigned to the listener (whose face hands illuminated above the stage floor) with no suggestion that a final version of the memories it describes will ever be uncovered. The auditor finishes on a confident assertion (the more you say the greater your chances) which seems flatly to contradict the far more tentative voice in That Time, which seems unable to assign any definite status to the memory it describes. In both, though, the idea of repetition is firmly embedded in the text: in Rough for Radio II the interrogation of Fox is one of a series, and even though a deliberate falsification of his words might mean that the cycle is broken, at the end of the short play there is no guarantee of this. That Time is structured as a series of repetitions and echoes, as the above fragment suggests: the variation-in-repetition that the text outlines is mirrored in the rather unorthodox staging, in which three recorded voices- to the left, to the right and above- circle the central image of the head.

Both texts, it could be said, move in a set of varied repetitions toward a final version of their protagonists’ experience; but they never quite reach it. The cycles of repetition described in both texts and in other texts that Beckett created for the stage neither build toward a final version, nor do they constitute a version in themselves- that is, the patterned structures can be recomposed with little loss of internal coherence. The internal dynamic of the texts is built largely from the relation of the component parts to each other, rather than from the order in which the parts come. Even in an early text like Godot, the dialogue creates meaning relationally; moments of apparent significance- Vladimir’s final monologue, for example- only acquire meaning because they link to other dialogue sections in the play. It has become a critical commonplace that Beckett’s work has a musical rather than a narrative structure (see Bryden 1998, for example); it is, though, a rather odd form of music- with no dominant melody, but composed rather of a complex web of harmonies, which can be restructured and recomposed at will. Beckett’s work is meticulously structured; but part of its uniqueness is that there is no compelling reason why the elements so ordered should, of necessity, be ordered in this way.  We cut into Winnie’s life on two happy days; but we could choose two others- one day does not cause the next. We encounter Krapp on one birthday; but the evidence of the tapes suggests that the same cycle of isolation, disgust and regret plays itself out each year. Mouth in Not I spools through her memories at high speed- but there is no reason for them to occur in the order they do; they gain significance from their relation to the central image- of the light, the buzzing in the skull, and the sudden torrent of words that suddenly pours out of her. The version performed is not- is never- the only possible version. The repetitions and echoes that the performances set up are both part of a tightly organised whole, and at the same time an arbitrary structure which does not have any sense of finality to it.

For example, the play Footfalls is based around a repeated action (the character May, pacing up and down a lighted strip in nine carefully measured steps) and a repeated dialogue exchange-
V: …May (Pause. No louder) May.
M: (Pacing) Yes, Mother.

V: Will you never have done? (Pause) Will you never have done… revolving it all?

M: (Halting) It?

V: It all. (Pause) In your poor mind. (Pause) It all. (Pause) It all.[8]

As can be seen from this, dialogue and physical action are inextricably linked; one repeats the other- the revolving cycles of movement on stage to the ‘It’ that May cannot abandon, the ‘It’ that she constantly revolves. However, the repetitions are not exact: May halts, sometimes, but not in one fixed place (mostly she pauses at the right hand side of the strip, but occasionally, and to no fixed pattern, she pauses on the left). The repeated dialogue quoted above is not exactly recapitulated: the second time it recurs it is recast by May’s offstage mother, and revisioned as reported dialogue between May and a non-existent audience-
V: ... Still speak? Yes, some nights she does, when she fancies none can hear (Pause) Tells how it was. (Pause) Tries to tell how it was. (Pause) It all. (pause) It all.[9]

And the third time, it is as dialogue between two fictionalised versions of May and her mother, described by May for the non-existent audience mentioned above-
M: ... Amy (Pause. No louder) Amy. (Pause) Yes, Mother. (Pause) Will you never have done? (Pause) Will you never have done… revolving it all? (Pause) It? (Pause) It all. (Pause) In your poor mind. (Pause) It all. (Pause) It all. (p402[10])

The repetitions are not exact; the second in particular is as much inferred as it is stated; however, they are also in some ways precisely the same, particularly in Beckett’s own 1979 production (in which Billie Whitelaw played May: in this production, the final, repeated ‘It all’ was given precisely the same cadence each time).

However, the repetitions do not move us closer to an understanding of it all (whatever it is): the repetitions accumulate, but they do not accrue. They echo each other, but they are not linked; even the second- which seems to indicate a potential development (and a move toward the revelation of the unspoken matter that May revolves)- does not lead directly to May’s monologue in the third section of the play. The echoes give the play structure; but they do not provide it with content. In fact, if anything, they point toward the absence of final content- of the final version of events, the thing that Mouth in Not I will hit on in the end, the reason for Vladimir’s and Estragon’s waiting, the Endgame that Hamm and Clov play out but do not complete. In other words, they both create and destroy; they give a form to the performance, and at the same time they draw our attention to the fact that the central issue that the performance seems to indicate is never finally addressed.

In other words, in theatrical terms, these plays have a familiar aspect, which should be apparent to anyone who has worked toward a finished performance. These are not finished versions; they are rehearsals- they gesture toward a final version, a completed version of the events that will make their import clear to the audience; but this final version is never reached. As noted above, Beckett knew this process: even before he got involved in the staging of his own work, he had already shown an interest in the processes of performance (he habitually attended the Abbey Theatre, and the theatres in Paris; he had developed a life long interest in the plays of Racine; and he had been involved in a notorious parody of Corneille’s Le Cid while working as a junior lecturer in Trinity College in the 1930s). The more involved Beckett became in the realisation of his texts, the more the texts themselves began to mimic the processes of their own realisation: until, at the end of his life, he wrote two plays which explicitly replicate the rehearsal process- Catastrophe and What Where. In both material- the image in Catastrophe, the unspoken what and where of What Where- is identified as important within the process; but in both the performance finishes before the moment of final realisation- before the play moves from rehearsal to performance. It is this- the fact that Beckett’s plays are frozen at the moment in the process when the laborious work of rehearsal involves the performers in a pattern of varied repetition, which is not itself the final version of the text- that gives Beckett’s work its curiously indeterminate form. It is neither the aporetic, eternally deconstructing form of post-modern Beckett: neither is it the quasi-mystical, revelatory form ascribed by earlier, humanist critics to his work. Rather, in the endless repetitions and revisionings of the rehearsal process, we have a model for the presentation of unresolved experience- an experience without the comfort of a final structure.