Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Dedication
- The Remains of the Modern and the Exhaustion of Thematics: An Introduction
- Theory Matters
- Texts Matter
- Performance Matters
- 9 ‘That's the Show’: Beckett and Performance
- 10 Reinventing Beckett
- 11 Staging Beckett: Voice and/in Performance (Company, What Where and Endgame)
- 12 Beckett and the ‘Idea’ of Theatre: Performance Through Artaud and Deleuze
- 13 Greying the Canon: Beckett in Performance, Beckett as Performance
- 14 ‘I think this does call for a firm stand’: Beckett at the Royal Court
- Index
13 - Greying the Canon: Beckett in Performance, Beckett as Performance
from Performance Matters
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 May 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Dedication
- The Remains of the Modern and the Exhaustion of Thematics: An Introduction
- Theory Matters
- Texts Matter
- Performance Matters
- 9 ‘That's the Show’: Beckett and Performance
- 10 Reinventing Beckett
- 11 Staging Beckett: Voice and/in Performance (Company, What Where and Endgame)
- 12 Beckett and the ‘Idea’ of Theatre: Performance Through Artaud and Deleuze
- 13 Greying the Canon: Beckett in Performance, Beckett as Performance
- 14 ‘I think this does call for a firm stand’: Beckett at the Royal Court
- Index
Summary
Samuel Beckett's resistance to self-refection, to a public metatext, to theorising his own theatre was legendary, and yet his personal letters and notebooks, his intimate, occasionally ‘uncautious’ conversations with directors and actors, were replete with just such reflections and revelations. While he told the critic Colin Duckworth in 1965, ‘I'd be quite incapable of writing a critical introduction to my work’ (Duckworth 1966: xxiv), his own musings – recorded in manuscripts and typescripts, in theatrical notebooks, in letters to directors, publishers, friends and confidants – constitute, collectively, just such critical insights.
The disparity suggests something of a multiplicity of voices, diction and contra-diction, a plural, at times a dialogic relation with his work. In one voice private discourse echoed public posture as it outlined a resistance to and incapacity for self-reflection. In a letter of 18 October 1954 to his American publisher, Barney Rosset, Beckett expressed a sense of diminished authority of authorship soon after translating Waiting for Godot. In a London meeting with Ralph Richardson, Beckett ‘told him that all I knew about Pozzo was in the text, that if I had known more I would have put it in the text, and that this was true also of the other characters’ (Letters 2 507).
The position bordered on the obsessive and Beckett restated it to his American director Alan Schneider nearly a decade and a half later, on 16 October 1972, looping back again to the Richardson incident. This time the offending ‘stars’ were the legendary American theatrical couple, Hume Cronin and Jessica Tandy, the play in question, Not I:
This is the old business of the author's supposed privileged information as when Richardson wanted the lowdown on Pozzo's background before he could consider the part. I no more know where she is [in this case Mouth in Not I] or why than she does. All I know is in the text. ‘She’ is purely a stage entity, part of a stage image and purveyor of a stage text. The rest is Ibsen. (Harmon 1998: 283; emphasis added)
To Duckworth he termed that ‘stage entity’ merely ‘an object’: ‘I produce an object. What people make of it is not my concern’ (Duckworth 1966: xxiv).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Beckett MattersEssays on Beckett's Late Modernism, pp. 240 - 254Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2017