[In the following essay, Gontarski appraises Beckett's reworking of his earlier plays and the changes they have undergone, paying particular attention to Play.]

In the early 1960s the nature of Samuel Beckett's writing for the theatre changed profoundly as he increased his direct advisory role in productions of his work and as he finally began to take full charge of directing his own plays. The experiences of staging himself had a double effect, altering his writing of new plays and, as important, but almost wholly ignored in current criticism, offering Beckett the opportunity to rethink, re-write, and finally re-create previously published work. That revisionist impulse—characteristic of Beckett's creative process at least as early as the rewriting of Dream of Fair to Middling Women into several of the stories of More Pricks than Kicks—broke through the restrictions of publication with Play in 1964. In the now-famous letter to George Devine of 9 March 1964, Beckett not only adjusted the da capo ending of Play but essentially redefined the dramatic conflict of the work:

The last rehearsals with Serreau [notes Beckett] have led us to a view of the da capo which I think you should know about. According to the text it is rigorously identical with the first statement. We now think it would be dramatically more effective to have it express a slight weakening, both of question and of response, by means of less and perhaps slower light and correspondingly less volume and speed of voice.¹

Such post publication revision suggests that the work as originally conceived and published was unfinished or incomplete and so as Beckett began officially to take charge of staging his own plays, first in 1967 with the Schiller Theatre production of Endspiel and continuing strongly (despite constant pledges to the contrary) until the 1986 re-write of his stage play What Where for German television, he took those opportunities to complete the creative process. If, as I will argue shortly, what we tend to call Beckett's late style begins with Play, then finally all of Beckett's theatre works are “late plays,” written in the “late style,” written, that is, after Play—even Play itself. That Beckett was recreating his dramatic corpus, re-inventing himself as a dramatist, rewriting history in effect during this early 1960s period is a perspective of singular critical significance, and yet the critical implications of Beckett's rewriting himself, for both the rewritten works and the corresponding new plays, have been, astonishingly, largely ignored in Beckett studies.²

When En attendant Godot opened at the Théâtre Babylone in Paris on 5 January 1953, the French dramatist and critic Jean Anouilh proclaimed it, “A music-hall sketch of Pascal's Pensées as played by the Fraterlini clowns.” That combination of ontological enigma and vaudeville highjinks would become the hallmark of Beckett's assault first on Naturalism and then on high Modernism itself. But in the early 1960s Beckett's theatre moved away from literary and music hall influences, away from a textually-based or literary theatre, towards one more overtly performative, where the visual (light and costume, gesture and pattern) and the auditory (music, repetition, echo) came to the fore. The more bemused critics kept asking, “What ever happened to the comedy in Beckett's theatre,” and, of course, British comedians Ryk Mayall and Ad Edmonson did not do Play or Ohio Impromptu in the West End but Waiting for Godot.³

In many respects the new theatre grew more overtly formalist and patterned as it became more visual, and Beckett balanced a theatre of concrete visual iconography with a theatre of literary imagery. With Play the Beckettian bricks were no longer tossed directly at Naturalism—that particular victim already on life-support by 1960—but against Modernism, if not against literature itself. With Play Beckett's theatre grew finally more static than active, more lyric than dramatic. It was for Beckett, in a very real sense, the end of literature—but the beginning of theatre. The shift is acutely evident to anyone who has tried to teach or lecture on, say, Play, Breath, Come and Go, Ghost Trio, … but the clouds …, or especially Quad without access to the productions. On the page, without the iconic, ideogrammatic counterpart, the works are unreadable—in any traditional literary sense, that is, if by unreadable we mean to suggest that their primary effect is extra literary.

These aesthetic changes were signalled as early as 1961 in a pair of radio plays with titles and themes more suggestive of music than theatre: Words and Music written in English at the end of 1961, and Cascando, written in French the following year. The first stage play of this new period, begun in the summer of 1962, as he was completing How it is,⁴ was Play. As he wrote to a colleague of Lawrence Harvey, Herbert Myron, on 31 May, “How it is still awaiting revision. Haven't done a [tap?] of work for months, but idea for a new act, one hour, three faces (mouths) and lights.”⁵ Finished that summer, the piece was entitled simply Play, and with it Beckett began to turn theatre back on itself with renewed vigour, deliberately exploring, stretching, reevaluating it, playing with the forms of drama—as he had with Eleuthéria, written, as the manuscript note indicates, “Prior to Godot.” By the following April Beckett attacked—quite literally—the genre of film in a work called Film, his first and only pure excursion into that medium, although, as we all know, he went on to write at least four non-literary works for television. But it was Play which was to have the most profound resonances on Beckett's dramatic art for the next two and a half decades.

In these works the nature of theatrical “character” itself was being redefined if not dispersed. Words and music were personified or reified, becoming protagonists—or rather antagonists—in the radio plays. And Beckett began to reflect or deflect his own aesthetic dilemmas within the works themselves. In the radio plays music competes with words for dramatic attention, for supremacy. In Film part of the self is represented by a camera and so the machine is drawn into the perceptual (and finally the intellectual) frame, although like Godot it never physically appears. (There are limits or impediments, after all, to self perception, the paradox of the camera photographing itself photographing itself being a trope perhaps for the limits or the abyss of self perception). The machine is as much a character as O and so while the camera is personified, O is reified, an object—as indeed he is named. Moreover, the camera is never, we realize, simply a neutral, objective observer. It records and participates, intruding on, affecting what it records.

Play then also seems to assault the very genre which apparently contains it—as Godot had a decade earlier—drama playing against itself, theater against the very idea of theater. If Godot eliminated “action” from the stage, Play all but eliminated activity, motion. If Godot eliminated intelligible causality, Play all but eliminated intelligibility itself. Beckett modified the stage directions on tempo from the “whole movement as rapid as possible” in Typescript 5 to the final “Rapid tempo throughout,” but he urged the former tempo to director George Devine, much to the chagrin of the National Theater's Artistic Director, Kenneth Tynan. Productions of Play seem, in fact, to have generated a whole new set of conflicts between producers and directors, or between those who understood and accepted Beckett's aesthetic shift and those who could not. As Billie Whitelaw recalls it, “Rows between Sir Laurence Olivier and Ken Tynan turning up at rehearsals and saying ‘you cannot possibly go as quickly as this’ and everyone keeping very quiet, as George Devine had no intention of going any slower—and neither had Beckett […].”⁶

Tynan, in fact, thought Beckett's presence at rehearsals intrusive and finally detrimental, as he noted in an acrimonious exchange of letters with the play's director:

Before Sam B. arrived at rehearsals, Play was recognisably the work we all liked and were eager to do. The delivery of the lines was (rightly) puppet-like and mechanical, but not wholly dehumanized and stripped of all emphasis and inflections. On the strength of last weekend, it seems that Beckett's advice on the production has changed all that—the lines are chanted in a breakneck monotone with no inflections, and I'm not alone in fearing that many of them will be simply inaudible. …

The point is that we are not putting on Play to satisfy Samuel Beckett alone. It may not matter to him that the lines are lost in laughs, or that the essential bits of exposition are blurred; but it surely matters to us. As we know, Beckett has never sat through any of his plays in the presence of an audience: but we have to live with that audience night after night!

Please understand me: I trust the play completely, and I trust your production of it up to the advent of the author. What I don't especially trust is Beckett as co-director. If you could see your way to re-humanizing the text a little, I'll bet the actors and the audience will thank you—even if Beckett doesn't.⁷

Devine retorted:

The presence of Beckett was a great help to me, and to the actors. … I assume you read the stage directions: “voices toneless except where indicated. Rapid movement throughout.” It was always my intention to try and achieve this, as it is, in my opinion, the only way to perform the play as written. Any other interpretation is a distortion. … To play the play as you indicate would be to demolish its dramatic purpose and turn it into literature (emphasis added). … I certainly would never have leased the play to the National Theater if I had thought the intention was to turn it into something it isn't, to please the majority.⁸

The accuracy of Devine's analysis of Tynan seems to have been borne out some five years later when Beckett sent Tynan a playlet, Breath, for a theatrical review Tynan proposed, whose title is derived from the surrealist pun, “Oh quel cul t'as.” Tynan seized the opportunity to demonstrate his sensitivity to Beckett's texts by overtly revising Beckett's typescript. To Beckett's “Miscellaneous rubbish” Tynan added, “including naked people.” (“Mene, mene,” Hamm might have said.) And Beckett's two cries, one of birth and one of death, were performed as erotic groans. (To add to the folly, the amended text of Oh! Calcutta! was published by Beckett's American publisher, Grove Press, with Beckett's contribution, identified as such and now called “Prologue,” facing a production photo of rubbish and naked bodies. Beckett found that his American contract forbade his intervention in this production, but he did succeed in restraining the use of the “Prologue” in all other countries where the “Entertainment” was produced, including the United Kingdom.)

Critic Bamber Gascoign shared Tynan's objections to Play in his 12 April 1964 review of the English premiere (The Observer, 12 April 1964), “The words are to be gabbled so fast that we can't understand them (we may seem to catch them the second time round but not in such a way as to appreciate them).”⁹ Undeterred by complaints of unintelligibility, Beckett went on to write yet another “unintelligible” play, Not I, and when actress Jessica Tandy complained to the author that the play's suggested running time, 23 minutes, rendered the work unintelligible to audiences, Beckett telegraphed back the now famous (but often misinterpreted) injunction, “I'm not unduly concerned with intelligibility. I want the piece to work on the nerves of the audience.”¹⁰ The play certainly worked on the nerves of at least one actress—Billie Whitelaw: “Not I came through the letter-box. I opened it, read it, and burst into tears, floods of tears. It had a tremendous emotional impact on me. I knew then that it had to go at great speed.”¹¹ For Whitelaw, the work on Play nearly a decade earlier had thoroughly prepared her for the extraordinary ordeal of Not I. The experience was finally nerve-wracking for her. Blindfolded with yet another hood secured over her face, she suffered sensory deprivation in performance:

The very first time I did it, I went to pieces. I felt I had no body; I could not relate to where I was; and, going at that speed, I was becoming very dizzy and felt like an astronaut tumbling into space … I swore to God I was falling.¹²

Earlier, the American premiere of Play fared even less well with its producers than the National Theater production. Beckett's instructions to Alan Schneider were that “Play was to be played through twice without interruption and at a very fast pace, each time taking no longer than nine minutes,”¹³ that is, 18 minutes overall. The producers, Richard Barr, Clinton Wilder, and, of all people, Edward Albee, threatened to drop the play from the program if Schneider followed Beckett's instructions. Schneider, unlike Devine, capitulated, and appealed to Beckett for permission to slow the pace and eliminate the da capo: “For the first and last time in my long relationship with Sam, I did something I despised myself for doing. I wrote to him, asking if we could try having his text spoken only once, more slowly. Instead of telling me to blast off, Sam offered us his reluctant permission.”¹⁴

Admittedly, Play was unusual theater for audiences in 1963. Overall, it was perhaps no more shocking than Godot had been a decade earlier, yet it shattered another set of theatrical conventions and audience expectations. It featured three apparently post-mortem characters. But even characters is not the right word. They are rather voices, instruments, or things, part of the funeral urns which appear to have swallowed—like some leviathan—all but their protruding heads. As the girth of the urns and the diameter of their openings decreased, rendering movement all but impossible, and as the faces took on the texture and complexion of the earth-encrusted urns, as they did in the English premiere which Beckett oversaw (or as Tynan claims, co-directed), the stage image became less a grouping of characters than a set of sculpted icons, a bas-relief triptych. Dialogue, in essence, disappeared. Side by side, the figures never speak to one another but respond only to the mechanical stimulus, an inquisitorial light which functions as a fourth character. In George Devine's rehearsal notes he reminds himself, “Rehearse separately to start with to get the idea of cues from the light and not from each other”¹⁵ (emphasis added). And Billie Whitelaw recalls that “We used to rehearse it with the stage manager playing the light, pointing a finger at us, giving us a cue. And before each performance, we sat down, the three of us and he, pointing his finger.”¹⁶

In Play then Beckett redoubled his assault on literature with a plot remarkable for its banality, as language or meaning are devalued from the opening, “largely unintelligible” chorus, and with a renewed assault against the very idea of resolution, ending and so completion with, at least as originally written, a da capo structure which suggests that these figures are trapped not only in urns but in a play, in a Möbius strip of narrative, a physical image which Beckett was to use for the pacing figure in Footfalls. Circularity and repetition were, of course, already implicit in the structures of Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Happy Days and even Krapp's Last Tape, but in Play the repetitions grow even more sinister, are more punishing (especially for the performers), the characters less corporeal, more dehumanized and reified than in anything Beckett had heretofore written for the stage. The imagery of Play suggested that Beckett had returned to his fiction for tropes as the stage iconography recalled less that of Beckett's earlier drama than that of prose narratives. One of the narratological voices of The Unnamable, for example, notes that “a collar, fixed to the mouth of the jar, now encircled my neck. And my lips which used to be hidden … can now be seen by all and sundry” (Three Novels, 332).

Structurally, the dramatic flow of Play was not sustained but incessantly interrupted, becoming a series of short, staccato bursts, which, in rehearsals for his own 1978 production, Beckett likened to the action of a manual lawn mower—a burst of energy followed by a pause; a renewed burst followed by yet another pause. It is a dramatic structure Beckett used as a background, a continuo played under the melody, within the work itself. “He went on and on,” notes the play's “other” woman, called simply W2, “I could hear a mower. An old hand mower.” Her lover, M, repeats the image shortly thereafter, “some fool was cutting grass. A little rush, then another” (Collected Shorter Plays, 150-51).

From Play onward Beckett's stage images would grow increasingly de-humanized, reified and metonymic, featuring dismembered or incorporeal creatures. It became a theater finally static and undramatic in any traditional sense. It is a theater of body parts and ghosts, a theater striving for transparency rather than solidity. And the playing space is always delimited, ritualized, circumscribed, framed. The proscenium arch is central—or rather peripheral in the most literal sense of that word—to these works, defining and emphasizing the playing space, delimiting the margins so that the works from Play onward make little sense performed on more modern, fluid or thrust stages or in the round. They are as much paintings, snapshots, or since they are textured and three-dimensional, as much bas-relief sculptures as drama. In his program notes to the British premiere of Play, director George Devine, no doubt echoing Beckett's own conversation on the subject (and yet again answering Tynan's objections), sounds unusually prophetic:

[…] very often in Beckett words are not used for their intellectual content or their emotional impact. This is especially so in Play, where “story and dialogue” are of a deliberately banal order. Here the words are used more as sounds, as “dramatic ammunition,” to quote Beckett's own phrase, and they take equal place with the visual action but do not dominate it.

Prescient as it is about Play Devine's analysis seems ill-adapted to the work before Play, at least to the original performed and published versions—that is, before the early plays became late plays. Despite Devine's implication that the anti-literary nature of the dialogue—or rather the three monologues—in Play is characteristic of Beckett's work, these are not observations one can comfortably apply to Godot, Endgame or Happy Days—at least not of the unrevised texts. But they do reflect Beckett's most fundamental aesthetic shift since Godot, and so Devine's comments not only presage the theater Beckett will written from Play onward, but also suggest that Beckett will reconstitute all of his work through the aesthetics developing in Play.

Play, moreover, triggered an increase in Beckett's direct involvement in the theater since it demanded a level of technical sophistication and precision unknown in his earlier work, and it was the writing of Play which may have, finally, forced Beckett—reluctant as he was—to assume full directorial responsibility for his own works. Beckett had introduced technology to his theater with Krapp's Last Tape in 1958, shortly after working on his first radio play, All That Fall, at the BBC. And the exploding umbrella of Happy Days still gives producers and fire wardens headaches. But the single inquisitorial spotlight—part torturer, part orchestra conductor, even part theater director—situated amid the footlights, which flashes from face to face instantly was not part of any technical director's repertoire of contraptions in 1963. And Beckett kept a hand in all major European performances to insure that technological compromise—three separate spotlights, for instance—did not compromise performance.

As we credit Beckett with redefining modern theater in January of 1953 with En attendant Godot, which made the theatrical tradition at the time seem positively operatic, we need to understand that Beckett's aesthetic and theatrical development did not stop then. We need to see his redefining (if not assaulting, since he himself had already become part of the theatrical tradition) his own theater with the composition of Play, which drew the performative and the figurative fully into his creative process for the first time, as at least of equal—if not greater—magnitude since it finally affected—some would say infected—the earlier work as well. The minimalism and formal simplicity of Beckett's later work, by contrast, makes even Godot and Endgame seem baroque, rococo, and Beckett has tried to rectify what he perceived as defects in that chronologically and aesthetically earlier work through his own direction, drawing his work closer to the iconic, sculptural qualities of the works from Play onward. These rewritten texts are not aberrations or curiosities but the main line of Beckett artistic development. Beckett's 1967 Schiller Endspiel, for example, produced not a faithful stage production of a petrified text, but a major new text in the Beckett canon.¹⁷ That it has almost been critically and performatively ignored for the 30 years of its existence is astonishing if not critically irresponsible.

Beckett has spoken freely about balletic moments in his later drama; as important are the still points, the sculpted icons, tableau vivants, Wartestelle, which characterize Beckett's late theater—that is, as I am contending, finally, all of Beckett's theater. As Beckett adapted the aesthetics of architects Mies Van Der Rohe that “less is more” and Adolf Loos that “ornament is a crime,” as he referred to his own “mania for minimalism,” he also seized directorial opportunities to recreate his work according to principles more in keeping with sculpture or even architecture than drama, and to test the results directly on the stage. That some critics are disquieted by Beckett's late aesthetics retroactively applied to a published canon is to be expected. They may prefer what they think of as Beckett's early plays, but as Beckett rewrote his own history after Play he may have ironically revised his early plays (if not his early self) out of existence. In the theater, there may only be the late Beckett.

Notes

1. This letter to Devine has been published in its entirety in New Theatre Magazine (Samuel Beckett Issue), 11.3 (1971), 16-17.

2. The exceptions in English, of course, are Ruby Cohn, Just Play: Beckett's Theatre (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980), particularly the final chapter, “Beckett Directs,” 230-279; and Dougald McMillan and Martha Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre (London: John Calder and New York: Riverrun P, 1988), passim. In general, the Germans have been more attentive to the significance of Beckett's direct work in the theatre than the British, Americans or French. See for example Michael Haerdter, Samuel Beckett inszeniert das “Endspiel.” Bericht von den Proben der Berliner Inszenierung Materialen zu Beckett's “Endspiel” (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1968); Walter D. Asmus, “Beckett inszeniert sein Spiel,” Beckett in Berlin ed. Klaus Völker (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1986), 145-147 (an invaluable resource for Beckett's German productions in general); Joachim Kaiser, “Beckett's Spiel in Ulm—die Aufführung des Monats,” Theatre-Heute No. 7 (July 1963), 6-9; and “Dirigent für Beckett's Partitur: Ein Gespräch mit Derek Mendel dem Regisseur der Ulmer Aufführung,” Theatre Heute No. 7 (July 1963), 9-10.

3. See my review, “Fartov and Belcher Tackle Godot,” The Beckett Circle: Newsletter of the Samuel Beckett Society 13.1 (Fall 1991), 6.

4. The letter to Myron is actually dated 31 May 1961, but the dating seems to be in error since it refers to Lawrence Harvey's sabbatical in Paris. Harvey did not go to Paris on his Guggenheim Fellowship until the summer of 1962.

5. The earliest version of the play was written for a woman and two men, Syke and Conk. These figures were contained not in the urns of the published version but in white boxes. For additional details see my The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett's Dramatic Texts (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985), 90-100.

6. James Knowlson, “Practical Aspects of Theater, Radio, and Television: Extracts from an Unscripted Interview with Billie Whitelaw,” Journal of Beckett Studies No. 3 (Summer 1978), 85.

7. “Life and Letters: Between the Acts,” in New Yorker, 31 October 1994, 84-5.

8. Irving Wardle, The Theatres of George Devine (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978), 208.

9. Michaël Lonsdale, who played M in Serreau's French premiere, notes of Beckett's instructions, “Il voulait qu'on parle à une vitesse de mitrailleuse.” Elisabeth Auclair-Tamaroff et Barthélémy, Jean-Marie Serreau Decouvreur de Théatres (Paris: L'Arbre Verdoyant Éditeur, 1986), 75.

10. Cited in Enoch Brater, Beyond Minimalism: Beckett's Late Style in the Theater (New York: Oxford UP, 1987), 23.

11. Knowlson, 86.

12. Ibid.

13. Alan Schneider, Entrances: An American Director's Journey (New York: Viking Press, 1986), 341.

14. Ibid.

15. Devine's notes are on deposit at the University of Reading Samuel Beckett Archive, ms. 1581/15.

16. Knowlson, 86.

17. See, for example, The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, Vol. II, Endgame ed. with an Introduction and notes by S. E. Gontarski (London: Faber and Faber, 1993 and New York: Grove P, 1993); and the other volumes in the series.