Staging Beckett in Great Britain 9781474240178, 9781474240208, 9781474240192

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Title
Copyright
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Foreword James Knowlson
Acknowledgements
Introduction David Tucker
Part 1 Origins, Theatres, Directors
1 The Arrival of Godot: Beckett, Cultural Memory and 1950s British Theatre David Pattie
2 ‘I think this does call for a firm stand’: Beckett at the Royal Court S. E. Gontarski
3 Feckham, Peckham, Fulham, Clapham … Hammersmith: Beckett at Riverside Studios Matthew McFrederick
4 Beckett at the West Yorkshire Playhouse: Happy Days, Not I and Krapp’s Last Tape (1993) Mark Taylor Batty
5 ‘A price to be paid’: West End Beckett John Stokes
6 ‘It’s all symbiosis’: Peter Hall Directing Beckett Sos Eltis
Part 2 Productions, Locations, Legacies
7 Krapp’s Last Tape in Great Britain: Production History amid Changing Practice Andrew Head
8 ‘An Unforgettable Image’: Staging Beckett’s Short Plays Derval Tubridy
9 ‘The tree has four or five leaves’: Talawa, Britishness and the First all-Black Production of Waiting for Godot in Britain Kene Igweonu
10 Mindscapes Among Thistle: Producing Samuel Beckett’s Plays in Scotland Ksenija Horvat
11 Contracts, Clauses and Nudes: Breath, Oh! Calcutta! and the Freedom of Authorship Graham Saunders
12 ‘That first last look in the shadows’: Beckett’s Legacies for Harold Pinter David Tucker
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Staging Beckett in Great Britain

Related titles from Bloomsbury Methuen Drama: Beckett’s Creatures: Art of Failure after the Holocaust by Joseph Anderton IBSN 978-1-4742-3453-5 The Plays of Samuel Beckett by Katherine Weiss ISBN 978-1-4081-5730-5 Staging Beckett in Ireland and Northern Ireland edited by Trish McTighe and David Tucker ISBN 978-1-4742-4055-0 Ten Ways of Thinking About Samuel Beckett: The Falsetto of Reason by Enoch Brater ISBN 978-1-4081-3722-2

Staging Beckett in Great Britain Edited by David Tucker and Trish McTighe

Bloomsbury Methuen Drama An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Bloomsbury Methuen Drama An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Imprint previously known as Methuen Drama 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY, METHUEN DRAMA and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 © David Tucker, Trish McTighe and contributors 2016 David Tucker, Trish McTighe and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-4017-8 ePDF: 978-1-4742-4019-2 ePub: 978-1-4742-4018-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Cover design by Eleanor Rose Cover photograph: Samuel Beckett in rehearsals of Waiting for Godot, Riverside Studios, London, February, 1984, by Chris Harris © David Gothard Theatre and Performance Collection. Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

Contents Notes on Contributors vii Foreword  James Knowlson xii Acknowledgements xviii Introduction  David Tucker xix Part 1  Origins, Theatres, Directors The Arrival of Godot: Beckett, Cultural Memory and 1950s British Theatre  David Pattie

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‘I think this does call for a firm stand’: Beckett at the Royal Court  S. E. Gontarski

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Feckham, Peckham, Fulham, Clapham … Hammersmith: Beckett at Riverside Studios  Matthew McFrederick

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Beckett at the West Yorkshire Playhouse: Happy Days, Not I and Krapp’s Last Tape (1993)  Mark Taylor-Batty

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‘A price to be paid’: West End Beckett  John Stokes

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‘It’s all symbiosis’: Peter Hall Directing Beckett  Sos Eltis

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1 2 3 4

Part 2  Productions, Locations, Legacies 7 8 9

Krapp’s Last Tape in Great Britain: Production History amid Changing Practice  Andrew Head

107

‘An Unforgettable Image’: Staging Beckett’s Short Plays  Derval Tubridy

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‘The tree has four or five leaves’: Talawa, Britishness and the First all-Black Production of Waiting for Godot in Britain  Kene Igweonu

141

vi Contents

10 Mindscapes Among Thistle: Producing Samuel Beckett’s Plays in Scotland  Ksenija Horvat

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11 Contracts, Clauses and Nudes: Breath, Oh! Calcutta! and the Freedom of Authorship  Graham Saunders

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12 ‘That first last look in the shadows’: Beckett’s Legacies for Harold Pinter  David Tucker

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Notes Bibliography Index

209 223 243

Notes on Contributors Sos Eltis is a fellow and tutor in English at Brasenose College, Oxford University. She is the author of Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde (1996) and Acts of Desire: Women and Sex on Stage, 1800–1930 (2013), and of numerous articles on Victorian, Edwardian and modern theatre, gothic fiction and Oscar Wilde. S. E. Gontarski is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University. His more recent books are: (with C. J. Ackerley) The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett: A Reader’s Guide to His Works, Life, and Thought (2006); (with Anthony Uhlmann) Beckett after Beckett (2006); and A Companion to Samuel Beckett (2010). More recently, he has edited (with Paul Ardoin and Laci Mattison) Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2013) (which book has served as a model for a series called ‘Understanding Philosophy/Understanding Modernism’); his critical, bilingual edition of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire was published as Un tram che si chiama desiderio / A Streetcar Named Desire in the series Canone teatrale europeo/Canon of European Drama from Editioni ETS in Pisa, 2012; he has also edited The Beckett Critical Reader: Archives, Theories, and Translations (2012) and The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts (2014), and he is series editor of ‘Other Becketts’ at Edinburgh University Press. A new edition of his On Beckett: Essays and Criticism has just been published (2013). Andrew Head is a lecturer in Drama and Theatre Practice at the University of Hull. He is interested in the production and performance of Beckett’s drama with a specific emphasis on embodiment and the role of the actor. He has recently completed a study of the Beckettian actor in relation to modern and contemporary performance practices and is also investigating the link between Beckett’s acting legacy and

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recent performance practices. He is also a director and a performer and this aspect of his work has led to several performance collaborations at international theatre festivals and regional UK venues. Ksenija Horvat is a lecturer in Drama and Performance at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. Specialist areas of research include contemporary Scottish theatre, gender in theatre, translating for stage, dramaturgy, playwriting and screenwriting. Further research interests include comparative history of dramatic forms, Japanese theatre, Chinese theatre, dance and physical theatre, and theatre anthropology. Horvat has published her research nationally and internationally (Edinburgh University Press, UK; Routledge, UK; University of Exeter Press, UK; Université Stendhal, Grenoble, France; Vetrne Mlyny, Brno, Czech Republic; BruccoliClark Publications, Columbia SC, USA; Unicopli, Milan, Italy). In addition she has translated and written for theatre since 1988. Horvat is the co-editor of the peer-reviewed international Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen published as a collaboration between Queen Margaret University Edinburgh and Kingston University London. Kene Igweonu is Principal Lecturer and Director of Knowledge Exchange for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Canterbury Christ Church University. His interests cover African and African diaspora theatre and performance, as well as cultural and performance theory. His current research and practice focus particularly on somatic practices in performance training, issues of identity in performance and cross-art practices. Dr Igweonu has published extensively on Black British theatre as well as on African theatre and performance. He contributed several entries on Nigerian theatre for the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Stage Actors and Acting (2015). Earlier works include Trends in Twenty-First Century African Theatre and Performance (2011) and a three volume co-edited book-set under the general title Performative Inter-Actions in African Theatre (2013).



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Matthew McFrederick is an AHRC-funded PhD student and sessional teacher in the Department of Film, Theatre & Television at the University of Reading. His thesis is focusing on the production histories of Samuel Beckett’s drama in London through the AHRC ‘Staging Beckett’ project. He is also a theatre practitioner and in 2014 was assistant director on Not I/Footfalls/Rockaby at the Royal Court Theatre, London. In September 2014 he was a Visiting Scholar at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin, as part of the AHRC’s International Placement Scheme. Trish McTighe is currently a lecturer in drama at Queen’s University Belfast. Prior to this she was a post-doctoral researcher on the ‘Staging Beckett’ project at the University of Reading (2012–15) and a recent visiting scholar in Irish drama at Fordham University. Her book, The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett’s Drama, was published in 2013 and she has published in the journals Modern Drama, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, and the online Irish studies journal Breac. David Pattie is Professor of Drama at the University of Chester. He is the author of The Complete Critical Guide to Samuel Beckett (2001) and Modern British Drama: The 1950s (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2012). He has also published on contemporary British theatre, Scottish theatre, popular culture and popular music. Graham Saunders is Reader in Theatre Studies at the University of Reading. He is author of Love me or kill me: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes (2002), About Kane: The Playwright and the Work (2009), Patrick Marber’s Closer (2008) and co-editor of Cool Britannia: Political Theatre in the 1990s (2008) and Sarah Kane in Context (2010). He was Principal Investigator for the five-year AHRC-funded ‘Giving a Voice to the Nation’: The Arts Council of Great Britain and the Development of Theatre & Performance in Britain 1945–1994 and is currently co-investigator on the three-year AHRC-funded project Staging Beckett: The Impact of Productions of Samuel Beckett’s Drama

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on Theatre Practice and Cultures in the United Kingdom and Ireland. He has contributed articles on contemporary British and Irish drama to journals including Modern Drama, Journal of Beckett Studies, Contemporary Theatre Review, Theatre Research International, New Theatre Quarterly and Studies in Theatre and Performance. John Stokes is Emeritus Professor of Modern British Literature at King’s College London and Honorary Professor of English and Drama at the University of Nottingham. His books include The French Actress and her English Audience (1996) and, edited with Maggie Gale, The Cambridge Companion to the Actress (1997). His two-volume edition of Oscar Wilde’s journalism, edited with Mark W. Turner, appeared in 2013. Since 1981 he has been a regular theatre reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement. Mark Taylor-Batty is Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Leeds. His publications include About Pinter: The Writer and the Work (2005), Roger Blin: Collaborations and Methodologies (2007), The Theatre of Harold Pinter (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2014) and, with Juliette Taylor-Batty, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (2008). He is an associate editor of the Performance Ethos journal and, together with Enoch Brater, he is series editor of Methuen Drama’s Engage series of books. Derval Tubridy is Dean of the Graduate School, Associate Pro-Warden for Research and Enterprise, and Senior Lecturer in Literature and Visual Culture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Author of Thomas Kinsella: The Peppercanister Poems (2001), and editor of a special edition of Irish Studies Review (16/3, 2008), she has published chapters in The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Volume V: The Irish Book in English, 1891–2000; Beckett and Nothing; A Companion to James Joyce; Contemporary Debates in Literature and Philosophy; Ireland: Space, Text, Time; Seeing Things: Literature and the Visual; The Irish Book in the Twentieth Century; Samuel Beckett: A Casebook and Picturing



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Language: The Art Book Tradition in Twentieth-Century Europe, as well as articles in Performance Research; The Irish University Review; Irish Studies Review; The Journal of Beckett Studies and Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui. Her research has been funded by the Fulbright Commission and the British Academy. David Tucker is Associate Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. He has authored the short book A Dream and its Legacies: The Samuel Beckett Theatre Project, Oxford c. 1967–1976 (2013), the monograph Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx: Tracing ‘a literary fantasia’ (2012), as well as a number of journal articles and book chapters on Beckett. He has edited British Social Realism in the Arts since 1940 (2011), and co-edited Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui volume 30 (2014) and volumes 20–24 of The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory.  Current work includes a co-authored book entitled New Realisms: Contemporary British Cinema (forthcoming 2018).

Foreword James Knowlson

This book and its companion volume can be traced back some forty-odd years to their beginnings in the founding of the Beckett Archive in the University of Reading in 1971. A successful ‘Samuel Beckett Exhibition’ in May of that year left us with a number of items which had been borrowed from owners who, when told that we were establishing a dedicated Beckett collection, agreed that some of their loans should become permanent gifts. Chief among the donors was Samuel Beckett himself, who, from that date on, more or less adopted the Special Collections of the university as the principal recipient of his manuscripts until his death in 1989. And much of this material related to his plays, for which, as the founder of the archive, I had developed a personal passion. I still remember very vividly receiving in my home mail in 1971 Beckett’s original directorial notebook for his recent production of Das letzte Band (Krapp’s Last Tape) at the Schiller Theater Werkstatt in Berlin. Reading in this notebook the author’s own detailed analysis of the light and dark emblems in the play (which were listed under the general title of ‘Mani’) and of Krapp’s intense psychological relationship with the tape recorder simply took my breath away. For these pages focused on elements of the play that, up to that time, I, and more importantly − since I was primarily a lecturer on eighteenth-century French literature and thought and a beginner in Beckett studies – other better informed modern drama scholars had never recognized as key themes of the play. The same could be said of several other notebooks that Beckett gifted to us only slightly later, such as the one entitled ‘Été 56’ which contained a manuscript draft of Krapp, called at the time of composition the ‘Magee Monologue’, Happy Days and All that Fall.

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Although I could never have imagined at that early stage that we had the makings of the richest collection of Beckett theatre material in the world, over the years such items continued to pour in, mainly as a result of Beckett’s own generosity, but also through personal gifts from friends, directors, actors, and fellow scholars and through a deliberate policy of steady accumulation, plus (within the limits of a truly minute budget) the occasional purchase. The process of collecting was never as systematic as we had hoped, largely as a result of a combination of lack of time and staff shortages. However, over the next four decades, we still acquired a large amount of material that related to productions of Beckett’s plays throughout the world: most notably, of course − as gifts from Beckett − the manuscripts of almost all of his later plays in English and French as he wrote them and his production notebooks in English, French and German as he directed them, which, during my regular meetings with him over a period of almost twenty years, he used to give me to bring back to Reading. While working increasingly myself on his plays, I had also become the accredited ‘Postman’! There were also set designs and maquettes, many recordings, and, eventually, almost 700 theatre dossiers containing theatre programmes, posters, photographs, interviews and reviews. In this way, within a few years, the Beckett Archive in Reading had become a veritable treasure trove for theatre scholars. But, back in 1971, for reviews and the like, we needed to borrow for our exhibition items from the famous Enthoven theatre collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum. This link with the V&A has now been reanimated and formalized in the shape of the ‘Staging Beckett’ project, a partnership between the University of Reading and the University of Chester, supported by an Arts and Humanities Research Council award, out of which a large online database of productions of Beckett’s plays in Britain and Ireland and these two books have emerged. Authors contributing to the two volumes have also consulted many other theatre collections in Britain, Ireland and the USA. Examples of such collections (some of which have only become available in the past

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few years) are the important archives of Harold Pinter, Kenneth Tynan and Michael White all held at the British Library, the Martin Esslin collection at Keble College, Oxford, the West Yorkshire Playhouse archive at the Brotherton Library in the University of Leeds, the Royal Court Archive at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the collection of George Devine’s letters from Beckett with its related theatre material at the Harry Ransom Center in the University of Texas at Austin and our own James and Elizabeth Knowlson Collection, which was recently added to the Beckett Archive at the University of Reading. Strikingly, too, as a quick glance through the notes to this particular volume will reveal, numerous articles and reviews have been located online, providing a wide variety of lively contemporaneous responses to Beckett productions charted over the past sixty years (since the British premiere of Waiting for Godot in August 1955). But, refreshingly, other new sources include telephone calls and emails from those actors, directors and set designers who are still alive to be questioned. Indeed, the two books also benefit from recent interviews that the ‘Staging Beckett’ project itself has generated, making this entire investigation into a dynamic, living process as well as a fascinating historical analysis. Several of the essays explore how various directors and designers have successfully worked within the constraints of fidelity to Beckett’s texts and of (more or less) conformity to the demands of his stage directions. In focusing, for instance, on Sir Peter Hall’s important contribution to the production history of Beckett’s plays in England, Sos Eltis draws attention (rather brilliantly, in my view) to the way in which, while scrupulously respecting Beckett’s texts and most of his later cuts, changes and revisions, Hall consistently maintained his own commitment to the central emotional, human and poetic truths as well as the musicality of his work. Similarly, Derval Tubridy delicately explores productions where other directors (Deborah Warner, Katie Mitchell, even Walter Asmus) have deviated from the strictest conditions of staging Beckett’s shorter plays − with a variety of consequences. It soon becomes clear, however, that, gradually over the years (and the

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programmes of the four annual ‘Happy Days’ Samuel Beckett Festivals that have taken place so far in Enniskillen are a good example of this happening), adaptations and deviations have been permitted that at one time would have never been allowed by the Beckett Estate. One other intriguing aspect of this survey of the more recent productions of Beckett’s shorter plays has been to reveal how the boundaries between theatre, painting, sculpture and performance art have shifted and become blurred, echoing Beckett’s own feeling that his late plays might be more at home in an art gallery than in any conventional theatre space, whether this has a proscenium arch or a thrust- or arena-type stage. Reading the present collection of essays, it also struck me how this study of the various stagings of Beckett’s plays raises several wider issues about some of the more significant developments that have taken place in the British and Irish theatre over the past half-century. In delving, for instance, into the various ways in which Beckett’s plays have been presented in different types of location and in differing conditions in the West End, John Stokes covers the shifting dynamics of London theatre life, while two other authors (S. E. Gontarski and Matthew McFrederick) explore the close relations that were forged between Beckett and the Royal Court Theatre and Riverside Studios, largely as a result of a network of personal friendships. For, as in most areas of his life, Beckett worked over his entire theatrical career through friendship. Studying the history of productions of his plays in the United Kingdom and Ireland − as well as in France, Germany and the USA – shows how consistently and how loyally he worked with and through his many friends in that field: among the directors and designers, George Devine, Donald McWhinnie, Jocelyn Herbert, Walter Asmus (in London as well as in Berlin) and Alan Simpson and, among the actors, Patrick Magee, Jack MacGowran, Rick Cluchey, David Warrilow and Billie Whitelaw. The essays also reflect movements that occurred within particular societies. The question of how Waiting for Godot came to be accepted, then integrated within ‘cultural memory’ in the Britain of the second

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half of the 1950s − by what Astrid Erll in her 2011 book Memory in Culture calls the processes of ‘premediation’ followed by ‘remediation’ – results in a fascinating, wide-ranging essay by David Pattie. But I also think of the questions related to race and ‘Britishness’ that are investigated in Kene Igweonu’s essay on the 2012 Talawa production of Waiting for Godot or the issues of social engagement that were raised by Gordon McDougall’s bold 1966 Traverse Club, Edinburgh production of the same play and are explored in Ksenija Horvat’s essay ‘Mindscapes Among Thistle: Producing Samuel Beckett’s Plays in Scotland’. On a personal note, over half a lifetime of theatre-going, I must have seen dozens of the productions of the Beckett plays analysed in this book. And, looking back, it is above all the great acting performances that one remembers: in Peter Hall’s various musically precise Godots, the lively poetic rhythms of the music-hall routines between Estragon and Vladimir, Ben Kingsley and Alan Howard or Alan Dobie and Julian Glover and, in Andrew Upton’s 2015 production by the Sydney Theatre Company at the Barbican in London, too recent to be included in this book, the subtle, beautifully modulated exchanges at the beginning of Act II between Hugo Weaving (Vladimir) and Richard Roxborough (Estragon). In the original Krapp’s Last Tape, the voice of Patrick Magee, echoing with a moving mixture of longing, regret and bitterness, ‘Be again, be again. [Pause.] All that old misery. [Pause.] Once wasn’t enough for you. [Pause.] Lie down across her’ resonates memorably in the mind, aided by memories of Donald McWhinnie’s 1972 BBC television recording. But it would be a mistake to pass over, in the same play, Krapp’s sensuous caressing of the word ‘Spoool’ by the great English music-hall comic Max Wall, or the touching human moments of David Warrilow’s Krapp in Antoni Libera’s production from the Haymarket Theatre, Leicester (‘A girl in a shabby green coat, on a railway station platform?’) − and, for me, claims that Beckett is a mere formalist (or for that matter an absurdist) are firmly contradicted by such moments − or, again, the profound stillness with which we are left at the end of the play by a very still Michael Gambon, John Hurt or Harold Pinter, as the ‘tape recorder runs on in silence’.

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Only occasionally does a production imprint itself on the mind’s eye for its set design or its lighting. Yet, alongside a few disasters, there have been some productions that have impressed for these very features, particularly with Happy Days or the shorter plays. Among the disasters, I think of the ‘Beckett on Film’ version filmed on the beach, where the noise of the wind is seriously distracting, when Rosaleen Linehan herself playing Winnie had been so brilliant in the outstanding original stage production by Karel Reisz. Among the successes (though not everyone will agree with me here), I would select the striking, remarkably innovative, spiral-shaped mound of Peter Hall’s 2003 Arts Theatre production which starred Felicity Kendal and the later avalanche-inspired set, designed by Vicki Mortimer for Natalie Abrahami’s 2014 Young Vic production, which framed a subtle visual and verbal performance by Juliet Stevenson. But lighting, design, movement and text probably converged most successfully in Walter Asmus’s production at the Royal Court Theatre of Not I, Footfalls and Rockaby, which had an almost complete absence of light in the theatre auditorium, creating a triptych of visually haunting images, all three plays brilliantly acted by Lisa Dwan. This must surely be one of the most memorable evenings of late Beckett plays ever to be presented in a theatre. One of the delights of this particular book is that of seeing individual performances that one remembers so well set in the context of their times, placed in the particular theatre conditions in which they appeared and were judged, often in such different ways, by contemporary critics.

Acknowledgements The editors are grateful to Anna McMullan, Graham Saunders, David Pattie and Matthew McFrederick for their collegiality, support and warmth over the life of the ‘Staging Beckett’ project. Staging Beckett, a three-year project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council involving the universities of Reading and Chester and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, has worked to bring to light the performance histories of Samuel Beckett’s drama on UK and Irish stages and build a database of all professional productions of the author’s work since 1955. The present two volumes represent the core aims of the ‘Staging Beckett’ project and would not have been possible without the generous support of our team. Guy Baxter and Siobhan Wootton are to be thanked in particular for their support on the database aspect of the project, as are Kate Dorney and her colleagues at the V&A. We are grateful also to the Beckett community at the University of Reading, especially to James Knowlson for his generous and tireless support of Staging Beckett. And finally, we would like to thank another member of the Beckett community who was also a supporter of Staging Beckett from its earliest days and who sadly passed away during the life of the project. This book is dedicated, therefore, to the memory of Julie Campbell. The editors gratefully acknowledge use of material in Chapter 11, quoted by kind permission of the Estate of Barbara Bray. Excerpts from certain of Samuel Beckett’s letters to Rick Cluchey of 4 October 1979; 23 September 1983; 2 November 1983 and 9 May 1984; and to Alan Mandell of 21 March 1984 reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Samuel Beckett c/o Rosica Colin Limited, London. © The Estate of Samuel Beckett.

Introduction David Tucker

The essays in this volume arise from a three-year collaboration between the University of Reading, the University of Chester and the Victoria and Albert Museum, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK. That project’s full title is ‘Staging Beckett: The Impact of Productions of Samuel Beckett’s Drama on Theatre Practice and Cultures in the United Kingdom and Ireland’. Previous project-based publications have sought to make the case for the work and lay some groundwork,1 to bring to view what had previously been semi-hidden or peripheral histories,2 to focus in on aspects of practice such as design,3 and to set Beckett’s productions in economic and social context.4 The present volume as well as its companion Staging Beckett in Ireland and Northern Ireland delve more deeply into the case studies, topics and questions at the heart of the project, presenting what might be termed the ‘main stream’ of the project in relation to those other tributaries. With the opportunities that two book-length studies allow, they lay out a more thorough history of Beckett in relation to British and Irish theatre culture and practice than has hitherto been possible. The present volume combines a range of methodologies that have been integral to the ‘Staging Beckett’ project, and in that sense it is a very collaborative publication. As James Knowlson has pointed to in his foreword, one of the major project outputs is a free-to-access public database of all professional UK and Irish productions of Beckett’s plays, since the very first Waiting for Godot of 1955 all the way to 2015 and beyond as the database can, and hopefully will, be continually updated. What has sometimes started as the bare bones of data, the places, names and dates – the ‘where now, who now, when now’ – of Beckett’s performance history, has been handed on to a number of the

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volume’s contributors who have enlivened it with further archival and other types of research in order to present detailed pictures of Beckett’s involvement with British theatre. The chapters also cite the interviews and public talks which formed part of the project’s various conferences and events, while the histories of particular plays in production are further informed by project-based public exhibitions held in Reading and Enniskillen. Certain of the ‘Staging Beckett’ project’s overarching aims are relatively plain, and are straightforwardly accounted for in the present volume and elsewhere. ‘To research and analyse professional metropolitan, regional and touring productions of Beckett’s work in the UK and Republic of Ireland since 1955’, for instance. Similarly ‘To consult, analyse and bring to the attention of researchers, practitioners and the public material relating to productions of Beckett from a number of new and under-exploited British and Irish archives’. Particular essays have contributed to the accomplishment of the aim ‘To investigate the impact of productions of Beckett’s drama on British and Irish theatre practice in directing, acting and design, and on theatre cultures more generally (such as programming and reviewing)’. Yet we are getting into increasingly ‘vaguened’ and difficult to pin-down areas, and the aim ‘To develop an understanding of whether a distinct British and Irish aesthetic of performing, designing and directing Beckett’s theatre has evolved since the first London and Dublin productions of Waiting for Godot in 1955’ is a difficult one indeed, but one nevertheless that with the hindsight of the present volume completed, it might be expected to have some useful perspective on. However, the careful, nuanced ways in which the volume’s contributors have approached their topics speak less of broad, general aesthetics, and more of individual places, relationships and times. The ‘where now, who now, when now’ is therefore central, vital to thinking of Beckett’s evolving UK and Irish productions. As was the case with the publication of his prose in France, the UK and the US, and with the production of his drama particularly in the furthest-away-from-him US, Beckett worked directly with a limited number of trusted collaborators who

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were themselves often associated with particular venues, and thus lines of interrelation have been mapped, a process which has frequently revealed some surprising intersecting routes. Yet there are also a number of broader narratives that the focused chapters speak to, and as such the political, economic, social and cultural contexts in which Beckett’s plays have been staged in London, England outside the M25 and Scotland are all variously discussed. The book’s first chapter, by David Pattie, begins where it all started with the 1955 Godot premiere. Borrowing terms from Astrid Erll, Pattie explores and problematizes the ‘strongly embedded cultural memory’ of this performance, in order to argue that the production was (again from Erll) ‘premediated’. That is to say that the play’s 1955 reception can partly be accounted for in the fact that the rules around British theatre were already in debate, and thus Godot arrived as ‘a text that posed, for a section of the British theatre audience, the right kind of formal and intellectual challenges’. It spoke to the then current conversation. Pattie goes on to place the production within the broader contexts of 1950s British theatre funding structures and to describe the battle lines that were being drawn within these by the major critical voices of the time, thereby revealing how aesthetic and economic concerns were intertwined and how ‘the very production system that Beckett […] deplored also helped the play have a lasting impact’. The second chapter, by the renowned US-based Beckett scholar S. E. Gontarski, tracks what was probably the most important working relationship Beckett had with a theatre in the UK, the Royal Court. Gontarski quotes extensively from Beckett’s correspondence to illustrate how ‘the Royal Court meant for Beckett less a building, a playhouse, a Society, a stage than a collection of people, especially those associated with the English Stage Company, particularly George Devine and Jocelyn Herbert’. Following on from the previous chapter’s discussion of arguments and positions already taking place in the wider British theatrical landscape in 1955, the English Stage Company in 1956 declared itself, as Gontarski points out, ‘A Writer’s Theatre’, and thus those affiliated with the Company at the Royal Court gave

xxii Introduction

Beckett’s works a home he could be happy with, even though ‘a number of his most protracted aesthetic and cultural battles were fought’ via this theatre. Gontarski explores all the productions of Beckett’s work staged at the Court, from Fin de partie and Acte sans paroles in 1957, Endgame and Krapp’s Last Tape in 1958, Happy Days in 1962, Godot in 1964, Oh les beaux jours in 1969, Come and Go, Cascando and Play in 1970, Krapp’s Last Tape and Not I in 1973, a revival of Not I in 1975, to the Beckett season of 1976 featuring ‘Beckett’s self direction of the Schiller Theater Warten auf Godot in April, a revival of Endgame in May, Play, That Time and Footfalls’. Then there was Happy Days in 1979, the return of Not I in 2013 and also, with Footfalls and Rockaby, in 2014. Throughout all these Gontarski weaves a detailed analysis of the arguments about censorship, performers’ abilities and directorial visions that were centred at the Court. The third chapter focuses in on another theatre, Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, which staged two major productions by Rick Cluchey’s San Quentin Drama Workshop, of Endgame in 1984 and Godot in 1980. Beckett attended rehearsals for both these productions and made himself a great deal more publicly available than he typically did when rehearsing at the Royal Court or elsewhere. Journalists could interview him, while photographers and painters produced portraits (one of which is the cover image for the present book), and various members of the theatre staff and public found him relatively available. Matthew McFrederick tracks the working relationships Beckett had with those at the Royal Court to the Riverside, he explores the wide range of documents pertaining to the rehearsals and the productions, including from the private collection of then Artistic Director at Riverside David Gothard, and looks at how Beckett shifted and altered the text of the plays during the rehearsal process. Finally, McFrederick reflects on the legacies the two productions had for Riverside, both in terms of later productions of Beckett’s work that the theatre staged, and in terms of the later careers pursued by those involved at the time. Mark Taylor-Batty’s chapter on the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, focuses in on the production of Happy Days starring Prunella Scales in

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1993. Taylor-Batty is concerned to contextualize the production within the particular theatre, and the particular theatre is then in turn contextualized within a broader economic and social landscape, and thereby the production, directed by Jude Kelly, ‘can be read as participating in an articulation of cultural worth and development in a city that was rebranding itself economically and culturally in the early 1990s’. Beginning with the physical site itself, the margins-of-the-city area known as Quarry Hill, Taylor-Batty outlines how the theatre is situated within a multifaceted history of industrialization, urban-housing planning and more recent civic regeneration, and argues that this history informs the theatre’s sense of its own cultural value, and thus how and what productions it stages. Accordingly, staging Happy Days ‘involved a concern to both appreciate and understand that play as written, but to perform it in a way that would connect with a regional audience, for many of whom this would have been a first contact with that author’. Taylor-Batty goes on to explore Scales’s performance in detail via her ‘commitment to layered realism’, before looking at the production’s critical reception and its design, and also considering Krapp’s Last Tape and Not I, which were produced at the same time. In Chapter 5 John Stokes explores how Beckett’s work has existed in the multifaceted crossover space of London’s West End, where that work has often contributed to ‘those key moments when the avantgarde has entered the vernacular’. Pointing out that ‘the West End has always been a cultural phenomenon as well as a place’, Stokes argues that a sense of the physical West End, its sometimes dilapidated buildings, has been incorporated into productions of Beckett’s work in the area, such as Krapp’s Last Tape at the New Ambassadors in 2000, and a 2004 Endgame at the Albery directed by Matthew Warchus. Stokes also looks at the 2009 Godot at the Haymarket, directed by Sean Mathias and starring Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, as well as Endgame at the Duchess in the same year. Stokes also explores a 1991 production of Godot in some detail, which starred Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson and had set design by Derek Jarman, comparing the critical reception the two famous actors received at the time with that accorded to

xxiv Introduction

McKellen and Stewart. The chapter concludes via recourse to Rancière’s notion of the ‘emancipated spectator’ by discussing the economics that must be borne in mind when thinking about the West End. Sos Eltis presents a detailed, chronological look at Peter Hall’s Beckett productions from the 1955 Godot, through Happy Days in 1975 and 2003, and Godot again in 1997 and 2005. As Eltis points out, ‘Directing Godot changed Hall’s life’. Yet while he was ‘A lifelong admirer of Beckett’s genius and always eager to please him, Hall is nonetheless clear about where his own methods of direction diverge from those of the author.’ The resulting divergences from Beckett’s texts and methods of rehearsal are precisely documented by Eltis, and the chapter offers a fascinating portrait of an extremely productive relationship between a director and a playwright. Exploring the theatre programmes and reviews amid a range of other material, Eltis presents a thorough investigation of each production’s design, direction, rehearsal and reception, all informed by Hall’s developing relationship with Beckett’s texts and with the wider UK theatrical landscape. In the next chapter Andrew Head presents a performance history of Krapp’s Last Tape which also argues that the play ‘can be regarded simultaneously as both a product of twentieth-century avant-garde performance practice […] as well as an example of innovative civic arts provision for local and provincial audiences’. As such, Head reads the various ways in which the role of Krapp has been performed as representative of various approaches to performance. Moving from what Head calls an ‘internal’ focus, which is characterized by gesture and abstraction, to more naturalistic portrayals, Head characterizes the play’s production history as ‘a developmental progression that echoes the patterning of light and shade found in the play text’. Head also discusses a ‘cultural undercurrent of provincial, festival and youth theatre productions’, and concludes that for this single-role play ‘Ultimately, perhaps it is the actor playing Krapp who is most instrumental in shaping a performance history of this work’. In Chapter 8 Derval Tubridy looks at productions of Beckett’s short plays, where because of the length of the plays ‘the decision of how

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to group them is key to the success of the production’, while similarly ‘The intimacy of the venue has a significant impact on how the work is received.’ The chapter focuses on three sets of performances: Footfalls at the Garrick Theatre (1994); the twin-production titled Shorts for the Royal Shakespeare Company (1997); and Not I, Footfalls and Rockaby at the Royal Court (2014). It explores the controversies surrounding Deborah Warner’s direction of Fiona Shaw at the Garrick, before discussing how ‘‘‘Beckett Shorts” reconfigured the audience’s relationship with Beckett’s theatre’ thanks to Katie Mitchell’s emphasis on spatial organization and physical choreography, and then going on to examine the recent successful run of Not I, Footfalls and Rockaby with Lisa Dwan, a production where ‘darkness drew together the three plays into a unified whole’. There has been much put on the record in the form of reviews and radio and television pieces in relation to this Royal Court production, but Tubridy’s informed appraisal should last as a definitive discussion. In the following chapter Kene Igweonu looks at Talawa Company’s 2012 all-black co-production of Godot at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. While the production received hugely positive reviews, Igweonu argues that the wisdom which started to prevail among them of a post-racial equal playing field for black British actors is misguided, and that instead ‘the fact of blackness’ should not be elided, and that doing so would ‘fail to recognize Talawa’s underpinning philosophy, which renders any work they do deeply political’. Aligning the play’s central concern with waiting with that of a post-racial society to come, Igweonu argues that while Talawa’s production ‘is first about underlining the idea of our shared humanity and a shared sense of Britishness that is not essentially about a black- or white-Britishness per se’ it is ‘also about underscoring the fact of blackness’. In Chapter 10 Ksenija Horvat offers a production history of Beckett’s plays in Scotland, those originating as Scottish productions as well as those which toured in, while also offering a critical appraisal of ‘the continuing popularity of Beckett’s work in Scotland’. Scottish productions, Horvat argues, ‘reflect the preoccupations of each generation who stage them, as well as individual directorial visions complementing or

xxvi Introduction

jarring with the author’s staging guidelines’, and as such they speak to and about wider Scottish theatre. Quoting extensively from contemporaneous reviews, Horvat presents Beckett’s productions as frequently embedded in wider debates about Scottish theatre and the Edinburgh Festival, while simultaneously the chapter brings to light numerous details about the individual productions. In the book’s penultimate chapter Graham Saunders looks at the controversy surrounding Beckett’s contribution of Breath to Kenneth Tynan’s Oh! Calcutta! Arguing against James Knowlson’s interpretation of why Beckett was willing to give Tynan the play, Saunders attributes Beckett’s acquiescence to Harold Pinter’s involvement. Researching the Michael White and Kenneth Tynan archives, Saunders uses correspondence that throws light on contractual agreements among other aspects of the story to nuance the subsequent controversial aspects of Tynan’s incorporation of Beckett’s piece, including the famous use of naked bodies as well as authorial attributions and changes of title. Saunders argues that the whole issue ‘illustrates an early and significant example of Beckett’s inconsistent behaviour when it came to asserting his rights as author over the production of his work’. The final chapter turns to legacies that Beckett had for British drama via Pinter. Using a range of previously unpublished material it explores Pinter’s early fascination with Beckett, specifically his discovery of the then relatively unknown author’s prose works and how this can be read back through Pinter’s early drama. The chapter then moves to a specific case study, told in relation to certain people who Pinter and Beckett knew well, predominant among them Barbara Bray. Pinter’s Proust screenplay provides a lens through which Beckett’s influence on a British dramatist can be seen operating at the margins of British theatre culture, working at the European edges of British drama in roundabout ways and discreetly, where there is confluence as well as at times more direct influence. The chapter ends by looking at Pinter’s final stage performance, in Ian Rickson’s Krapp’s Last Tape of 2006, and by arguing for a nuanced reading of Pinter and Beckett’s relationship that can take account of Pinter’s changing concerns over time.

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The present book is accompanied by its companion Staging Beckett in Ireland and Northern Ireland, and it is hoped that these volumes presage further similar extended works on Beckett’s US and Continental European production histories. The histories drawn in the following chapters are already pushing at their national boundaries, with the American Rick Cluchey central to Beckett’s work at the Riverside, Oh! Calcutta! being first staged in the US, and Pinter’s European travels in search of Proust, to name just a few. In a contemporary context of instant global communications and Beckett’s worldwide recognition, national boundaries might themselves seem a more out-of-date idea than is Beckett’s drama. Hopefully the present volume does not too much require identifications to be made overly neat, though we recognize the absence of Wales in the following chapters, and hopefully future performance history work on Beckett can pick up Welsh productions. In focusing on individual people, places and times, Beckett’s work, whether that be in rehearsals, on well-known or relatively less well known stages, of his major or shorter works, or even refracted through the writing and performances of other authors and actors, can be seen as the mutable, adaptable yet singular and brilliant thing it is. Everyone named in the present book from directors, actors, authors, publishers, friends, colleagues, journalists, photographers, painters, even enemies, all in their various ways appear secondary to that main attraction. Most are happy to come after it, to follow in its wake and to be a part of a history which is, primarily, of that work. In a small way so too this book is of a mind with them.

Part 1

Origins, Theatres, Directors

1

The Arrival of Godot: Beckett, Cultural Memory and 1950s British Theatre David Pattie

‘Rubbish, absolute rubbish’: Godot and cultural memory In 2005 the playwright Ann Jellicoe was interviewed by Kate Dorney for the Theatre Archive Project, an AHRC-funded attempt to gather together first-hand accounts from those involved in British post-war theatre during a crucial time in its evolution (roughly, the period from 1945 through to the end of the 1960s). Unsurprisingly, the interviewers and interviewees anchored their recollections around a set of key companies, productions and events: Theatre Workshop at Stratford East; the Royal Court under George Devine (and, unavoidably, the premiere of Look Back in Anger in 1956); Olivier at the Old Vic; and Waiting for Godot, which received its premiere at the Arts Theatre in 1955 in a production directed by the young Peter Hall. Jellicoe hadn’t seen the play at the Arts, but she caught it when it transferred to the Criterion Theatre later in the year: KD: Do you remember anybody leaving Waiting for Godot? […] AJ: Oh not when I saw it. By the time I saw it, which was at the Criterion, it was definitely […] ‘I could not love anyone who would not love this play’. KD: Oh really? AJ: Oh yes, no, no. In fact I don’t ever remember hearing stories of people walk out of Waiting for Godot.

4

Staging Beckett in Great Britain KD: Apparently when it was first at the Arts Theatre […] AJ: The Arts, before it went to the Criterion? KD: Yes. AJ: Oh well, you know, so they did. KD: Well, no, so the legend has it.1

We have no independent evidence that Jellicoe’s memory is wrong; but given the reaction that the play produced in the Arts Theatre, and later when it went on tour (see below), it is unlikely that the Criterion audience greeted Beckett’s play in appreciative silence. In fact, the story of Godot’s first English production is, as Dorney points out, of furious spectators fulminating against a piece of meretricious, pretentious continental rubbish. However, as this extract shows, there is a curious disjunction between ‘the legend’ of Godot’s initial reception, and the response of most of the Theatre Archive project’s interviewees, who seem to have stayed resolutely fixed in their seats. Others interviewed for the project were not as enthusiastic, either about Beckett or about the style of theatre he seemed to represent. The theatre director Peter Lambert, in particular, was summarily dismissive. His reaction to Beckett, Ionesco, and the ‘less realistic things’ that came in to the British stage during the 1950s, was that they were Rubbish, absolute rubbish […] Because it was meaningless […] and it was meaningless for a purpose, which was to fool the audience into thinking they were being clever […] I mean, whoever saw Ionesco, really? Wasn’t he sitting in a dustbin, didn’t he and his wife sit in a dustbin throughout the whole play? […] I’m not saying one has to have realism all the time but I think one has got to have comprehensible English spoken by comprehensible people.2

It is easy, at this distance, to laugh at responses like Lambert’s; the dismissive confusion of Beckett and Ionesco is certainly comic, and the quote smacks of the fussy, insular Englishness we tend to associate with the fussy, insular 1950s. It is easy, too, to place Jellicoe and Lambert on different sides of a yawning cultural divide, and in doing so to



The Arrival of Godot

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agree, unconsciously at least, with Jellicoe; she does seem to represent the attitudes of the winning side – the people that saw Godot as the harbinger of radical change. To do so, however, elides the similarity in the two responses; both Jellicoe and Lambert are responding to the myth of Beckett, and to what that myth came to represent. Lambert’s response might slide Beckett and Ionesco together into a doubleheaded theatrical monster threatening the entrenched traditions of the English stage, but Jellicoe also links Beckett to other writers, albeit in a more subtle way. Her response – ‘I could not love anyone who would not love this play’ – is a slight variation on Kenneth Tynan’s famous review of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in 1956. Lambert and Jellicoe are equally concerned with the question of Beckett’s place in British theatre and his lasting influence, for good or ill; but both of them, unavoidably, look back on Beckett from the perspective of the early twenty-first century – a time when the importance of Beckett’s work is set. No wonder their answers explicitly or implicitly tie his work to that of other writers of the time; the reception of Godot, and of Beckett’s other work, was intimately bound up in decisive changes to the British stage. But also, it is no wonder that, in both responses, two myths of Beckett (roughly, the theatrical liberator as against the prophet of the new incomprehensibility) play themselves out. It is a measure of Beckett’s undoubted importance that his work should be mythologized in retrospect; it was a crucial component of a stillcurrent narrative that describes the course followed by British theatre in the 1950s. That narrative has been much discussed and analysed elsewhere.3 The late 1940s and early 1950s were a period of stagnation, according to this narrative; the British theatre was in the stranglehold of the commercial sector (personified by Binkie Beaumont, the éminence grise of HM Tennent, one of the main commercial theatre groups), until a few brave souls in the Royal Court and Theatre Workshop dared to produce work that responded both to the state of the contemporary nation, and to the movements that were transforming theatre in Europe and the United States. It is not that this narrative is entirely

6

Staging Beckett in Great Britain

untrue. New writing for the stage in the early 1950s was in something of a slump; a common theme in the influential theatre criticism of Harold Hobson in The Times and Tynan in The Observer was that of the antiquated irrelevance of much of what happened on the British stage. But, like all such narratives, it does reshape what at the time would have been a rather more confused jumble of facts and information; in Lambert’s and Jellicoe’s accounts, for example, Beckett finds himself tied to writers with whom he would not necessarily have made common cause, in the service of a change in the British theatre scene which he definitely did not intend. What we have here, in other words, is a strongly embedded cultural memory. As Astrid Erll points out in Memory in Culture (Palgrave, 2011), this term has a long history. It was first coined in 1988, by Jan Assmann: ‘The concept of cultural memory comprises that body of reusable texts, images, and rituals specific to each society in each epoch, whose “cultivation” serves to stabilize and convey that society’s self-image. Upon such collective knowledge, for the most part (but not exclusively) of the past, each group bases its awareness of unity and particularity’ (Assman 1995: 132). As opposed to other types of memory (described as collective memories in Assmann’s article), cultural memory allows the generation of socially fixed narratives; these narratives are then re-interrogated and re-employed to create something apparently paradoxical – a fixed point of reference whose meaning shifts, depending on the circumstances within which the memory is reanimated. For our purposes, we might note the retelling of the 1956 narrative in two critical works: John Russell Taylor’s Anger and After, published in 1962, fixes the epochal transition in British theatre throughout the narrative, whereas Dan Rebellato’s 1956 and All That (first published in 1999b), interrogates that narrative, pointing out, quite correctly, that the cultural memory as previously described is also an exercise in forgetting, in discarding those parts of the theatre of the time that do not fit (in particular, Rebellato notes the strain of normative heterosexism that ran through the story as previously told). Both versions, however, fix the narrative of a radical disruption



The Arrival of Godot

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in British theatre history firmly in place, even as they draw different meanings from that disruption. I do not intend to argue that this narrative is mistaken, and that Godot was only one staging post in a seamless transition between the theatre sector of the 1940s and the theatre sector of the 1960s. What interests me is something else, which is the role that Godot played in the construction of the cultural memory of 1950s theatre. It was a strikingly experimental text, but other, similarly unconventional but theatrically effective plays were also staged at the same time – Ionesco’s The Lesson, or John Whiting’s strange, apocalyptic Saint’s Day – without anything like Godot’s almost immediate impact. Nor can we say that the British stage was hermetically sealed from developments in the wider theatrical world; London especially was wide open to work from Europe and from the States (Jean Anouilh, Tennessee Williams et al.), so the arrival of another experimental text from Paris would not have come as a complete surprise. When we look, therefore, at the impact of the first London production, the one thing that simply cannot be argued is that the play dropped from a clear sky onto an entirely unprepared Britain. The more one examines the performance in context, the more it seems likely that the battle lines around Godot had already been drawn up. In effect, Godot was (to borrow a term from Erll) premediated. Erll defines premediation as a process which ‘draws attention to the processes of mediated memory that are at work even before the representing of a matter in a certain fashion is made […] Premediation means that existent media circulating in a given context provide schemata for future experience – its anticipation, representation and remembrance’ (2011: 142). We are familiar enough with the idea that cultural events become significant – and therefore a part of our shared cultural memory – through a process of remediation; that is, the events themselves are mediated – retold and reimagined – and that process itself determines their place in a commonly shared narrative which orders and assesses past events. Premediation, however, works before and around the original cultural moment; potentially significant

8

Staging Beckett in Great Britain

moments, images and texts take their place in a cultural landscape which has already prepared the way for them. This process is bound up with the formation of previous cycles of cultural memory; these in turn create socially accepted cultural narratives, against which new events and moments are read. For Erll, the two processes work together: ‘Pre- and remediation are basic processes of cultural memory. Their functions are manifold: first and foremost, they make the past intelligible; at the same time, they can endow media representations with the aura of authenticity; and finally, they play a decisive role in stabilizing certain mnemonic contents into powerful sites of memory’ (ibid.: 142–3). Given the events and debates surrounding its first production, Godot was subject both to premediation and remediation almost immediately, because, at the time of its first British production, the cultural narrative about British theatre was being rewritten; and, in the new narrative that was forming, there was a place for a text that posed, for a section of the British theatre audience, the right kind of formal and intellectual challenges.

‘This is why we lost the colonies!’: Godot and British theatre It all began during that lovely, lovely summer of 1955; I was minding my own business and quietly enjoying the sun at the Oasis and Serpentine swimming-pools, when a phone call came from the Arts Theatre. A Mr Peter Hall wanted me to read a play called Waiting for Godot. He was away in Spain at the time, but had left word that he hoped for a speedy decision. Whatever the play was like, it needed time to consider the pros and cons, because although I was in my usual parlous state of penury, the prospect of a few weeks work at the Club theatre didn’t exhilarate me. (Bull 1959: 166)

It is fair to say that Peter Bull, the original Pozzo in Peter Hall’s 1955 London production, was not impressed by the idea of Godot. It is also fair to say that he remained unimpressed by the play, even though he



The Arrival of Godot

9

admitted that being in Godot did him ‘far more good than any other performance I have ever given […] I have a lurking suspicion way back in my noddle that I shall end my days playing Pozzo in some of the less accessible repertory theatres of England’ (ibid.: 190–1). His objections to the play (and his bemused reaction to Godot in performance) were from the first determined both by artistic and commercial considerations; a prestige production (something like Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not for Burning, say) might not be successful initially, but appearing in the first run could lead to more lucrative, long-term engagements (Bull notes approvingly that a two and a half week run in Fry’s play led to ‘the best part of two years work’ (ibid.: 166). However, for a man schooled in the exigencies of the commercial theatre, Godot was a well-nigh impossible task. Bull couldn’t understand Pozzo, and therefore couldn’t make the character live in rehearsal until, in a flash of inspiration in the week before performance, he decided to ‘pretend Miss Margaret Rutherford was playing the role’ (ibid.: 170). The opening night was his ‘most alarming experience in the theatre’ (ibid.: 171), worse, even, than the war (‘the windiness felt on the Italian beach-heads and elsewhere was nothing to compare with one’s panic on that evening of August 3rd 1955’ [ibid.: 171]). He, and the rest of the cast, had to endure a constant stream of barracking throughout the run (one night, Bull overheard one of the audience say to the woman next to her, ‘I do wish the fat one would go’ (ibid.: 175) – the first time, as Bull indignantly notes, that he had ‘been insulted DURING a performance’ (ibid.: 176). Nor could he rely on his friends for support: Robert Morley left before the second act, and (according to Bull) would phone him periodically, to offer judgements such as ‘I have been brooding in my bath, and it is my considered opinion that the success of Waiting for Godot is the end of the theatre as we know it’ (ibid.: 177). Matters did not improve when Beckett himself made an appearance: We got the impression that he didn’t care for the London production a great deal. He gave us a party, where we were all rather rude to him,

10

Staging Beckett in Great Britain but he took it in good part, and left for France after telling us that he didn’t think the pauses were long enough. We told him that if they were any longer, not a customer would be left in the building. (Ibid.: 179)

One can tell that the experience of Godot was not one that Bull would care to repeat; after his rueful acknowledgement that Pozzo would continue to haunt him, and that he might find himself reprising the role for provincial audiences, he rounds off the chapter devoted to the play with ‘But heaven and the theatre-goers of Britain forbid!’ (ibid.: 191). It is easy, at this remove, to find the chapter that Bull devotes to Godot as comic as Lambert’s response to Beckett and the type of theatre he represented. However, it is important to note that Bull’s biography was published in 1959, before either Godot or its author had been written indelibly into the history of post-war British theatre. From our perspective, Bull is on the losing side of history, and it is easy to forget that, when he wrote his autobiography, Beckett was not yet Beckett, and Godot was not yet Godot: the author was not an icon, and the play not yet an agreed masterpiece. What is fascinating, though, about the chapter is the sense it gives of those narratives locking into place; Bull is already looking at Godot as a potential indication of theatre’s future direction. His rueful assessment – that at some point in the future he will don the bald wig and give his Pozzo in Runcorn, Scunthorpe or somewhere equally distant from the West End – implies that the play will be around long enough to mean something to a future audience. And, although he describes them in less detail, he does record some overwhelmingly positive responses from people who thought the play ‘absolutely wonderful’, ‘a great treat’, ‘gloriously funny’, ‘heartbreakingly noble’, and so on (ibid.: 178). These responses, as Bull remembers, were not without their own, especial strain: But even this type of customer could be alarming, because they either sat spellbound in respectful silence or laughed their heads off in such a sinister way that the actors thought they must have forgotten to



The Arrival of Godot

11

adjust their costumes. And it was worse when they came round to the dressing-rooms after the play to tell us what the play meant. It was far too late for that sort of thing anyhow, and it didn’t help me at this stage of my portrayal to learn that Pozzo represented Fascism, Communism, Lord Beaverbrook, Randolph Hearst, Mussolini, James Joyce, or rather surprisingly, Humpty Dumpty. (Ibid.: 178)

The subtext of Bull’s chapter is relatively clear. There is a war going on between the defenders of a play like Godot and those who (as Bull sees himself) have a far more practical engagement with the living reality of the English stage. This war is being conducted at all levels: tyro directors like Peter Hall are willing to give bizarre new texts a try, but old stagers like Robert Morley know the threats such plays pose. Respectable audience members are voluble in their displeasure (James Knowlson notes one of the comments: ‘This is why we lost the colonies!’ (quoted in Knowlson 1996: 415); on the other side, a horde of intellectuals (led, in a rare moment of critical unity, by Hobson and Tynan) declare the play to be a masterpiece – and torture the poor cast with their attempts at elucidation. What emerges most powerfully from Bull’s account is the image of a production moving across a cultural battlefield that already exists; for the arguments on either side to have any purchase (for the respectable audience members to be so vocal, and for the intellectuals (as Bull sees them) to be so enthusiastically verbose) more must be at stake than the play itself. Watching the first performances from the other side of the channel, Beckett noted (in a letter to Pamela Mitchell) his weariness with the whole affair. The first London production of Godot had been a long time coming: the play had been licensed to Donald Albery and Peter Glenville the year before, and its difficult route to performance has been well documented (see Knowlson 1996). By the time the play made its way to the stage, Beckett had grown tired of the sheer difficulty of getting the performance mounted in any form. As far as he knew, he told Mitchell, the production was ‘fairly good’ (Beckett 2011: 539); what had proved most enervating was the enforced journey the

12

Staging Beckett in Great Britain

text had taken through the institutional and commercial structures of the stage. Famous actors had passed it up: the Lord Chamberlain had demanded that it be changed and Beckett had effectively lost control over the details of the production to those who saw it, first and foremost, as a commercial proposition: I think, though I don’t know, not having been told, that the Arts production is in the nature of a try-out (in place of the usual pre-westend provincial tour) and that the play may be transferred to a larger theatre later on, this ingenuous theory being based on nothing more serious than the assumption that Albery and Co would like to get their money back and if possible a little over. (Ibid.: 539–40)

The kind of structures, in other words, that Peter Bull took for granted (because they provided the framework for his professional life) appeared to Beckett, quite understandably, to be a set of perverse restrictions, based on nothing more than the system’s need to turn a profit, while not overstepping the bounds of propriety. The system that gave Godot its first British production was one in which the idea of state-subsidized art of any kind was still relatively new. The Arts Council had been established in 1947 and for the first few years of its life the new organization did not have much money to spend. Arguably, the first decisive impact that new systems of funding had on the British theatre came towards the end of the decade, when a number of new regional repertory theatres began to appear in England. The people choosing to stage Godot, therefore, had no choice but to treat it as a commercial property; and they knew that such a difficult play would need to be carefully handled – which explains the rather tortuous, back to front nature of the production that so annoyed Beckett. Like it or not, the system had to be accommodated; there was simply no other way for the play to be staged. On the face of it, this system was fixed; even though the war had devastated London, the theatre industry survived through to the post-war period in reasonably good health. There was no automatic reason for people like Albery and Glenville to assume that a new



The Arrival of Godot

13

theatre ecosystem was likely to appear, in London or elsewhere in the country. J. B. Priestley, one of the stars of the interwar theatre, cast a characteristically dyspeptic eye over the post-war stage in 1947: Theatre at present is not controlled by dramatists, actors, producers or managers, but chiefly by theatre owners, men of property who may or may not have a taste for the drama […] [It] is not that the owners are purely ‘commercial’, but that they cannot help satisfying their own particular tastes […] What I condemn is the property system that allows public amenities and a communal art to be controlled by persons who happen to be rich enough to acquire playhouses. (Priestley 1947: 6)

Priestley was undoubtedly right: the London stage (the hub around which the rest of British theatre revolved) was controlled by a relatively small number of producers, linked to each other through business arrangements of byzantine complexity; the theatre outside of London was linked closely to the commercial operations of the capital, both through complex chains of ownership and because material that was either on its way to the capital (and being fine-tuned in the provinces), or material that had already proved itself in London was a crucial part of the programming of the larger regional theatres. The regional repertory theatres were in a rather more parlous state. For those without the means to attract large touring productions or to attract local government funding (or the limited amount of Arts Council money available), the future seemed rather bleak – as new forms of mass entertainment became more widely available during the decade, audience numbers began to fall away, and those repertory theatres worked on the weekly system began to close. What irked Priestley, however, was not so much the economic durability of a theatre model based on the commercial sector, but the ethos such a sector promoted; it would, of necessity, favour the profitable over the artistic, and the tastes of the powerful individual over the will of the collective. Priestley’s concerns (which were echoed by others at the time – see below) were not voiced in a political vacuum. Generally, in Britain in

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Staging Beckett in Great Britain

the immediate post-war period, the tide was running in favour of the idea of state intervention: both the memory of the depressed 1930s and the recent experience of a command-controlled war economy seemed to suggest both to the Left and the Right that government should play a greater role in the organization of the country. The welfare state, proposed during the war, was cemented into place; in the same year as Priestley delivered his broadside against the commercial stage, the NHS was formed; and the Labour government started to nationalize key sections of British industry (a practice continued by the Conservatives from 1951 onwards). The formation of the Arts Council could be seen as the cultural arm of state intervention – a kind of Welfare State of the Arts: this though, is a bit of an exaggeration, given the fact that it was a relatively small player in the theatre economy for much of the 1950s. What the Council did do, arguably, was to provide state backing for a view of the British stage that Priestley for one would have wholeheartedly supported. Bill Williams, the secretary of the Council in the early 1950s said, in a speech in Liverpool in 1953: The theatre in London is dominated by show business organised along strict commercial lines. There are some specifically obnoxious features about the London theatre. One is the profiteering in bricks and mortar by speculators […] The consequence […] is that any show which does not reveal immediate signs of a long run is whipped off at once. The twin mottoes of the London theatre are: long run or sudden death. (Quoted in Roberts 1999: 14)

Strong words, but not out of place at the time. The TUC had argued as much at their annual conference in 1944, and a 1948 conference (organized by two theatre journals – New Theatre and Theatre Journal – and attended by a representative cross-section of the great and good in British theatre, although not, tellingly, by the Theatre Managers Association who pulled out of the gathering at the last minute) called for radical reform of the theatre sector’s infrastructure. These strident calls for change did not have an immediate effect; rather, they functioned as a kind of background chorus, spreading the argument



The Arrival of Godot

15

that British theatre was somehow deficient, badly organized, and out of step with the times. Godot, then, arrived in a theatrical environment in which the idea that a fundamental change in the nature and structure of British theatre was imperative was already gaining traction. Much the same narrative was rehearsed regularly by two of the key tastemakers of the time. Information about new productions and theatrical trends had to pass through a relatively small number of outlets; in particular, the London theatre critics of the time played a crucial role in premediating the arrival of texts that could fulfil the function of Godot, and the cluster of productions that surrounded it. The most influential reviewers – Hobson and Tynan – saw themselves not only as critics of individual productions, but as evangelists for a better British theatre. They did not agree on much (Hobson was a Christian Scientist, Tynan a Socialist; Hobson tended to champion poetic and absurdist dramas, Tynan to favour socially engaged theatre), but they did agree that the British stage was moribund. Compare Hobson in 1952: ‘I came back [from Paris] to a country whose newspapers are mainly filled with tidings of war, insurrection, industrial unrest, political controversy, and parliamentary misbehaviour, and to a theatre from which it seems to me, in the first shock of reacquaintance, that all echoes of these things is shut off as by sound-proofed walls’ (quoted in Shellard 1995: 98) with Tynan in 1954: [The] theatre must widen its scope, broaden its horizon so that Loamshire appears merely as the play-pen, not as the whole place of drama. We need plays about cab-men and demi-gods, plays about warriors, politicians, and grocers […] I counsel aggression because, as a critic, I had rather be a war correspondent than a necrologist. (Tynan 2007: 37)

The tone is different, but the underlying narrative is the same; British theatre is sealed away from reality, systemically incapable of producing art that responds to a world in the middle of radical transformation. Moreover, the British stage could not be relied upon to generate such art all by itself. There were glimmers of hope (Tynan found them in

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Staging Beckett in Great Britain

Olivier’s acting; Hobson approved of the poetic drama of Fry); but for signs of true theatrical health, both Tynan and Hobson looked elsewhere – Hobson mainly to France, Tynan to Germany (and especially to Brecht) and the States. There were other influential sites of theatrical agitation – in particular, the magazine Encore, a determined advocate of new forms of drama, began publication in 1954. But even Encore rode in the slipstream of Hobson and (especially) Tynan, and only really came into its own in the latter part of the decade. For both Tynan and Hobson to champion Godot was not simply a happy coincidence, but a significant cultural event in itself. Beckett’s play, then, fitted into a narrative that was already shaping itself around the ideal new theatre text, or at least around one version of it: the play could not, by any standards, be classed as commercial (Terence Rattigan’s Aunt Edna, the archetypally staid, unadventurous British audience member, would hate it); it was determinedly experimental, and could therefore be used as a counterweight to British writing, which was, as the argument went, predictable and hermetically sealed off from the real and the new; and it had the right provenance. Both Beckett and Ionesco (whose The Lesson premiered in London in the same year as Godot) benefitted from the fact that their work was first produced in Paris. The link between the French capital and the London stage was well established. Jean Anouilh’s work was regularly produced in the West End, and Fry had adapted Anouilh’s L’Invitation au Château as Ring Around the Moon in 1950; the London stage also hosted the work of Jean Giraudoux, and adaptations of Gide’s novels. Paris was one of the places that both Hobson and Tynan looked at with some envy. Tynan noted ruefully: Last week I welcomed a young Frenchwoman engaged in writing a thesis on contemporary English drama. We talked hopefully of John Whiting: but before long embarrassment moved me to ask why she had not chosen her own theatre as a subject for study. She smiled wryly. ‘Paris is in decline,’ she said. ‘Apart from Sartre, Anouilh, Camus, Cocteau, Ayme, Claudel, Beckett, and Salacrou, we have almost nobody.’ (Ibid.: 37)



The Arrival of Godot

17

Even if one subtracts the undoubted rhetorical inflation from this, the intent is clear; the English stage’s closest continental rival is in the middle of a theatrical golden age, and the English stage is nowhere. Beckett’s name was therefore in front of that section of the theatregoing audience that read Tynan avidly; and he had advantages that the other writers on the list lacked. He was Irish, and could therefore be fitted in to a lineage of Irish writers whose sole function seemed to be to revivify the London theatre – the latest innovator from the land of Shaw, Synge, and O’Casey. The play itself was, if not conventional, then at least performatively comprehensible; although variety was not the commercial force it had been earlier in the century, enough of the performance styles associated with it remained in the public consciousness to allow Godot’s early reviewers to place it squarely in the tradition of music-hall (Hobson referred to music-hall crosstalk in his review, Tynan to the doubletalk of vaudeville). This would also have helped some sections of the audience to negotiate the apparent strangeness of two tramps on a more or less bare stage: the mise-enscène might have been odd, but the rhythm of the text and the look of the performers suggested Flanagan and Allen. Lastly, the initial framing of the play as one which engaged in the deepest questions of human existence (even if it left the exact nature of that examination undefined) was in itself a draw, at least for a certain segment of the audience, as Dorien Brooks, a theatregoer in the 1950s interviewed for the Theatre Archive Project, noted Waiting for Godot was a most memorable occasion. For the simple reason that when I got home and actually talked about it to my husband, ad inf[initum], he said to me ‘What was it about exactly?’, because he’d read the crits, and they were inscrutable, and I said to him, ‘Well if you asked me to sit down and write a précis about this, I couldn’t do it’ and yet I was moved to the very depth of my being.4

But even the idea that Godot was a philosophical rebus was itself a premediated perception; the play, the Theatre Archive interviewees mainly concur, had something to do with existentialism (even if the

18

Staging Beckett in Great Britain

link is undefined), and this too came from Paris – and as such was part of the thriving, innovative cultural scene that London so conspicuously lacked. Another Theatre Archive project interviewee, Lionel Burman, best caught the strange mixture of the familiar and the strange, the exotic and the homely, and the new and established in the play: Let’s face it Waiting for Godot is an ordinary play in a sense that things succeed act after act and they change from act to act only slightly. I can see that more in terms of the aesthetics that were coming in in the fifties and sixties. The influence of existentialism, the idea of time and duration, so that for me quite a lot of Beckett is more like music than drama in a way, it’s musical variations. What I said earlier about knowing the context of a play is important with Beckett, I think you’ve really got to know something about the background he came from not only in Ireland and his interest in sport and activities but his experience during the occupation and then the enormous influx of existentialism and the whole Sartrean ideology to which he reacted and responded.5

This memory, like all the interviews, is fleshed out from the perspective of the early 2000s; but it chimes with the terms used to discuss Godot and Beckett from the beginning – terms which in themselves were part of the theatrical and cultural debates of the time. There is a direct link back, from these quotes, to the frighteningly intense audience members that bearded Bull in his dressing room after the show. From Burman’s memories, and from the responses of some members of the audience at the time, one gets the sense of a cultural debate already underway – and of the almost immediate co-option of Godot as a key text in this debate.

Godot’s arrival It is not that a Godot-shaped hole opened up in the midst of the 1950s West End, and that the play snugly fitted into its cultural slot; it was not the only potentially revolutionary text produced in 1955.



The Arrival of Godot

19

Godot, though, was the most thoroughly premediated of the texts that appeared in that year. It offered some reassuringly familiar elements to a section of the British audience, but it also came from the correct theatrical location. It was allied (or could be allied) to the philosophy associated with that location, and it could be co-opted into an already heated debate over the nature and purpose of British theatre. That being said, a production in London of one play would not be enough on its own to change the theatrical tides. Godot in Florida in 1956 (or in New York), or Godot in Dublin, while important productions, did not have quite the same level of cultural impact. In London, things were different, not least because the important parts of the 1956 and All That myth (to borrow the title of Rebellato’s book) were already in place before Godot’s premiere, and also because the play did not come alone. In 1955, Ionesco was premiered, Brecht’s Mother Courage was performed, and Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was staged in London. Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop had taken up residence in the Theatre Royal, Stratford East in 1953, and had begun to turn its attention to new writing. In 1956 they premiered Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow (in a version heavily adapted by the company during rehearsal). The Berliner Ensemble came to London in 1956, and The English Stage Company started to produce work at the Royal Court that year. However, it could also be said that the very production system that Beckett and Bull deplored also helped the play have a lasting impact. Godot went off on tour, much to Bull’s chagrin, to Cambridge, Blackpool, Harrow, Brighton, Streatham Hill, Golders Green and Birmingham (where Bull and Timothy Bateson left the production). During 1956, Godot was also performed in Hornchurch, Edinburgh, Manchester, Oxford, Leeds and Leatherhead. The tour coincided both with the premiere of Look Back in Anger in May 1956, and (just) the arrival of the Berliner Ensemble in September. The play was then revived in three significant provincial theatres: Nottingham Playhouse and Bristol Theatre Royal in 1957, and Oxford Playhouse in 1958. In other words, the impact of the play was felt across a span of time when

20

Staging Beckett in Great Britain

the debate about the future direction of British theatre gained traction (and when the premediated space that Godot had partially filled was being further populated by other texts and companies). During the period, Beckett’s play was still visible – a performative presence in a shifting theatrical landscape – because the initial contract with Albery and Glenville stipulated that it tour. In The International Reception of Samuel Beckett, Mary Bryden captures well the sheer oddness of Godot, landing as it did in the West End during the ‘dog days of that exceptionally warm summer of 1955’: Over at the Stoll Theatre on Kingsway, the comfortable orientalist fantasies of the musical Kismet, set in Baghdad, were enjoying huge popularity. About a mile away, however, […] the characters of Godot, by contrast, appeared hopelessly immured in abjection and indigence […]. (Bryden 2009: 41)

It could be said, though, that it was Godot’s and Beckett’s good fortune to be unlikely in the right way; in a way which enabled them to become a bone of cultural contention, but which also provided, for its supporters and those members of the audience who favoured it, a combination of strangeness and familiarity. A premediated narrative existed before Godot’s first London production – one in which the London stage was hopelessly outmoded, crassly commercial, and nowhere near as culturally and philosophically vibrant as stages elsewhere; and one in which British theatre shared the same problems as British culture (insularity, insecurity, and a craving for the reassuring and intellectually easy). Godot could not satisfy all of the narrative on its own (Beckett was Irish, not English, like Osborne; the play did not deal directly with a society in the midst of uncomfortable change, like Look Back in Anger; and Beckett, unlike Brecht, did not provide a set of handy theories through which his work could be discussed). Beckett’s play, however, looked enough like a version of the type of work that (for a proportion of its audience) the British stage lacked. This ensured that, as premediation became remediation, Godot was already an integral part of the developing cultural memory of the 1950s.

2

‘I think this does call for a firm stand’: Beckett at the Royal Court S. E. Gontarski

Ours is not to be a producer’s theatre, nor an actor’s theatre; it is to be a writer’s theatre. George Devine, 1956 I have always regarded the Court as you and our understanding as essentially a personal one between you and me rather than with the Society. The theatre will never be the same for me with you gone. SB to Devine, 7 March 1965 [T]o work on a Beckett play with Sam directing is an experience never to be forgotten. Jocelyn Herbert Samuel Beckett’s working relationship with the Royal Court Theatre, where some of his most stunning English-language productions were staged and where his most protracted aesthetic and cultural battles were fought, was unprecedented in British theatre history, but the Royal Court meant for Beckett less a building, a playhouse, a society, a stage than a collection of people, especially those associated with the English Stage Company, particularly George Devine and Jocelyn Herbert. At the Royal Court, particularly during the Devine years, Beckett was playwright and shadow director and so simultaneously both tutor and tutee, master and apprentice, and as Martin Esslin has noted, ‘In fact the Royal Court was the home of Beckett’ (Doty and

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Staging Beckett in Great Britain

Harbin 1990: 208). In 1956 the English Stage Company declared itself ‘A Writer’s Theatre’, and, at a conference in 1981, Esslin went on to laud such emphasis as the Royal Court maintained: ‘this is a theatre that really does have respect for the writers and doesn’t go in for one of the great diseases of the theatre of our period, namely, the so-called director’s theatre where the director has some concept which he imposes and thinks the script is little more than raw material’ (ibid.: 205). Over his career in the theatre Beckett would be extraordinarily fortunate to find producers and directors who ‘have respect for the writer’: Roger Blin in Paris, Alan Schneider in the United States, and, perhaps chief among them, George Devine in the UK. Devine had been interested in Samuel Beckett’s work at least since he developed the English Stage Company at the Royal Court in 1956. Almost immediately thereafter Devine was in touch with Beckett about staging Beckett’s first mime and was negotiating the English-language rights for what would be Beckett’s second produced play, Fin de partie. When he heard that the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre had backed out of or postponed its commitment to stage the play, Devine rushed to Paris to offer the Royal Court Theatre as a venue for the premiere in French as part of what he conceived as a ‘French Fortnight’ in London. Thus Beckett’s second major play would have its French and subsequently its English-language premieres in London at the Royal Court, beginning on 3 April 1957 in French, the production accompanied by Deryk Mendel in Acte sans paroles. ‘The Court agreed to pay production costs, budgeted at 760 Pounds, and running expenses for one week,’ according to Terry W. Browne; even more importantly, something of a quid pro quo was established: ‘As part of the agreement Beckett […would] translate Fin de partie into English and give the English Stage Company the option to mount its own production at a later date using the original sets’ (Browne 1975: 32, emphasis added), which it did, finally, opening, not without substantial resistance, on 28 October 1958 and running for a respectable 38 performances (if only at 40 per cent capacity, according to Browne [114]). Although the French production ran for only six performances it opened with a gala, the French Ambassador



Beckett at the Royal Court

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in attendance. Beckett would attend rehearsals for the Blin production, but from what he saw he deemed the London production ‘not very satisfactory. But I am told the première went much better,’ he continued (Beckett 2014: 40). From its short Royal Court run, the production went to the Studio des Champs-Elysées in Paris where it opened on 26 April, and where, as Beckett wrote to A. J. ‘Con’ Leventhal in a letter of 28 April, ‘Blin has made enormous progress since London and gives now a quite extraordinary performance. The play gains greatly by the smallness and intimacy of the Studio’ (ibid.: 45). This was a watershed moment for Beckett not only because it established his working relationship to Devine and the Royal Court, but because he agreed as well to translate Fin de partie for the Court, a play he deemed almost untranslatable, or at least, as he wrote to his American publisher, Barney Rosset, on 6 April 1957, ‘the French is at least 20% undecantable into English and will forfeit that much of whatever edge and tension it may have’ (ibid.: 38). Rosset too was among those who had gained Beckett’s confidence as a publisher, and Beckett now decided to expand Rosset’s dossier; he would transfer the American performance rights from his English theatrical agent, Curtis Brown, and offer them to Rosset, even as this decision ‘would bring down, from Covent Garden and I suppose from [Godot’s American producer, Michael] Myerberg, thunderbolts upon my head’ (ibid.: 39).1 Equally important was Beckett’s decision to sell the English publication rights of this new play to his American publisher: ‘When Faber offered to advance me money on the Fin de partie translation I replied I was selling it to you, and I prefer it that way. […] I do not think there is anything in my contract with the Royal Court that infirms the above’ (ibid.: 38); that is, with that decision there would be no opportunity for Faber and Faber to publish an edited, truncated or censored version of Endgame as it had for the first publication of Waiting for Godot, which Beckett deemed mutilated.2 But the Lord Chamberlain would make the staging of Beckett’s second play at least as difficult as it had his first. The French language production, however, gained its licence with little interference, and

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Staging Beckett in Great Britain

the French production was even recorded in the studio on 5 April for national broadcast (2 May 1957) on the BBC’s Third Programme, which had broadcast All That Fall on 13 January 1957.3 The English language premiere of Endgame, on the other hand, was initially refused its performance licence. As Terry Browne put the matter: When Fin de partie received its world première, in French at the Royal Court […] no objections were raised to it by the Lord Chamberlain. However, when the play was submitted to him a year later in English, he found parts of it blasphemous and insisted upon alterations. Beckett agreed to some changes, but to others he was obdurate. After six months of negotiations the main point was resolved – to the satisfaction of the Lord Chamberlain, if not entirely satisfying to the English Stage Company or Beckett. In the scene in which Hamm, Clov, and Nagg all pray to God and then give up, Hamm was forbidden to say, ‘The bastard! He doesn’t exist.’ Instead the Lord Chamberlain accepted, ‘The swine!’ as somehow or other less offensive. (Browne 1975: 58)

The conflict with the Lord Chamberlain’s office runs even deeper than Browne suggests as representatives of the Lord Chamberlain seemed particularly hostile to Beckett during this procedure. Assistant Examiner, Sir Vincent Troubridge, writing to the Lord Chamberlain on 14 December 1957, put the matter thus: This is the English version of ‘Fin de Partie,’ the ridiculous, despairing, meaningless play by Samuel Beckett (author of Waiting for Godot) that I read in French before its production earlier this year. It is a play about an old blind man who confines his father and mother in two dust bins and talks interminably. I refer the Lord Chamberlain to my report on the French version for at least the sequence of actual events, if not what it all means, which is Mr Beckett’s secret.4

Beckett’s replacements in a letter of 26 December 1957 that answered Devine’s letter of 21 December were in fact as follows, Beckett listing the changes that he considered ‘easy’ compared to a replacement of ‘The bastard’:



Beckett at the Royal Court

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1. Replace ‘balls’ by ‘botch’ and, four lines later, ‘botches by ‘ballockses’. Or, if they object to ‘ballockses’, simply replace ‘balls’ by ‘hames’. 2. Replace ‘pee’ by ‘urinate’ or, if they object to ‘urinate’, by ‘relieve myself ’. 3. Replace ‘pee’ by ‘urination’ or, if they object to ‘urination’, by ‘relief ’. 5. [sic] It is a pity to lose ‘arses’ because of its consonance with ‘ashes’. ‘Rumps’ I suppose would be the next best. (Beckett 2014: 81)5 The Lord Chamberlain’s office at first accepted the following excisions or changes: 1. ‘balls of the fly’ replaced by ‘botch of the fly’ 2. ‘I’d like to pee’ replaced by ‘I want to relieve myself ’ 3. ‘What about that pee’ replaced by ‘What about that relieving yourself ’ 4. ‘bastard’ replaced by ‘swine’ 5. ‘arses’ replaced by ‘rumps’. The Lord Chamberlain then went further, asking for the elimination of all the lines except number four above, which replacement was agreed, finally. On 22 January 1958, a defensive Assistant Comptroller wrote to the Lord Chamberlain to suggest a strategy for dealing with what might have been a public outcry: I stress that the Lord Chamberlain has not banned the play, but only required a small alteration which could be made with no detriment to the play if its author was not a conceited ass. If they put it about that the play has been banned we should do our best to prove them liars.6

One compromise that Devine had offered was to play the offending prayer scene, from ‘Let us pray to God’ to ‘he doesn’t exist’ (Endgame 1958: 54–5), in French, a version the Lord Chamberlain had already accepted, but Beckett demurred in his letter to Devine on 26 December 1957:

26

Staging Beckett in Great Britain I am afraid I simply cannot accept omission or modification of the prayer passage which appears to me indispensable as it stands. And to play it in French would amount to an omission, for nine tenths of the audience. I think this does call for a firm stand. It is no more blasphemous than ‘My God, my god, why hast Thou forsaken me?’ (Beckett 2014: 81)

Beckett further noted that he had already made some changes for publication: ‘I have made a few inoffensive changes (including as it happens “ballockses” for “botches”) when correcting proofs’ (ibid.). By 3 January 1958, the Lord Chamberlain seemed to be compromising to some extent in a letter to Devine from Sir Norman Gwatkin, suggesting the elimination of ‘God’ or the mumbling of much of the speech and finally accepting Beckett’s suggestion and substituting ‘the swine’ for ‘The bastard’ (Beckett 2014: 89 n.1). Beckett, on the other hand, hardened his position on the centrality of the prayer scene in a letter to Devine of 5 January 1958: ‘I am obliged to maintain the prayer scene as I wrote it’ (ibid.). At this point, then, or rather by February 1958, a licence for Endgame had been refused by the Lord Chamberlain (see note 6 below). Six months on, 7 July 1958, Beckett was still adamant: It is quite impossible for me to consent to a weakening of this passage. If the position is that the Lord Chamberlain, having taken his stand against ‘bastard’, is now committed to its removal, but would accept a different term of more or less equal force, then a compromise is still possible. I could accept, for example, ‘The swine, he doesn’t exist’. (Ibid.: 157)

At this point Beckett was headed to ‘Jugoslavia’ (which he called ‘Titonia’ after its dictator Marshal Tito) so further communication on the issue would not be possible. On his return on 28 July 1958, he wrote to Devine as follows: ‘There are no alternatives to “bastard” agreeable to me. Nevertheless I have offered them “swine” in its place. This is definitely and finally as far as I’ll go’ (ibid.: 165). In the same letter of 28 July, Beckett demonstrated his gratitude for the protracted battle that Devine was waging on his behalf: ‘I should



Beckett at the Royal Court

27

like to assure you, whatever course you adopt, and to mark in a small way my gratitude to you personally and to the Royal Court theatre, that I undertake here and now to offer you the first option on UK rights of my next play, in the unlikely event of my ever writing another’ (ibid.: 165–6). Endgame was delayed to the point that it would finally appear on a double bill with the world premiere of the promised next play, Krapp’s Last Tape, on 28 October 1958, the latter conceived for Patrick Magee whose work Beckett had known from the previous year’s BBC production of All That Fall. Endgame of 1958 would feature Devine himself as Hamm and the actor many consider Beckett’s favourite, Jack MacGowran, as Clov. In fact Faber and Faber in its 1958 hardcover edition of Endgame would feature Devine as Hamm, hands folded in the disputed prayer scene. For Krapp the first prospect would be Alec Guinness, but he declined the role (ibid.: 124); Magee then would be perfectly acceptable to Beckett, who as usual with his Royal Court productions, oversaw rehearsals closely and made some changes to his text in the process, namely that he originally wanted the voice of Krapp to come directly from the tape recorder itself but that proved impractical and risky in production: ‘This is probably too obvious to be worth saying, but when writing the thing I actually thought of the voice as coming from the visible machine!’ (ibid.). Moreover, after writing Krapp’s Last Tape Beckett worried about productions outside of his oversight, particularly its American performance. He wrote to Rosset on 1 April 1958 to say of its premiere, ‘I’d hate it to be made a balls of at the outset and that’s why I question it’s [sic] being let out to small groups beyond our controp [sic] before we get it done more or less right and set a standard of fidelity at least’ (ibid.: 123). On 10 April 1958 Beckett wrote to Rosset that he was grateful for Rosset’s withdrawing Krapp from Mary Manning’s The Poet’s Theatre of Cambridge, MA, adding to Manning that he did not want the play ‘rushed into production in the States’ (ibid.: 128 n.2), thus giving priority not only to the Royal Court production but to his oversight of the same as well, noting to Rosset

28

Staging Beckett in Great Britain

that he was off to London to oversee the Devine production, ‘where I hope to get the mechanics of it right’ (ibid.: 127).7 That next play at the Royal Court would be Happy Days (already premiered in New York by Alan Schneider, it opened at the Cherry Lane Theatre on 17 September 1961 with Ruth White as Winnie) and would again involve the Royal Court’s set designer Herbert whose ‘excellent sketches’ Beckett approved of, particularly the one (where Winnie has her head on the mound). I like it very much and if this effect can be obtained when the set is lit I think it is just about right. The sky might perhaps be a little hotter (slightly more orange at the top only). Blue sky I’m afraid simply won’t work – tant pis for the word in the text. (Ibid.: 498)8

The Happy Days production was not otherwise going well, as Beckett noted to Patrick Magee on 17 September 1962: Things are in such a mess at the Court – no Winnie decided on yet [Beckett had suggested American Ruth White on Schneider’s recommendation but finally Brenda Bruce was Devine’s choice], and opening scheduled for Oct. 18th! – that it may not come off at all. I shall know this week one way or another. If it does come off I shall be there for rehearsals this day week. (Ibid.: 501)

And he wrote to Tom MacGreevy on 30 September 1962, ‘I go to London tomorrow week for rehearsals of Happy Days and will be there till the opening on Nov. 1st’ (ibid.). By 9 October the production was looking promising, ‘After two days’ rehearsing I’m very hopeful. There are some good things about her. It had started off badly – voice and inflexions all wrong. Now much better’ as she put on a ‘Half Scots half Cockney’ accent, ‘amazing what an improvement it makes. […] If she goes on progressing at the same rate it should be really quite something’ (ibid.: 507). But to Barbara Bray he admitted on 11 October 1962: Poor rehearsal today, B.B. [Brenda Bruce] quite lost in text & business. When I went to theatre this morning George asked me (nicely) to let them work alone today. I seem to be upsetting her. That is, failing in



Beckett at the Royal Court

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what I came to do. I’ll let them get on without me now & then, every now & then. […] George rang me after sine me rehearsals to tell me how it had gone, obviously upset at having to dismiss me. In a burst of maximanimity I suggested I shd. leave them in peace on Monday again & only renew intrusion on the Tuesday. (Ibid., 507–8)

Beckett remained cordial with Devine, however, spending weekends ‘Down here [in Long Sutton, near Basingstoke, Hampshire] with George & Jocelyn & divers children since yesterday till tomorrow’ (ibid.: 509), but he continued to complain about rehearsals which had not gone well in his absence: Saw Bruce again Friday. She went through [the text]. Disastrous. [I] Stuttered a few groans and fled. Shall have it out here with G.[eorge] today. But fear nothing to be done. He has her back on her puke English – only dead flat – if you know what I mean. I shall get the Scots back or perish in the attempt. […] Haven’t suffered & sweated so much for decades. (Ibid.: 509–10)

Despite such overt tensions as Happy Days generated, Beckett’s relationship with Devine remained exceptional; by November of 1962 Beckett offered him first option on all his theatre work, beginning with Play. Writing to American director Alan Schneider on 7 November, Beckett notes What I should like to know from you and Barney [Rosset] is whether or not I am free to make arrangements in London & Europe. I mean, do you want the world première or merely the new world? I have given the script to Devine. I have decided to give Royal Court first option on all my work in the future, this applying both to revivals & to new work. Devine is the nicest and most decent man one could meet and this is very important to me. He is not a great director, but most conscientious and painstaking and will always let me be in on production. Happy Days opened Nov 1, with Brenda Bruce & Peter Duguid. I don’t think she carries the guns for the part, but she has done well and got – I am told – great praise. Excellent set by Jocelyn Herbert. I haven’t read the critics and don’t intend to read any more notices of my work.

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Staging Beckett in Great Britain Friendly or not it’s all misunderstanding. [Harold] Hobson for as usual, [Kenneth] Tynan as usual against. (Ibid.: 513, emphasis added)

Beckett wrote to Herbert on 8 November, praising her set and confirming his decision about offering the Royal Court options on all of his theatre work, ‘I wrote to [John] Barber [of Curtis Brown] to tell him what I told George that evening in Chelsea, viz. first option on everything, revival or new, to Royal Court in future. I feel happy about this’ (ibid.: 515). By July 1963 a fledgling National Theatre, then at The Old Vic, approached Devine ‘with a suggestion he should produce [i.e. direct] PLAY for them next Spring, with a Sophocles play [Philoctetes]. I like the idea and have asked for further details. I wd. of course be there for those rehearsals’ (ibid.: 565, emphasis added). Play would open 7 April 1964, but not without protracted battles that threatened the production since the work seems, in many respects, to be an all-out assault on theatre itself – as, in fact, Eleuthéria and Godot had been a decade earlier – drama playing against itself, theatre against the very idea of theatre. If Godot eliminated ‘action’ from the stage, Play all but eliminated motion. If Godot eliminated intelligible causality, Play all but eliminated intelligibility itself. Beckett at first modified his stage directions on tempo from the ‘whole movement as rapid as possible’ in Typescript 5 to the final ‘Rapid tempo throughout’ (Beckett 1999: 307), but he evidently urged the former to Devine, much to the chagrin of the National Theatre’s Literary Manager and general Beckett foe Tynan. Rehearsals of Play, even without the Lord Chamberlain involved, seemed to generate a whole new set of conflicts between producers and directors, or rather between those who understood and accepted Beckett’s aesthetic shifts and those who could not. As Billie Whitelaw, who was introduced to Beckett’s work through this production, recalls: ‘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’ (Whitelaw quoted in



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Knowlson 1978: 85). Tynan, in fact, attacked Beckett’s presence at rehearsals, finding his influence finally intrusive and detrimental, as he noted in an acrimonious exchange of letters with the play’s director: Before Beckett arrived at rehearsals, Play was recognizably a work we all liked and were eager to do. The delivery of the lines was (rightly) puppet-like and mechanical, but not wholly dehumanized. […] 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. […] I trust the play completely, and trust your production of it. What I don’t 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 Samuel Beckett doesn’t. (Tynan 1994: 84–5)

Devine (ever the Beckett loyalist) retorted: The presence of Beckett was a great help to me, and to the actors. […] To play the play as you indicate would be to demolish its dramatic purpose and turn it into literature. […] I certainly would never have leased the play to the National Theatre if I had thought the intention was to turn it into something it isn’t, to please the majority [emphasis added]. (Devine quoted in Wardle 1978: 208)

Critic Bamber Gascoigne, however, shared Tynan’s reservations and complained 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 such charges, Beckett would go on to write yet another ‘unintelligible’ play, Not I. When American actress Jessica Tandy complained that the play’s suggested running time of 23 minutes rendered the work unintelligible to audiences, Beckett telegraphed back his now famous (but oft misconstrued) injunction, ‘I’m not unduly concerned with intelligibility. I hope the piece may work on the nerves

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of the audience not its intellect’ (Brater 1974: 200). The play certainly worked on the nerves of at least its 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’ (Whitelaw quoted in Knowlson 1978: 86). 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’ (ibid.: 87). From Play onward and despite the Tynans of British theatre, Beckett’s stage images would grow increasingly dehumanized, reified and metonymic, featuring dismembered or incorporeal creatures as Beckett’s became a theatre of body parts and spectres, a theatre striving for transparency rather than solidity, a theatre, finally, trying to undo itself. And as plot and character dissipated, the playing space grew more delimited, circumscribed, controlled. The proscenium arch, however, is indispensable for such works, framing a playing space. The works from Play onward make little sense performed on modern, thrust stages or in the round. In his programme notes to the English premiere, Devine, clearly echoing Beckett on the subject, sounds prophetic: [V]ery 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. (University of Reading Samuel Beckett Archive ms. 1581/15)

Despite Devine’s implication that the anti-literary nature of Beckett’s dialogue – or rather the three monologues – in Play is characteristic of



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Beckett’s theatre work, his comments fit the original texts and productions of Godot, Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape, or Happy Days poorly. But it is precisely the aesthetic perspective Beckett was to bring to revising these works. Devine’s observation presages not only the theatre Beckett would write from Play onward, but it also anticipates Beckett’s need to revise and even to reconstitute all his theatre works through an aesthetics that percolates through Play. Waiting for Godot would finally come to the Royal Court in Anthony Page’s direction with Jack MacGowran as Estragon and Nicol Williamson as Vladimir in December of 1964, a production, as was his custom at the Royal Court, that Beckett oversaw with Page’s blessing. Page would revive his staging in New York in 2009 for the Roundabout Theatre Company at the legendary, if not infamous, Studio 54, with Nathan Lane, Bill Irwin and John Goodman. The set, unfortunately, was disastrous, simulating a ring of stone, the constrictions of which, finally, did little more than limit the ability of the actors to move about the stage. In an educational programme supplement, Page noted ‘I directed it formerly in ’65 with Beckett there most of the time. So I still had the confidence, more or less, that I knew what he was after’ (roundabouttheatre.org/upstage/godot.pdf). Page would work under Beckett’s close supervision again on the 1973 Royal Court Theatre production of Not I with Billie Whitelaw cited above. Shortly after Devine’s second ‘firm stand’ on behalf of Beckett’s theatrical vision, he retired from day-to-day activities at the Royal Court, and Beckett wrote on 7 March 1965, replying to a request from Peter Hall for Beckett’s work to become a permanent part of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s repertory. A young Hall had become Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1960 (and remained until 1968) and in addition to turning it into a year-round company and establishing a London base for it, mostly for transfers of successful productions from Stratford-upon-Avon, the ambitious Hall wanted to expand the RSC’s repertory to contemporary work from home and abroad, precisely the aegis that Devine had set for himself and for the English Stage Company at the Royal Court. Hall had directed Waiting

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for Godot for its London premiere at the Arts Theatre in August of 1955 and so had done battle with the Lord Chamberlain on Beckett’s behalf as well, and this just at the time that Devine was establishing the credibility of the English Stage Company. Hall had, moreover, recently produced Endgame with the RSC at the Aldwych Theatre, the first of the group’s London bases, in July 1964, with essentially what might be deemed a Royal Court cast. The playbill for that production carried the following credit: Endgame (Fin de Partie) was given its world première by a company from Paris at the Royal Court Theatre, London, on April 2nd, 1957. It later opened in Paris. The following year an English version was seen at the Royal Court. The play was very successfully revived in Paris recently [i.e. February] with an English cast and two of the cast of the Paris revival now appear at the Aldwych: Patrick Magee (as Hamm) and Jack MacGowran (as Clov which he also acted at the Royal Court in 1958). The Aldwych production opened on July 9th, 1964.10

Beckett replied to Devine as follows: He [Hall] knows of my commitment to the Court. I have always regarded the Court as you and our understanding as essentially a personal one between you and me rather than with the Society [i.e. the earlier incarnation of the English Stage Company as the English Stage Society Ltd.]. The theatre will never be the same for me with you gone and quite frankly I am not interested in maintaining its priority in your absence. If you agree with this view I shall be free to consider whether or not to accept Hall’s offer. If on the other hand you ask me to maintain the priority after your departure I shall bow to that view and reply to Hall accordingly. (Beckett 2014: 663)

Devine was understandably suspicious of what he may have deemed a threat to his legacy, his reservations suggested by his response to Beckett on 17 March 1965: ‘I personally feel that it would be a pity if you were to give Hall an exclusive right to produce your plays. […] I know that Gaskill, who is taking over here in September, will want to do your work’ (ibid.: 664 n.3). Beckett, who generally consulted any



Beckett at the Royal Court

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number of friends on such occasions, wrote to his British publisher John Calder on 9 April 1965 to say, ‘After correspondence with George and Peter Hall I have decided that my commitment to the former ends in September when he leaves and not to commit myself to the Royal Shakespeare, though welcoming any proposal from them’ (ibid.). The Aldwych Endgame, then, had actually opened in Paris first with essentially the same cast, and Beckett wrote to Rosset’s assistant, Judith Schmidt, on 7 February 1964: ‘Rehearsals of Endgame with Pat Magee and Jack MacGowran very exciting. They are both marvellous. We open at the Studio des C.E. [Champs-Elysées] Monday the 17th [of February] for a month’s run’ (S. E. Gontarski Grove Press Archive, Florida State University Special Collections). Writing to Alan Schneider on 11 April 1964 Beckett lamented his exhausting theatre schedule: ‘Have been rehearsing practically continuously since Jan. and shall be on again in London in June-July for Aldwych Endgame with Jack & Pat. After that simply must go into retirement for a long spell’ (Beckett 1998: 155); and on 31 May 1964, Beckett continued, ‘I am going to London June 29 to rehearse ENDGAME. We open July 9 [in London]. From then on I am at your disposal’ (ibid.: 157). Beckett then oversaw both Paris and London rehearsals. On 7 August 1965 George Devine suffered a heart attack followed shortly thereafter by a stroke. Beckett responded with a short but touching, comforting, and very personal note ending, ‘I send you my deeply affectionate thoughts. In my old head I have your hand in both of mine’ (Beckett 2014: 672), and on September 15 he answered a letter from Herbert, ‘distressed that the news is not better. […] You know what’s in my heart for you and George, so I needn’t try and say it. But you do, to you both, from me. You’re with me here and I’m wishing for you hard. All loving thoughts, dear George and Jocelyn’ (ibid.: 673–4). Devine would never recover, and he passed away on 20 January 1966, but Beckett remained close with Herbert for the next twenty-three years. In the post-Devine era, The Royal Court would maintain its emphasis on new British and European theatre, paying particular

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Staging Beckett in Great Britain

attention to Beckett’s work, especially under Devine’s successor William Gaskill (ad 1965–1972, with Anthony Page as co-ad from 1969–72), the theatre hosting the Compagnie Renaud-Barrault in Blin’s direction of Oh les beaux jours with Madeleine Renaud in September of 1969, to the evening of shorts, ‘Beckett / 3’, featuring Come and Go, Cascando, and Play in March of 1970, to Anthony Page’s twin bill, Krapp’s Last Tape and Not I, the former with Albert Finney, the latter with Billie Whitelaw, in January of 1973, to Anthony Page’s revival of Not I with Billie Whitelaw in January of 1975, to the Beckett season of 1976 celebrating, if that is the word, Beckett’s seventieth birthday, featuring Beckett’s self-direction of the Schiller Theater Warten auf Godot in April, a revival of Endgame in May, Play, That Time and Footfalls, the first two directed by Donald McWhinnie, the last Beckett’s landmark self-direction of the play written for and performed by Billie Whitelaw in May, to what is perhaps his crowning achievement, Happy Days again with Billie Whitelaw in June of 1979.11 In May 2013, forty years after the landmark 1973 Whitelaw world premiere under Beckett’s direction, Not I returned to the Royal Court with a performance by Lisa Dwan, who was ‘tutored in the role by Billie Whitelaw’, as the Royal Court’s press release and the post-performance video interview describe it. Dwan’s iteration was first performed at Battersea Arts Centre in 2005, at the Southbank Centre in 2009 and at the inaugural International Festival of Beckett in Enniskillen in 2012. The role was reprised at the Court in January 2014 in an evening of plays for women, including Footfalls and Rockaby, all three featuring Dwan, the latter two directed by long-time Beckett associate Walter Asmus. Through them all the spirit of Beckett as a complete and committed man of the theatre, as a playwright and practising director, has remained a central thread of the Royal Court.

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Feckham, Peckham, Fulham, Clapham … Hammersmith: Beckett at Riverside Studios Matthew McFrederick

This chapter will examine Beckett’s rehearsal periods at Riverside Studios, London, where he shaped his final directorial visions of Endgame and Waiting for Godot when he worked with the San Quentin Drama Workshop in 1980 and 1984 respectively. It will reflect on how Beckett’s presence at Riverside was portrayed in newspaper reports and artistic responses at the time, on the work undertaken there and innovations arising from the rehearsals, and finally it will analyse the legacies for Beckett’s drama that were stimulated by his time at the Studios. Before discussing the rehearsals of Endgame and Waiting for Godot, it is worth briefly contextualizing Beckett’s career in the British theatre prior to the 1980s. Undoubtedly his closest creative partnership was with the Royal Court Theatre, where he directed or supervised many productions of his drama until 1979. This association stretched back to George Devine’s artistic directorship of the then emerging English Stage Company, when he gave Beckett a platform for the world premieres of Fin de partie and Acte sans paroles and it would prove to be the UK venue where his drama was most consistently staged during his lifetime. Beckett gained further practical theatre experience by working in more of the UK and Europe’s most distinguished theatres, including the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Odéon Théâtre de France and the Schiller Theater in Berlin,

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involving actors he was eager to collaborate with such as Patrick Magee, Klaus Herm and Billie Whitelaw.1 Productions of his drama failed to materialize at the Royal Court during the 1980s under the artistic directorship of Max Stafford-Clark and his last collaboration at the theatre would see him direct Happy Days with Whitelaw in 1979. The 1980s proved to be the decade in which Beckett’s drama began to inhabit a range of alternative London homes.2 It was also the decade in which arguably the most significant events concerning his drama in the UK were not performances, but rather two rehearsal periods Beckett surveyed at Riverside Studios. A number of initial questions about his time at Riverside arise: how did Beckett first learn about Riverside? Why, after working in theatres often considered among the pinnacles of the Western theatre tradition, would Beckett rehearse his final theatre productions in an arts centre in Hammersmith? And why was Beckett working with performers he had not handpicked? Beckett first encountered Riverside in a working capacity with the rehearsals of Endgame on 7 May 1980, though he would have been familiar with the geographical area at least since his early years at the Royal Court having attended dinner parties at George Devine’s house on the Lower Mall in Chiswick.3 Indeed his later knowledge of Riverside most likely came from Devine’s partner, his close friend and Royal Court scenographer, Jocelyn Herbert. Herbert was friendly with the then Riverside Programme Director and Administrator and later Artistic Director David Gothard, who suggests that Herbert may have recommended Riverside as an alternative venue for Beckett to use in London and that Beckett ‘would have trusted her recommendation entirely’.4 When and how much Beckett knew about Riverside in advance of his visit remains unclear, though his correspondence reveals that he was familiar with the Studios and its management structure.5 Although one of his earliest references to the venue mistakenly calls it ‘Riversdale’ (Harmon 1998: 370), behind this confusion was an early endorsement for Riverside, with Beckett outlining that it was in contention with the Royal Court to stage Happy Days with Whitelaw in 1979.6 While this production did not



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materialize at Riverside, just over one year later he would find himself working in west London. At first glance, Riverside Studios may appear an unlikely place for Beckett to finish his practical work in the British theatre. However, to think this would be a disservice to the venue’s history, which deserves further examination.7 A former BBC TV Studios where Dr Who and Hancock’s Half Hour were filmed, situated on the banks of the Thames in Hammersmith, Riverside is located at the margins of London’s theatrical and artistic centre.8 Following the departure of the BBC in 1975, a charitable trust formed by Hammersmith and Fulham Council converted the buildings into two large multipurpose arts spaces before making Peter Gill the venue’s first Artistic Director in 1976. Gill’s opening seasons staged acclaimed productions of The Cherry Orchard (in 1978) and The Changeling (in 1979) before his departure to the National Theatre Studio. The reputation of the Studios continued to grow and in the early 1980s it became a hub of cultural activity that programmed major international artists including Tadeusz Kantor, Dario Fo, Joan Miró, David Hockney, as well as many others. It was eclectic and often visionary in terms of discovering ground-breaking artists such as Michael Clark. Furthermore, it proved to be a place of learning for many writers, actors, dancers and artists, as Hanif Kureishi, a former employee, stated: ‘Riverside was what a university should be: a place to learn and talk and work and meet your contemporaries. There was no other place like it in London’ (Kureishi 2000: 4). Under the artistic directorship of Gothard in the early 1980s it earned a reputation as ‘the Royal Court Theatre in exile’ (Wiesner 2006: 2) with Emily Green arguing that it ‘made the Fringe look dowdy, the West End look taxidermied and the National Theatre a concrete maiden’ (1994). Beckett’s presence at rehearsals was a fillip for the theatre and remains a celebrated part of the Studios’ history. Beckett was in Hammersmith primarily because of his collaborations with the San Quentin Drama Workshop, which grew out of his friendship with the former San Quentin prisoner turned actor, Rick Cluchey, who first discovered Beckett’s drama in the Californian

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penitentiary. By coincidence they would later meet in Paris, and corresponded over a number of years with Cluchey repeatedly proposing that Beckett attend a rehearsal. His persistence would lead to Beckett working with the San Quentin group on two occasions before Riverside; he directed Cluchey in Krapp’s Last Tape at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, which opened on 27 September 1977, and their friendly collaborations continued one year later when Beckett observed their rehearsals of Endgame at the Altkirche in the spare time he had from directing Spiel at the Schiller Theater Werkstatt. Beckett was unimpressed by what he saw with the Endgame production and even had the cast re-audition for their roles. Nonetheless he did see improvements, appreciated their enthusiasm and on 18 October 1978 the group travelled to London to perform Krapp’s Last Tape and Endgame at the Open Space Theatre. Their Riverside rehearsals were again the fruition of Cluchey’s persistence and although Beckett had attended San Quentin rehearsals in the past, his attendance in Hammersmith would prove a more remarkable and accessible event, particularly in light of the disillusionment he voiced regarding theatre work in general to friends before the rehearsals. Indeed seven months before directing Endgame in May 1980 he stressed to Cluchey, ‘Never felt so far from theatre since I first looked to it for comfort 30 years ago. Perhaps haven again some day before I go down’ (Beckett 1979b).9

Documenting Beckett In The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography, Thomas Postlewait stresses how performance histories depend on ‘the available documentation […] to reconstruct the event’ (Postlewait 2012: 230). Documentation of rehearsals is normally limited to the notes and perspectives of the practitioners involved, as they usually signify the private and mysterious phase of a production’s life, where only the cast and crew experience its creative spirit, its struggles and ecstasies. Prior to Riverside, Beckett’s rehearsals were only attended



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by the cast, creative team, close friends or the occasional theatre employee. His Riverside rehearsals in 1980 and 1984 were more open than normal, certainly very open for someone popularly depicted as an exceptionally private man. In an unprecedented step they were also observed by artists, directors, journalists, photographers and academics, whereby the friendly, creative surroundings of Riverside made the rehearsals become an unintentional performance ‘laboratory’ (Wheeler 1982). This openness enabled more records to be produced than most rehearsals as those observing responded to the work in their respective mediums, and these materials have since been preserved in the University of Reading’s Beckett Collection and other private collections.10 Such documents, Postlewait suggests, act as ‘windows through which we can observe the[se] past events’ (Postlewait 2012: 239). Indeed, reading these documents today reaffirms the assertions of Beckett’s assistant director for Endgame, Gregory Mosher, who surmised ‘two parallel events progressed – the production of Endgame and the tracking of a reclusive maestro’ (Oppenheim 2000: 132). Through the various accounts and archival traces of these rehearsals by journalists, photographers and artists, it is clear that Beckett’s presence at Riverside generated an ‘extraordinary fascination’ for those in attendance (Knowlson 1987: 451). The responses epitomize how, as Postlewait notes, ‘certain events, at the time they occur, get characterized by participants and observers as significant’ (2012: 248). Part of this fascination was alluded to in the newspaper reports published, which also characterized the rehearsals as a significant event. Journalists such as Maeve Binchy and Brian Appleyard recorded their surprise at Beckett’s openness, which was typified in the conversations they shared with him, as he was known to rarely speak to journalists. Notably each journalist began their article by offering their own portrait of Beckett, whereby they would describe the author’s appearance almost as proof that they saw him. Before her transition to popular novelist, Binchy wrote a feature on Beckett in The Irish Times, which was reported to have angered Beckett as Binchy chose to focus on his appearance and memories of Dublin while neglecting the work on stage.11 He later saw

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the need to mix his anger with comedy, as actors Alan Mandell and Bud Thorpe both recalled with much amusement Beckett’s response to Binchy’s article, referring to her as ‘Bitchy Binchy’.12 Despite Beckett’s annoyance with Binchy in this instance, four years later he again allowed journalists into rehearsals for Godot, with Steve Grant offering another depiction of the playwright: A 77-year-old man sits in the foyer of Riverside Studios all but ignored in the lunchtime buzz of rattling plates and conversation. He seems tired, occasionally rubbing his eyes, sipping at the half of Guinness in front of him on the scrubbed wooden bench. He is painfully thin, the quarter miler’s wiry frame having succumbed to stiffness in the last few years; the hair, neat and silvery, is stroked up from the lined forehead in a self supporting ridge. His voice is soft, almost a whisper, a Dublin voice, lilting, musical, despite the bearer’s long residence in Paris. (Grant 1984: 13)

The written accounts of Beckett at Riverside suggest he appeared more open than usual to the presence of visitors during both sets of rehearsals. Hugh Hebert referred to the mutual understanding that appeared to function between visitors and Beckett during rehearsals by reporting: ‘[Beckett] had accepted we should be there, the pretence was that we were not’ (Hebert 1980). Various people attended the rehearsals, each perceiving the events differently depending on their own relationship to the man, the work and their own discipline. It became a meeting space for Beckett and friends such as Whitelaw, Alan Schneider and Shivaun O’Casey, while other new faces and strangers came to the venue to catch a glimpse.13 Beckett was largely able to overlook watchful eyes in the theatre space at the time, later jokingly referring to the events as a ‘jamboree’ (Beckett 1984a). Mandell – who played Nagg in the 1980 Endgame – noted of the visitors that ‘Beckett didn’t seem to mind all the drop ins.’ However, Mandell ‘was not used to allowing  people in to observe the rehearsal period’.14 Despite Mandell’s understandable reservations as an actor, many of the stories from those attending ultimately helped publicize the San Quentin



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tours, while marking Riverside as a venue more closely associated with Beckett’s drama. As described above, Beckett’s openness was ‘a great surprise’ for those who witnessed the rehearsals (Shainberg 1987), including one writer, Lawrence Shainberg, who met Beckett at Riverside for the first time in 1980 and kept in contact with him over Beckett’s latter years. Shainberg described the rehearsals as a ‘happy time’ for Beckett, where he was ‘relaxed in company’ (1987) because of the rehearsal environment. Such sentiments saw new portraits of Beckett come to the fore, as Shainberg articulated in The Paris Review: ‘Beckett’s presence destroyed the Beckett myth for me, replacing it with something at once larger and more ordinary’ (1987). Shainberg’s assertions were supported by the striking photographs and drawings which materialized as a result of Beckett’s time in rehearsals. Some of the most iconic photographs were taken by John Minihan during these rehearsals, with his two publications Samuel Beckett: Photographs (1995) and Samuel Beckett: Centenary Shadows (2006) adding to the iconographic visual portraits of Beckett. Minihan’s images are closely connected with the event and have been deposited and recycled in the venue’s ‘repository of cultural memory’ (Carlson 2006: 2) as a means of public interface through their later use in playbills, exhibitions and even at times as the Studios’ Facebook profile picture. Further images of Beckett were taken in both the 1980 and 1984 rehearsals by Chris Harris and have recently come to light through the David Gothard Collection.15 Harris’s portraits also offer a new lens for viewing Beckett, which is, as Gothard suggests, ‘unexpected [and] not familiar’ (Wiesner 2006: 15). Through Harris’s images Beckett is captured unaware and displays a more liberated character in action, which suggests his directorial precision, concentration and rapport with the San Quentin cast. As well as photographers, Beckett also became the study of two painters: Tom Phillips and John Devane. Phillips’s lithograph ‘Samuel Beckett’ (1984) has previously been displayed in London’s National Portrait Gallery and emerged as a result of his sketches from the rehearsals. Phillips discussed his own approach to drawing Beckett by

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stating, ‘At the beginning I did not know quite how to set about drawing him […]. I gradually realized sitting behind, trying to form a strategy, the back of his head was as eloquent as the front, and as recognizable’ (Phillips 2014). Phillips’s piece complements a similar photographic study of Beckett from Harris.16 Intriguingly, both artists identify and respond to Beckett’s distinctive physical features from their perspective as voyeurs of these rehearsals watching both Beckett and the onstage drama that unfolded in front of him. Their portraits both construct and contribute to the aura and depictions of Beckett’s presence in rehearsals, suggesting, as do the aforementioned reports and interviews, the number of ways in which Beckett has been or can be read or represented from his time at the Studios. Harris and Phillips visualize a recurring representation of Beckett’s time at Riverside as they show (even without a trace of face) how portrayals of this rehearsal event staged Beckett in the foreground as much as the struggle of Lucky in the background. With this image of Beckett actually in the rehearsal space in mind, this chapter will now proceed to address his practical work with the San Quentin Drama Workshop in rehearsals.

Rehearsing Beckett: Endgame Before discussing Beckett’s participation at Riverside, it is important to contextualize how both rehearsal periods were assisted by rehearsals or performances prior to his involvement. San Quentin had staged Endgame before and had been briefly observed by Beckett in Berlin, while Godot was initially directed by Walter Asmus for five weeks in Chicago. Beckett’s involvement at Riverside shows how he was still working creatively with these texts as he fine-tuned these existing performances with revisions and cuts, while encouraging a greater emphasis on the work’s shape, pace and rhythm ahead of their tours. Many of these decisions were shaped by Beckett’s continuous directorial experience as he worked on his early and later plays in performance.17



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The Endgame rehearsals ran from 7 May to 22 May 1980, initially in Studio 2 as The Biko Inquest featuring Albert Finney was running in the main theatre. While Beckett could draw upon past productions, his collaborations with the San Quentin group enabled him to reread the play and develop a more structured and shaped vision of it in English. This was epitomized by how he envisaged the play’s structure, as he began to see it with an eight-scene structure in comparison to the sixteen he outlined in his Schiller Theater production. Both Schiller and Riverside rehearsals employed a greater emphasis on the play’s patterning in performance; for example, Clov’s inspection of the opening scene in a clockwise order (Hamm, bins, sea window, earth window) was followed by an anticlockwise arrangement as he unveiled the scene (earth window, sea window, bins, Hamm).18 His direction demanded his actors intertwine these stage patterns with choreographic precision, something that was achieved by Thorpe’s adherence to mathematical symmetry for Clov’s movements in and out of the kitchen to his stage left. With this in mind Beckett would write in his notebook, for example, ‘C’s entrance identical-same number of steps to A, same half turn away’ (Gontarski 1993: 50). Beckett walked Thorpe through this choreography on stage, just as he was likely to offer actors line readings when necessary, and often surprised the actors by his active participation during rehearsals. On one occasion, to the amazement of the actors, he performed the role of Nell alongside Mandell (in the absence of Teresita Garcia Suro), a character he described as ‘a whisper of life’ (Thorpe). In an interview with James Knowlson, Thorpe expressed his captivation with this moment, saying ‘the two of them, they could have done it […] it was frighteningly beautiful’ (1993). Rehearsals often saw Beckett critique his work, with Mandell recalling Beckett saying ‘There’s too much text’ in relation to lines such as Hamm’s ‘All is … all is … all is what? (Violently) All is what?’ (Gontarski 1993: 56). Cuts, revisions and alterations characterized his direction with notable textual cuts made to the song scene and all references to the song. Excisions were also made when he decided there

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was too much clutter on the stage, such as the picture identified in the original editions of the text or with his descriptions of the characters when he chose for them not to have red faces. As he watched the play in performance, he saw the need for simplifications to moments such as Clov’s observations with the telescope and his use of the ladder. By working practically Beckett also made justifications in light of the text, as he wrote in his production notebook, ‘Windows not high’ in order to legitimate Hamm’s question ‘Have you shrunk?’ (Gontarski 1993: 43) These practical developments, the rapport he shared with what he called the ‘San Quentinites’ (quoted in Harmon 1998: 372) and the ambiance of Riverside led to a largely positive rehearsal experience for Beckett, as Mandell noted: Beckett more than enjoyed the rehearsals. He revelled in them. Well perhaps revelled is not quite the right description. At one point I was alone with him at our London digs. […] He told me he would not be coming to Dublin for the opening. When I asked why he said, ‘They’d eat me up alive.’ I told him what a joy the experience had been for me. He said, ‘You’ve given me life.’ He meant, I think, the whole rehearsal period and more.19

With these experiences in hand from Hammersmith, the cast and production team departed for Dublin without Beckett on the first stop of their Irish and British tour, with little idea that they would be back at Riverside to rehearse Godot with Beckett four years later.

Rehearsing Beckett: Waiting for Godot Original plans for San Quentin’s Godot rehearsals suggested that they would take place in Paris, though Beckett showed his fondness for Riverside by writing to Cluchey ‘Try for Riverside again’ (Beckett 1983a). Prior to the second rehearsals he had again strongly indicated that his directing days were over, though he relented and his participation in 1984 was ultimately for the Workshop’s benefit, as Cluchey



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told him their tour to the Adelaide Festival (and subsequent Australian dates) hinged on his direct involvement. Beckett relayed a message to the production’s director, Walter Asmus, stating that he agreed ‘mostly to satisfy the Festival’s insistence that I should “survey” (as Rick put it) the production’ (Beckett 1983b). As further correspondence with Cluchey suggests, Beckett was keen to underline some rules and accentuate his physical condition in advance of rehearsals: I need assurance on two counts: 1. That I shall not appear in any film of proceedings in London. 2. That the general title B. directs B. will be modified as requested. Please understand the extent of my fatigue & do not ask too much of me. (Beckett 1983c)

Although the tour was branded as ‘Beckett directs Beckett’, Beckett showed scepticism towards this title for the San Quentin triple bill, particularly in the case of Godot, where he was reluctant to be identified as the production’s director due to his respect for Asmus, who was given the official credit.20 Beckett wrote to Cluchey stating, ‘Your Godot should carry the mention “in consultation with the author”’ (Beckett 1983a). In turn Asmus’s reflections suggest his own loyalty, as he admitted upon Beckett’s arrival in London, ‘I didn’t justify anything. […] I just handed it over to him all together, I didn’t interfere at all, I took notes.’21 Rehearsals for Godot began on 20 February 1984, in what would be the final theatre production Beckett would work on in the UK. Asmus recalled Beckett’s condition when he arrived in London, he was too ‘tired to do the production [and] not really in command or the shape he had been in 10 years ago’.22 Even though he made notes and changes to a 1981 Faber text of Godot prior to rehearsals, both Asmus and the cast have suggested that he felt unprepared, in comparison to past rehearsals, as he could no longer memorize the text. Nonetheless he still demonstrated a keen eye for the play’s symmetry on stage, an attentiveness that even caught out Asmus’s precise direction. For example, Asmus recalls his direction of specific entrances with Pozzo

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and Lucky entering audience right in Act One. In Act Two Beckett has them enter audience left, though Asmus admitted, to his own embarrassment, how he had them enter audience right again with Beckett quick to assert: ‘No! No, No! It’s all wrong, they enter from the other side.’23 The rehearsals proved to be another opportunity for Beckett to examine Waiting for Godot and make alterations to the play in performance and to the English text. Some of these changes took into consideration his work on Warten auf Godot at the Schiller Theater, alongside further discussions with Asmus in relation to his 1978 Brooklyn Academy of Music production and his own reflections on reading the play in 1984. Some of these ideas were reaffirmed in the San Quentin production, such as the swapping of Vladimir and Estragon’s jackets and trousers after Act One and the tree was also modelled on Matias’s pale, thin Schiller design. Furthermore the concept of twelve Wartestellen developed in Berlin was again used by Beckett and Asmus, as they saw this as a ‘major motif ’ for the play’s ‘visual structure’ (McMillan and Knowlson 1994: 91). The symbiotic parallels between each pairing also developed, as, for example, Dougald McMillan and Martha Fehsenfeld noted: ‘Beckett concurred with J. Pat Miller’s incorporation of gestures in Lucky’s monologue similar to those of Pozzo in his to create a visual parallel between the two speeches’ (McMillan and Fehsenfeld 1988: 75). Inevitably this production would develop its own variations and modifications, as Beckett came to the play with more experience and practical knowledge of the theatre at a different stage in his own life, with different actors, and in different circumstances. Each of the San Quentin actors expressed their fondness of the rehearsal experience. Lawrence Held played Estragon in this production and described how his process developed with and without Beckett: the basic character was there and remained; but the levels on which that basic character worked were expanded considerably. There were moments that I felt very happy with, moments that were very



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amusing, that had been developed in Chicago, but suddenly they had the life taken right out of them. And that, initially, was a problem for me; but that is always an actor’s problem – having to accommodate the director’s wishes. And in this case, the director also happens to be the writer. It became very obvious to me that Beckett’s work is always in a state of flux and evolution, and that this was how he felt at this particular time, hence this is how he was going to direct it. (Quoted in Duckworth 1987: 177–8)

Part of the evolutionary process saw, as Colin Duckworth highlights, a greater ‘contrast between the characters of Vladimir and Estragon’ (1987: 178). Further character-specific developments were made with some of the biggest changes incorporated for the role of Pozzo; substantial cuts were made to Pozzo’s speeches and much of his stage business, such as the use of his pipe. Performed by Cluchey, Beckett saw Pozzo’s relationship with Lucky as less violent in this production, and he cut his numerous jerks of the rope in favour of Pozzo simply ‘return[ing] to the end of the rope’ (McMillan and Knowlson 1994: 23) as he organizes Lucky around the stage. Although significant cuts were made, additions were also integrated. Notably one segment of dialogue from the original French text was restored to the English text having been overlooked for thirty years. Beckett contemplated three different variations though it was eventually performed (and published) as follows: Estragon Let’s go! Vladimir Where? (Moves towards Estragon. Seducingly) Perhaps we’ll sleep tonight in his loft. All snug and dry, our bellies full, in the hay. That’s worth waiting for. No? Estragon Not all night. Vladimir It’s still day. (Silence. Both look at the sky.) (McMillan and Knowlson 1994: 19)

Although this passage represents an addition to the text, Beckett more than often simplified the text and made the staging clearer when he could.

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Time limitations once again determined the working parameters of this process, though as Cluchey asserted ‘if [Beckett] had had ten more days, I’m sure he would have cut, added, cut, orchestrated, rearranged, in an endless process’ (quoted in Duckworth 1987: 179). Beckett’s rigour in rehearsals demonstrates how the writer would continue to shape and discover his play through performance, even in rehearsals that would prove to be his final production of Waiting for Godot; a process that challenges the idea that a performance could be definitive or complete. Beckett’s tiredness after Godot surpassed his exhaustion after Endgame, though despite this it is evident he once again had a positive experience at Riverside and described the production he surveyed as ‘very presentable’ (Knowlson 1996: 691). One of his highlights was the performance of J. Pat Miller as Lucky. Beckett told Miller ‘he was the best Lucky he had ever seen’ because of the ‘overwhelming’ and ‘searing’ way he delivered Lucky’s speech (Knowlson 1996: 691). Of one performance by Miller, Asmus recalled ‘I could feel the vibrations beside me. Beckett was trembling beside me. Lucky’s speech had moved him so much. I felt tears coming to my own eyes. This holy moment.’24 Beckett would be glad he praised Miller, as Miller died of AIDs shortly after the conclusion of their Australian tour. The tour would prove the culmination of Beckett’s two Riverside rehearsals where San Quentin would add their productions of Endgame and Krapp’s Last Tape to Godot as part of their ‘Beckett directs Beckett’ programme. As Beckett departed Riverside, his work and indeed this production remained for a few more days, with Gothard arranging for San Quentin to perform to local school children on 1 and 2 March 1984, which allowed Beckett’s drama to reach a new generation.

Beckett’s Riverside legacy Beckett’s presence at Riverside proved a significant moment in the history of the west London arts centre, re-emphasizing, at a time when the venue faced uncertainty over its future funding, that it was



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a venue where major international artists felt comfortable working. Through the publicity and images that materialized from Beckett’s visits, Riverside was known as a venue that the playwright himself endorsed and as a result became the London venue most associated with Beckett’s work in the 1980s. As Marvin Carlson alludes to, these memories would be ‘consciously utilized by the theatre culture’ (Carlson 2006: 8), as future publicity materials and newspaper articles would feature images of Beckett at the venue. Memories of Beckett at Riverside shaped its cultural imagination and actively stimulated its future programming, creating a legacy of his work at the Studios with renowned Beckettian performers such as Joe Chaikin in Texts (1981), Billie Whitelaw in Rockaby, Enough and Footfalls (1986) and Max Wall in Krapp’s Last Tape (1986). While the rehearsals ‘achieved a definite and substantial identity’, events looked upon from this perspective can often ‘exclude other events from visibility and consideration’ from the cultural narratives generated (Postlewait 2012: 249). This chapter will now reflect on the lesser-known production histories and legacies of Beckett’s drama at Riverside which were in fact initiated as a result of Beckett’s presence in Hammersmith. Following San Quentin’s Endgame rehearsals in 1980 the first example of their influence on Riverside came when its programming included the acclaimed American actor, director and former leader of the Open Theater, Joe Chaikin, performing Texts in 1981. Texts was an adaptation by Chaikin and director Stephen Kent which combined Beckett’s prose works Texts for Nothing and extracts from How It Is.25 Both Beckett and Chaikin were on friendly terms and corresponded as Chaikin sought advice and permission prior to staging Texts. Beckett initially offered thoughts on how he saw the material working on stage through an onstage Author whose speech was intermittently broken by a recorded voice,26 though later in a note which signals how Beckett would occasionally make exceptions for his friends, he demonstrated faith in Chaikin by writing ‘I give you carte blanche to use the Texts as you please + end of How it is’ (Beckett 1981). Beckett maintained an active interest in the production’s development, as

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Chaikin and other friends updated him on its progress. When Chaikin performed at Riverside it was largely acclaimed, with critics such as Sarah Powell suggesting that Texts was an example of a production which overcame traditional assumptions about Beckett’s work: ‘If an evening with playwright Samuel Beckett spells gloom and doom, think again […] Texts undermines the pessimism with a clown-comic lift’ (Powell 1981). Ned Chaillet added to the production’s positive reception in The Times, describing Chaikin as one of theatre’s ‘major innovators’ before stating ‘It is a tribute to Mr Chaikin and Mr Kent that [Texts] becomes mesmerising drama […]. Mr Chaikin’s performance […] demonstrates that superb acting can exist well outside the English tradition’ (Chaillet 1981). Through performances such as Texts Riverside demonstrated how even though Beckett was not present, they could attract acclaimed performers of Beckett’s work capable of redefining assumptions attached to his oeuvre. In the years that followed the 1984 rehearsals, Riverside’s artistic directorship and management structures changed, though their commitment to Beckett’s work continued as they honoured his eightieth birthday in 1986 with a number of events across the year. This season began with Whitelaw performing Rockaby, Footfalls and Enough; performances previously staged individually at the Royal Court and National where she had originally been directed by Beckett and Schneider, though restaged with the help of Robert Hendry and Rocky Greenberg. This triple bill was the first time Whitelaw had worked on Beckett’s plays without his direction or supervision since she first performed in Play at the Old Vic in 1964. As well as the foremost actress Beckett collaborated with, their programming would go on to showcase the next generation of Beckettian performers including Barry McGovern in his touring production of I’ll Go On from the Gate Theatre in Dublin in July 1986.27 McGovern was already an accomplished performer of Beckett’s drama in Ireland, though he would later symbolize the Gate’s developed interest in Beckett’s drama through his multiple performances in their Beckett productions. After what was the Gate Theatre’s first visit to London



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with a production of Beckett’s work, the Irish theatre would go on to contribute numerous productions of Beckett’s drama to the London theatre landscape over a twenty-five-year period, with performances in the West End as well as their two Beckett festivals in 1999 and 2006 at the Barbican Centre, which both staged Beckett’s nineteen plays for the theatre. Further Beckett performances and events at Riverside happened during the 1980s including Max Wall’s in Krapp’s Last Tape, as the venue continued to promote Beckett’s work. As the decade drew to a close and Beckett’s health deteriorated, several of his friends involved in his Hammersmith rehearsals planned a production to lift his spirits. This production of Krapp’s Last Tape and Catastrophe first staged at the Leicester Haymarket would bring together a number of his close friends and collaborators within the theatre. David Warrilow played Krapp in a production directed by Beckett’s Polish translator Antoni Libera, designed by Herbert with Gothard then an Artistic Associate of the Haymarket. The production also toured to Riverside and the timing of Beckett’s death saw the first UK performances of Beckett’s drama after his death take place in the Hammersmith arts centre. It was here in his alternative London theatrical home that the UK productions of Beckett’s drama post-Beckett would start. As stated, Beckett’s participation in rehearsals at Riverside initiated a legacy of further Beckett productions at the Hammersmith venue. However, the broader impact of these rehearsals on individuals working at Riverside or directly involved in these rehearsals remains lesser known. Of the numerous people engaged in the theatre, Beckett’s impact is perhaps best encapsulated by the career of the then Riverside Associate Director David Leveaux. Leveaux would go on to be a renowned Broadway director for his work on Eugene O’Neill and Pinter’s plays and following his work at Riverside he would direct the first East German Beckett production with Das letzte Band at the Theater im Palast, East Berlin in 1986, featuring Ekkehard Schall. Through distanced reflection it is possible to see the

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impact observing Beckett in rehearsals had on individuals who were present: I had the great fortune to sit around and watch him direct in that distinctive and discreetly influential style that depended less on him saying anything than it did on the actors being aware to their nerve endings that he didn’t miss a thing. Moreover, and here was the clue, there was nothing abstract about his advice to the actor. Not a word about metaphors or meanings or themes, only the gently firm injunction to ‘look up there’ or to be clear on a word or a phrase. (Leveaux 2014)

Leveaux’s comments offer a fitting reflection on Beckett’s time in rehearsals at Riverside. He suggests the distinct impression Beckett’s physical presence stimulated from those observing and the subtlety and conviction with which he envisaged his plays, though unmistakably he also highlights the education these rehearsals gave those in attendance. To conclude, it is worth recalling Beckett’s disillusionment with the theatre in 1979 and his hopes for a theatre ‘haven’ before his death. By 1984, he was seventy-seven and inevitably left Riverside tired from his exertions over rehearsals, though he enjoyed the work, the friendly atmosphere and the venue. As the theatre encountered funding difficulties with the Greater London Council (GLC), he signed a letter alongside several prominent artists to the editor of The Times describing Riverside as ‘a joyful building’ (Matta et al. 1982). In later years when funding difficulties meant Riverside closed for several months Beckett wittily referred to the GLC as the ‘G.L. Curmudgeons’ (Beckett 1985) in a letter to Gothard, who had subsequently left Riverside. Though perhaps more significantly Beckett stated succinctly, ‘Another haven closed’ (ibid.). Although he was only present in Hammersmith for a number of weeks, he developed an affection for the venue and the people who helped him. His drama would continue to be staged even when he was not directly involved, underlining his position in Riverside’s eclectic international programming during the 1980s. Over



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these years Riverside established itself as the alternative home for Beckett’s drama in London, stimulated by rehearsals which proved a significant pedagogical and public moment; where well-worn portraits of Beckett were redefined and a new generation of practitioners, producers and devotees were educated and inspired.

4

Beckett at the West Yorkshire Playhouse: Happy Days, Not I and Krapp’s Last Tape (1993) Mark Taylor-Batty

The central subject of this chapter is the production of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, directed by Jude Kelly, starring Prunella Scales, designed by Pamela Howard, and produced by the West Yorkshire Playhouse in 1993. In relation to this, productions of Not I and Krapp’s Last Tape that were produced and performed at the same time, and programmed within the run of Happy Days, will also be briefly considered. These three productions will be considered partly within the context of the ambitions and vision of the relatively young West Yorkshire Playhouse, and its incidental place in the regeneration of Leeds at the time of the centenary of city status being conferred.1 From that perspective, the adoption of Beckett’s work within the third season of the West Yorkshire playhouse can be read as participating in an articulation of cultural worth and development in a city that was rebranding itself economically and culturally in the early 1990s. In 1984, Leeds City Council earmarked the Quarry Hill site, east of the city centre, for a new theatre building. This would house the production work of the Leeds Playhouse, which had come into being in the late 1960s following popular petition to establish a regional theatre. Its first productions, from 1970, were housed in a temporary theatre operation on the southern edge of the University of Leeds campus.2 Productions were accommodated in a building that was designed so that it could partially house and later be fully converted into a sports

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hall for the university, once the Playhouse eventually had its own purpose-built building.3 The first sod was dug on Quarry Hill by Sir Donald Sinden in 1987, Dame Judi Dench laid the foundation stone early in 1989 and the building was topped by Albert Finney later that year. Dame Diana Rigg opened the theatre in March 1990 and operations were finally moved from the campus Playhouse, across the town, to the Quarry Hill site. Theatrical activities were inaugurated with a production of John O’Keefe’s Wild Oats, directed by Jude Kelly, who had been appointed as the theatre’s Artistic Director.4 The area known as Quarry Hill in Leeds is situated between the city’s main bus station and the York Road flyover, as that road meets and becomes the A58 (M), known as the ‘inner ring-road’ and which extends and arcs to cradle the city centre. By the time of the opening of the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Quarry Hill had been on the margin of the city centre for the best part of the century of the city’s civic status, with St Peter’s Street and Eastgate acting as the border between the commercial and business functions of central Leeds and the industrial, wholesale or domestic functions of buildings beyond. The Victorian Kirkgate market stands in clear view over St Peter’s Street, and marks a corner of the centre’s retail activities. In the nineteenth century, Quarry Hill had been the location of the Gas Company on York Street which supplied the city centre gas lamp illumination, and which was surrounded by tightly packed, back-to-back terrace houses with no proper sanitation facilities. The gas works were demolished in the 1920s, and the slum houses cleared by progressive council planning in the 1930s. The site was then developed as the largest social housing project in mid-century Europe, creating 930 flats over thirty-six acres of land within five minutes walk of the city centre. The Quarry Hill flats stood from 1938 to 1978, an iconic warren of modernist buildings that dominated the east side of the city centre. To this day the words ‘Quarry Hill’ will evoke memories of this remarkable building to anyone who lived or grew up in Leeds in the 1970s or earlier. The naming of the two stages at the West Yorkshire Playhouse both honours and perpetuates that memory: the Quarry theatre and the Courtyard theatre are names



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that enshrine some consciousness of the local history of the theatre site into its everyday practices.5 After the demolition of the Quarry Hill project, with the location dormant and liminal as an empty, tree-lined green space during the 1980s, the development of the site into what is now something of a cultural hub represents a spilling out of and from the city centre, a pushing of the margin outwards to the York Road, and a rewriting of the function of that urban space. As well as the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Quarry Hill is now the home of BBC Yorkshire, Yorkshire Dance, Phoenix Dance Theatre, The Northern Ballet and The Leeds College of Music. The transformation of the site from the location of typhoid and cholera epidemics in the 1840s, to a poisonous Victorian industrial suburb, to a revolutionary working-class housing solution, to its present status as something of a cultural hub, in many ways serves to chart the growth of Leeds itself and, importantly for those of us who are connected with the city, participates inevitably in the appreciation of the culture we today consume on that site. Happy Days, seemingly set in a post-apocalyptic barren landscape, inadvertently referenced back to the desolate state of the Quarry Hill mound before the regeneration of the area that the theatre represented and the choice of the play, in the early years of a new programming ethos, indicates something of the ambitions of the theatre’s directorate. There had only ever been one production of a Beckett play in the Playhouse’s history to date: that of Waiting for Godot, directed by Andrew Dallmeyer, in 1971.6 By coincidence, then, productions of Beckett plays had been programmed in the early seasons of both the Playhouse at its University of Leeds site and in its own building later on Quarry Hill. The early adoption of Beckett’s work into repertoires of as-yet unproven, new artistic projects articulates something both about that author and about the theatres themselves, but perhaps in very different ways in the two instances, two decades apart. To some degree, the programming of Beckett’s plays speaks to the manner in which his dramas had become established as part of the world theatre canon, and the potential his work has to effect a reputation for

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willingness to take on and promote intelligent and challenging work. The selection of Happy Days perhaps signals a more deliberate embrace of the author’s work over the choice of Waiting for Godot, the renown of which is a more certain guarantee of audience interest. A strategic gravitation towards the ‘classics’, Beckett included, as the core fare of the new West Yorkshire Playhouse is confirmed if we look further at the 1992–3 season, which contained works by J. B. Priestley, Edward Albee, Georges Feydeau, Eugene O’Neill and William Shakespeare. Happy Days in the Courtyard theatre ran alongside Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars in the Quarry theatre. Not I and Krapp’s Last Tape were selected  to accompany the main production of Happy Days in 1993, and this choice was intended and received as an act of celebration of the recently deceased writer’s work.7 Alongside the O’Casey, these productions contributed almost by accident to a mini-festival of Irish theatre early in 1993. Not I was performed by Tricia Kelly (Jude’s sister) and directed by Cathy Denford, who also co-ordinated Krapp’s Last Tape, with Robert Bowerman in the title role. The West Yorkshire Playhouse was approaching its third birthday at the time of these Beckett productions. The theatre was at that time the most comprehensive theatre complex outside of the capital – only the RSC and the NT produced more large-scale productions – and still today holds claim to being the busiest of the so-called ‘regional’ theatres. In addition to such ambitions of scale, from the outset the mission of the theatre was to be centred in the community, and to serve the 40 million people within its capture area. Upon opening in 1990, Artistic Director Jude Kelly explained ‘on a very simply pragmatic level, a £13 million resource should be used by everyone’ and asked ‘How does a theatre like this address its non-theatregoing communities?’ as a means of articulating a personal objective as Artistic Director in a national newspaper interview (Thornber, R. 1990). One might envisage many answers to that question, but staging Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days might not straightforwardly be one of the first or most obvious. How might one position Beckett in that context and against that set of ambitions?



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The reputation of intellectual and philosophical weightiness that had frequently cast a shadow over programming Beckett, as far as Kelly was concerned, need not be a problematic issue in a regional theatre, and she characterized that kind of critical response as a specific problem of London theatre culture, where traditions of performance generate and perpetuate expectations in audiences that attach themselves to certain authors and plays. Talking about the West Yorkshire Playhouse in 1993, she stated: ‘You do not have an audience of cognoscenti in the regions who are bored with The Cherry Orchard or snobbish about Neil Simon’, and she promoted the benefits of presenting a wide range of material to – and the advantage of having an opportunity to develop – a new audience, and having significant authors’ writing tested ‘against audiences unspoilt by familiarity with their […] work’ (Coveney 1993). Within this vision, the purposeful selection of Beckett’s drama participated in the formation of that new West Yorkshire audience. Clearly, a dimension of Kelly’s ethos as Artistic Director was that it was opposed to the notion that to build a popular audience you should only programme populist material. She recognized, though, that in putting on a range of classics ‘this could present you with a problem. How do you disseminate them? How do you make them vivid? How do you share them with other people and not lose any of their distinctiveness?’ (Prince 1994: 298). Programming Happy Days in this context was a mode perhaps of appropriating Beckett, challenging the manner in which it is assumed his work was not easy to consume, or refusing to embrace the obscurantism or self-sustaining elitism that such an attitude might promote.  That ‘appropriation’ of Beckett involved a concern to both appreciate and understand that play as written, but to perform it in a way that would connect with a regional audience, for many of whom this would have been a first contact with that author, there in the theatre on the hill that had once been an empty space. The casting of Prunella Scales in the role of Winnie (or any actor with a substantial popular reputation) might be read as a first move to accommodate Beckett for audiences that would have had little or no

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exposure to his work via usual regional theatre programming. There is no doubt that her ‘household name’ reputation, predominantly via television comedy (notably for the role of Sybil, the long-suffering wife of Basil Fawlty in the BBC’s Fawlty Towers (1975–9)), would act as a draw for audiences for whom the name of the play’s author would have meant little or nothing. Her recent appearances in the James Ivory film Howard’s End (1992), and the Thames Television situation comedy After Henry (1988–92) had served to sustain her public profile into the new decade. This ‘household name’ status was nonetheless incidental to the casting decision: she was clearly an ideal actor for the role, from many perspectives; an experienced stage actor with a charismatic presence and a proven talent for comedic acting, she carried a combined skill-set of stage acting, an awareness of space and tensions across the stage with a live audience and TV acting, and an attention to close-up facial response and reaction, all of which was perfectly attuned to the demands of a role such as Winnie. She had in fact previously been offered the role twice before, once for a Birmingham theatre when she was in her twenties, and which she declined, and more recently for the 1991 Dublin Beckett Festival, which she had turned down on learning that there would be only three weeks for rehearsals and feeling that this would be insufficient. Scales, who had become a patron of the West Yorkshire Playhouse, had first met Jude Kelly at a women’s section meeting of the Wandsworth Labour Party in the early 1980s, at a time when Kelly was running the Battersea Arts Centre. Their longstanding friendly resolve to one day work together came to fruition in this production of Happy Days. For both, the production represented a risk of some form. For Kelly, this was in professional terms: she was conscious of a ‘benchmark’ set for productions of Beckett which, if she failed to meet it, might result in critical contempt (ibid.: 299). Scales articulated the risk in terms of failing an audience, who might expect a certain type of comic performance from a production that carried her name, or that she might risk accusations of trivializing the work by critics unwilling to see her as suitable for the role (ibid.: 271).



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There was a five-week rehearsal period for the production, the final three of which made use of the mound within which Winnie is entombed. Despite the discomfort and constraint put upon the actor’s chief equipment – her body – Scales happily embraced the physical restrictions that the role demanded. She pointed out in an interview in the Independent that ‘[t]he focus is not a disadvantage. It’s a plus, plus, plus. It’s money in the bank’, implying that the focus on the audience directly and near-permanently at her was valuable to an actor, offering certainty over what is captured, seen and heard (Butler 1993). Traditions of performing Beckett, the ‘performance genetics’ of production histories, and the experiences of actors before her in the role were all unimportant to her: Robert Bowerman, who played Willie, recalled that Scales had heard of Beckett’s demand for flat delivery of the lines of Billie Whitelaw and completely rejected it as an approach, stating that she ‘wanted to do it as an old woman on the top of a Clapham omnibus talking to her next door neighbour’.8 This impulse to ground the character in something approaching a recognizable reality is typical of Scales’s approach to her work more generally. As a young actor, she had trained with Ute Hagen, who taught emotional memory and immediacy, and Scales would often refer to such techniques when discussing her work preparing for performance. One evening in 1993, after her performance as Winnie, she met informally with a group of drama students in the foyer of the West Yorkshire Playhouse, and, prompted by their questions about her approach to the role, she explained that she had attempted to understand the character of Winnie through a process of appreciating and absorbing intentions, motivations and objectives in a classic Stanislavskian manner. She had placed the abstract, the metaphor, the meta-theatrical at a lower priority, and had sought to understand the Winnie behind and beneath the mound, grasping at the relevance of what memories the character recounts to construct a backstory. In particular, she considered the significance of the story of the mouse that runs up Mildred’s leg as indicative of a sexual undercurrent that gave shape to Winnie’s repression and assumed childless state.9 To Eric

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Prince, she stated that she considered the remembered incident to be ‘fairly straightforward Freudian stuff ’ and detailed how she thought the incident was central to an understanding of Winnie in terms of sexual failure and the loss of romance, a failure to fully connect with Willie (ibid.: 285). Pursuing this line of enquiry, and after conducting her own detailed research on the play and on Beckett’s life, Scales theorized that Winnie might have been based on the author’s aunt, or some configuration of relationships he had with his mother’s family. She believed that excavating the text for its potential biographical source would be of value to her as an actor in finding the answers to such speculation, in the hope that some firm grounding for her role could be established. For example, she reflected at length upon the significance of the ellipsis-marked hesitation in ‘papa, mama, Bibby and … old Annie’ in the story of Mildred and the mouse, assuming that there was something unusual or to be feared about ‘old Annie’ that was being partially suppressed from articulation. The care and concern to locate and understand the character of Winnie extended to constructing a pretty extensive backstory, which Scales shared with her co-actor Bowerman. Scales’s Winnie was a northern, upwardly mobile woman with a quantity surveyor for a father.10 She had enjoyed dancing lessons as a girl, and married at around the age of twenty-five, probably in a Masonic Hall which her father frequented, after meeting Willie while touring a musical in the regions. She ‘has been quite unable to cope with physical sex, but needs emotional fulfilment’ (ibid.: 285). Scales even decided with Jude Kelly whether Winnie in fact did her clothes shopping at British Home Stores rather than Littlewoods or Marks and Spencer.11 Such a level of detail in Winnie’s biography and the backstory was layered and calculated, to the point that together the actors agreed that Winnie was born in 1907 and Willie in 1900, and that the play must be happening in 1961, all to take account of some of the references in the text. Scales’s commitment to layered realism as an actor fortuitously conformed with Kelly’s desire to make Beckett speak for a newly developed, regional audience (though Kelly herself had less need of a



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precise background for the characters) as making Winnie identifiable for and to that audience would reduce the challenge that the play might represent. The director argued for the need to find a fit between actor, character and script, the rehearsal room discovery that might accommodate all approaches to the work and let the material express: I think I’m trying to find a character that lives in the language. Most writers write hearing voices. There will be moment when you find a voice that matches the language […] I don’t think you can combine the idea of clowning, pathos, absurdity, the human condition, language, unless you find a character that naturally speaks like that. (Ibid., 304)

Scales’s approach to her art had always been grounded in a care to make what she expressed as an actress relate to the lived experience of her audience. Concerned that, in her view, ‘too many productions [of Beckett] have been almost deliberately mystifying’ she stated of such an approach that ‘I found this alienating and I felt now this is an avenue down which I do not intend to run’. As already illustrated, she described her own approach in terms of character realism: I have to justify the script. I have to say it. What kind of person would say this? In this order? In these circumstances? Who is the person that would say that? What are the circumstances that would produce this? […] I have to find her. I mean, I can’t work any other way. If I’d been playing it in Dublin I would certainly have played it Rathmines, If I’d even playing it in Edinburgh I’d have gone for Morningside […] If I’d been playing it in London I would have played it Upper Norwood but the connotations with Sybil Fawlty might have been harmful. (Ibid.: 272–3)

There was an ambition, articulated unambiguously here, to consider Winnie specifically in terms of the audience who might confront her, and this purposeful contextualization must only have been sought to promote a greater identification between Winnie and her witnesses. Jude Kelly nuanced this, recalling how in fact the rehearsals began with Scales adopting a Norwood-area London accent, and how the actor was in fact initially reluctant to shift to a Yorkshire accent for fear that

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a local audience might read that as deliberate, patronizing perhaps, in ways that would detract from the purpose of audience identification with the character. As rehearsals progressed, the northern accent was trialled and adopted, and slowly a northern background was constructed in Scales’s biography of her character. Reviewers appreciated the concentrated realism of her approach. Robin Thornber described Scales’s Winnie as ‘no ponderous tragedy queen abstracted from Greek drama but, like one of Alan Bennett’s talking heads, a comfy lady of the sort you might meet in the queue at the checkout, more or less one of us’ (1993). Alfred Hickling commended her ‘steely resolve, punctured by deep, tragic eyes, angst chipping angrily at the corners of her smile’ (1993). Alastair Macaulay locates her Winnie accurately as ‘Northern, middle-class, genteel, dowdy, fading’ and adds that ‘Scales catches Winnie’s nervous system and, when she gabbles, she is alarmingly real’ though he notes that ‘If anything, she over-characterizes Winnie […] gives Winnie more surface than essence’ (1993). Some of that approach to realism recognized by the reviewers was also manifest in the stage design, by Pamela Howard, who had sought to avoid abstracting the scorched earth and baked sky of Beckett’s play. Howard had been acquainted with Scales for many years (their children were at school together) and had in fact discussed the play with her many times in the past, before this particular opportunity to work together. She had even had an opportunity to discuss the play with Beckett himself, in the summer of 1989. According to Howard’s testimony, when Scales was offered the role of Winnie she suggested to Kelly that Howard do the design (ibid.: 252). As the designer had already had commissions from the theatre, the working relationship was such that the suggestion was very easy to adopt. A number of set designs for the play were entertained by Howard and discussed with Jude Kelly; ‘a set with blue crystals […] one made with hessian, with burnt bits’ (ibid.: 300), but the director and the designer agreed that ultimately the environment had to be one in which the characters of Winnie and Willie could credibly exist, live,



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survive. Abstraction was kept to a minimum. The final stage image that Howard crafted of bleak, blasted sand dunes was, she recalled, ‘inspired by a winter walk along East Head, a National Trust spit of sand dunes at West Wittering, West Sussex one New Year’s Day’.12 Further inspiration was possibly also absorbed from the performance of the play that she witnessed in 1992 at the Théâtre national de la Colline, Paris (directed by Pierre Chabert and featuring Denise Gence as Winnie), though she felt the volcanic rock, solid appearance of the mound realized by Yannis Kokkos and Sylvie de Meurville was not appropriate to the fact of Winnie sinking into the ground. Despite her aversion to the realism of the volcanic landscape in the Paris production, Howard seems at first to have considered a similar approach, as her research into natural materials might indicate. In the archives of the West Yorkshire Playhouse, memos reveal that builders’ suppliers had been contacted to find the most practicable natural substance to create the set. Options offered to the design team had included ‘Lytag’ (expanded clay) which is a brown, lightweight aggregate; Calconite Flint, which is lightweight, heavier than Lytag but white and therefore closer to the desirable colour that Howard imagined; Natural pumice (which was a volcanic ash sourced in Greece) and Isotag, an ‘alternative lightweight aggregate’ which seems to have been the eventual favoured choice.13 Ultimately a decision was made to have the stage and mound construction covered employing a painted and textured cloth-like solution, rather than fully with loose materials which would have been less pragmatic. The key construction substance for the mound was vermiculite, ordinarily used to insulate lofts. Deconstructed egg-boxes were soaked in a hot adhesive and flung onto a hardwood base structure to begin a texturing effect, the vermiculite was then scattered on top and, reacting to the heat of the adhesive, would expand in place. Isotag was then sparsely scattered on top to provide the natural top layer and pebbles and stones were gathered to be placed appropriately around and upon the mound to contribute to the appearance of an arid and barren location. The result was described as a

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The mound was asymmetrical, described by Howard as ‘two humped shoulders’ (Prince 1994: 254), and spread out to fill much of the available stage space. The additional hump was a solution to the problem of needing to keep Willie out of audience view as required: the Courtyard theatre has a raked audience, with sight lines at angles down onto the surface of the stage, and these had to be considered in detail once the play left the rehearsal room to finish preparations in the space. Calculations down to fractions of inches were undertaken and projected, as every possible sight line was catered for within the design. For Howard, the mound ‘is simply a device. It is there to allow the Winnie-Willie thing to evolve’, explaining her role as functional in terms of a narrative that must be engineered to unfold clearly for an audience, through space as much as through words (ibid.: 257). Early design sketches had Winnie’s mound constructed on steel deck, but the final solution involved Scales sitting on an office chair with its pneumatic stalk being used to offer adjustments in heights between the two acts. A collar of material was added around the actor’s neck to complete the second act submergence. An electric fan was placed inside the structure, and the mound was partially sound-proofed on the inside to ensure its operation could not be heard from the auditorium. From seats in the galleries, to the left and right of the stage, a neck support was clearly visible which would not be seen from the majority of seats in the stalls. In one interview, Scales justified this comfort, arguing that support for the back of the neck releases the eye muscles (Butler 1993). In a lengthy five-week rehearsal period, the actors worked with the mound for all of three weeks, and costume and props were trialled and selected over that period, put under scrutiny ‘in action’ in the rehearsal room.



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Robert Bowerman was also cast as Krapp in the production of Krapp’s Last Tape that ran alongside Happy Days for the third week of the full run. He recalled how he was inspired by Scales’s attitude to her role to himself adopt a more ‘realistic’ approach to Krapp, whom he played as a lonely clown figure in a production that nonetheless did not hold back on the physical humour. Ostensibly directed by Cathy Denford, who in the end could not stay around for the full rehearsal period, Bowerman found himself often self-directing, rehearsing to himself in a dressing room mirror to try to hit upon the right voice, face and gesture. This lonesome approach was in fact attuned to the nature of the character, whose words pour into the empty space around him. Krapp’s Last Tape was performed in the same space as Happy Days, earlier in the day, and with a black drape placed before the larger set to accommodate Krapp’s den in the downstage portion of the Courtyard stage, closer to its audience, but cramped onto an apron stage. Bowerman’s Krapp’s Last Tape was pedantically faithful to the text of the play, in that it discounted or was constructed in possible or deliberate ignorance of the adjustments that Beckett himself had made in his own directorial approach to the play, and which were broadly sanctioned for general application. For example, the original directions for stage make-up – a whitened face and reddened nose – were followed accurately, and the associated comic aspiration of the banana rumination section were indulged and mined fully for comic effect, pursuing the most overt interpretation of the clowning references in the make-up and costume proposals. Bowman recalled meeting James Knowlson in the foyer after his performance, and receiving an observation that his was one of the most comic performances of the work that the scholar had ever seen.14 The visual clown-like elements, and the humour these generated, nonetheless contrasted with the pathos that Bowerman sought to evoke, and the balance was difficult to achieve. Not I was performed by Jude Kelly’s older sister Tricia Kelly, who stepped in to assist with just six days to go before her first night. The actor originally cast in the role had been unable to continue,

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experiencing such difficulty in retaining the text that she felt she had to renege upon her agreement to play the role. As with Scales’s approach to Winnie, Kelly’s approach to her role involved an attempt to achieve a certain grounding in reality. She began by asking herself a series of questions about the voice she had to inhabit: ‘Who is the person speaking? Who are they speaking to? […] Why are they saying it? What is the imperative to speak?’ (Kelly 2014) and decided to take the narrative in the text as belonging directly to the mouth speaking: that the voice was that of a seventy-year-old woman, who had been brought up in an orphanage by nuns, and who dies, or experiences a stroke or similar experience, while walking in a field. As Scales was doing for Winnie, Kelly tried a northern accent for the role, but only after rejecting an Irish one, given the brief time available for rehearsals. In the end, though, the assurance of her own Liverpudlian lilt proved to be the most comfortable choice. In working on the delivery in these ways, she felt that it was necessary to ground the experience for the audience: When you’re dealing with material like this which could seem very disembodied – literally – you feel that you want to kind of root the person speaking into something bedded in and real, for the audience and for yourself actually as the actor. And it’s not naturalism, it is patently not naturalism, but you do feel you’ve got to, you want to sort of make that this is a woman, who has a biography and obviously that woman is not a middle class woman, she’s not lived a middle class life. She is one of the sort of marginal women on the edges of a community. Possibly a rural community actually. So that’s the impulse, that you want to sort of bed it and make that more real. (Ibid.)

The subject of an internal memo in the West Yorkshire Playhouse archives for the production of Happy Days implies that a discussion was had over the need for Not I to be staged in the Quarry theatre to avoid clashing with the tech time needed for setting up Happy Days in the Courtyard, and the placement of the small, intimate play within the large space in front of a vast auditorium must have seemed something



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of a compromise. The ambition to house all three Beckett plays in the Courtyard was clearly unrealistic, and Krapp’s Last Tape arguably did not benefit from the restricted spatial arrangement available downstage of the Happy Days set. The Quarry theatre, however, had more than double the seating capacity (at 750) than the Courtyard, and would offer nothing like the intimate experience that Not I seems to crave to function well. The performances of all three plays were well attended, and Happy Days sold out on numerous evenings. The productions of both Not I and Krapp’s Last Tape ran earlier in the evening, allowing audiences to have an extended evening of Beckett in one sitting, and tickets for them were discounted to half price (£2) to those who held a ticket for the main show. There were just six performances of Not I, and nine of Krapp’s Last Tape. To augment the sense of celebration of Beckett, and participate in a developing ethos at the West Yorkshire Playhouse of entering into dialogue with their audiences, two events accompanied the performances: a ‘Q&A’ event with Scales, and scholarly talk entitled ‘Dialogue on the work of Samuel Beckett’ given by Eric Prince, then of University College, Scarborough, and who had been present at some rehearsals. Prince had also been approached to write a programme note for the production of Happy Days, and this piece of writing, ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Beckett’, opens with an exhortation to close the programme and just watch the play, promoting the experience of theatre over its analysis. Another programme note, entitled ‘Why ask Why?’ and written by Albert Hunt, continues in that vein and seeks to alleviate the worries of audience members who might feel they need to understand what is going on in front of them. Hunt takes the example of Winnie’s confrontation with Shower and Cooker as an indication of Beckett’s own will to ridicule the unending human appetite for meaning. Together, these events and these commissions for the programme were clearly made as part of an ambition to release the audience from any concern that one needs to engage with the plays on an intellectual level – that one needs to ‘understand’ them – in order to be able to enjoy them. By way of comparison, the programme notes

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in the Leeds Playhouse production of Waiting for Godot in 1971 offer far more scholarly anchoring of the play by citing Arthur Adamov and Albert Camus on the absurd generically, and Kenneth Tynan, Alec Clunes and Martin Esslin on Beckett and the absurd more specifically, adopting an approach that would seek to validate the importance of the writing and situate it within philosophical frameworks, rather than as a piece to confront and enjoy in the darkened auditorium. There is an undoubtable conscious attempt in the 1993 programme material to avoid just this kind of pigeonholing of Beckett for an audience. An agenda to embrace the theatrical, to forge a contract with the audience, was at the heart of the new West Yorkshire Playhouse enterprise, and when this was applied to Beckett it made for a refreshingly engaging approach that encouraged and permitted the audiences to consider the given plays on their own terms.

5

‘A price to be paid’: West End Beckett John Stokes

By a quirk of theatrical history Beckett made his London debut in the West End: Waiting for Godot opened on 3 August 1955 at the Arts Theatre in Great Newport Street and later moved to the Criterion in Piccadilly Circus, opposite the statue of Eros. That was back in the time when the West End had a mixed reputation as both the natural home of innocuous family entertainment (middle-brow comedies, old-fashioned farces, American musicals) and, this being prior to the Wolfenden Report of 1959, the notorious beat of street-walkers with the Soho sex industry close to hand. No wonder that, on both counts, Godot might look like an interloper, even if the Arts Theatre did have its own special history. Cities are forever changing, however, and over the years this has certainly been the case with the West End. From the 1850s, when it first became possible to think of London as having a centralized entertainment industry, until today, when a topographical term has come to signal an idea – ‘West End entertainment’ – the West End has always been a cultural phenomenon as well as a place. Contemporary historians investigating the material practices of nineteenth-century theatre have taken full account of the financial pressures driving urban development and have sought to place the capital’s theatre within an overall economy. Jacky Bratton’s The Making of the West End Stage reveals how in the second half of the nineteenth century ‘public spaces for display and shopping, entertainment and instruction, leisure and pleasure were part of the building and development of the new London’ (2001: 4). Yet she is at pains to dispel the view imposed in the late

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nineteenth century by the Ibsenite likes of William Archer and Bernard Shaw that condemned West End theatre as ‘simply commercial and commodified activity’: ‘A different view of the building of the West End, both literally and in its symbolic dimensions, would read theatre – and also professional and social singing, dancing, music-making, reading and lecturing – differently, alongside the new understandings of public pursuits like shopping, dining out and strolling’ (2001: 4–5). We might take our cue from this claim and view the West End theatre of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries equally dispassionately and recognize the necessary, fundamental part that an atmosphere of all-round commercial activity has played in its success as a provider of pleasure. Although the West End is routinely reported as either booming as never before or as being on the point of imminent collapse, the truth is invariably more complex. So-called ‘Theatreland’ is both the home of contemporary entertainment and an historical site, or set of sites, and it capitalizes on that combination. As popular culture has changed so the West End has continually remade itself, benefitting not only through a kind of innovative parasitism (rock musicals, marionette spectacles, TV spin-offs) but – Beckett will be much to the point here – contributing to those key moments when the avant-garde has entered the vernacular. This has been the case with Harold Pinter ever since The Caretaker in 1960 and even, surprisingly enough, with Edward Bond whose play The Sea was staged at, of all places, the Haymarket in 2008. In 2009 Michael Billington opened his review of Waiting for Godot at the Haymarket – directed by Sean Mathias, starring Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Patrick Stewart – in typical fashion: ‘It’s a sign of how much our theatre has changed that Beckett’s masterpiece, once seen as a subversion of West End theatre, now occupies one of its iconic temples’ (2009: 12). Billington went on to note that there was, nevertheless, ‘a price to be paid’. This was a reference not to expensive theatre seats in central London but rather to the artistic penalties risked by highprofile productions. ‘Sean Mathias’s star-studded revival’ he wrote, ‘lends this unnerving play a patina of cosy charm.’



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It remains true that an intellectual hostility, a suspicion of ‘cosy charm’, dating from the 1880s, persists even today, at least among theatre critics. Earlier complaints about dated practices and suffocating complacency had been made for good reason. As Tracy C. Davis has shown in The Economics of the British Stage, 1800–1914: Long a centre of taste, London became by the Edwardian years also the literal centre of ‘original’ production for the live arts. The greatest of the innovations in touring also facilitated significant exportation of the English language and British culture as a commercial product, reinforcing Britain’s imperial and colonial projects by solidification of a lingua franca along the maritime routes of its sphere of influence. (2000: 359)

It was partly because ‘the West End’ had been exported so successfully as a brand name that it carried imperial associations which, even in the mid-1950s when Beckett’s plays first became known, persisted among radical theatre-makers. For Joan Littlewood, for instance, or Lindsay Anderson, or early English enthusiasts for Beckett such as George Devine, ‘West End’ was a term of opprobrium. A few decades later, at the turn of the century, with ‘post-colonial’ and ‘multicultural’ ideals more securely in place, the British theatre has made successful attempts to turn a post-imperial capital into a cultural resource, a variegated tourist paradise, full of exhilarating populist energy. Yet one still hears vilification from progressives, whether practitioner or critic, even as they rely upon it for their professional survival. Waiting for Godot, concluded the Observer critic Susannah Clapp writing about that 2009 production, is ‘actually a bit obvious. Perfect, then, for a West End hit’ (2009: 11). Does a partly tourist-based theatre, dominated by musicals in the age of Lloyd Webber and by what Clapp calls the ‘obvious’, provide a more appropriate environment for Beckett than it did in the 1950s? Clearly some promoters think that it does. There is a paradox here, beyond the idea that ‘pleasure’ might be gained from witnessing Beckett’s extreme situations, and it lies in the way that the conditions under which consumption takes place, such as

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enforced glamour and conspicuous expense, can, on a good night, open an audience’s eyes to theatrical possibilities. These days the limits of the West End have to be defined against what lies beyond; parameters shift and are defined in relation to external as well as internal pressures. Cultural boundaries have altered dramatically since the mid-twentieth century, widening and becoming increasingly permeable, though still notionally and financially in place. To the west of the West End the Royal Court in Sloane Square has always been hospitable to Beckett and although never considered a West End theatre its productions have often transferred to the West End. The concrete stronghold of the Barbican, now probably the most international of London venues, has welcomed Beckett productions from near and far. To the south, across the river, there has been the establishment and expansion of the National Theatre and the emergence of a South Bank cultural quarter made up of the periodically rejuvenated Old Vic with its series of transatlantic collaborations, the magnificently refurbished Young Vic (two auditoria) and a sprinkling of ephemeral, uncomfortable but fearlessly experimental spaces.1 Even the cluster of concert halls around the Festival Hall has sometimes housed quasi-dramatic events. Further afield, but still within the greater London area, there have been Beckett productions at the Greenwich Theatre, the Riverside Studios, the Roundhouse in Camden Town and the Arcola in Hackney. There has been a blurring of fixed distinctions between an unashamedly populist or ‘West End’ theatre and a self-conscious fringe. Considerable interchange now takes place between commercial and subsidized managements, not just as a matter of ‘transfer’ but involving direct lines of creative influence. Claire Cochrane, another theatre historian concerned with economics, has charted this process in detail, noting that ‘pursuit of modernist ideals has seen the avantgarde embrace popular genres for both aesthetic and political reasons and thus the “illegitimate” has become legitimate as it were’ (2011: 9). We might add that some actors seem to be able to move freely between theatrical situations of many kinds. By 2009 Mark Rylance, with his triumphant performance in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem behind



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him (a transfer from the Royal Court to the Apollo and Broadway) and Simon McBurney, whose Theatre de Complicite has become an international model for ‘physical theatre’ experimentation, played in Endgame at the Duchess (2009). Here together, in what had become a Beckett classic, were ‘the greatest theatre-maker of his generation’ and ‘the greatest actor’ (Taylor 2009: 15). The present account of recent Beckett productions will concentrate, though not exclusively, on major productions that took place in unquestionably ‘West End’ environments and were mounted by unashamedly commercial managements often with so-called ‘celebrity casting’. These include Waiting for Godot at the Queen’s Theatre in 1991, Endgame at the Albery in 2004, the Haymarket Waiting for Godot in 2009 and Endgame at the Duchess in the same year. It will have little to say about several fine productions that have transferred to London from outside the city. Examples of such productions would be Krapp’s Last Tape at the New Ambassadors in 2000, with John Hurt made up to resemble the playwright himself in a production that originated at the Gate in Dublin and travelled to the Barbican before ending up at the New Ambassadors, thereby getting ‘the proper West End outing it deserves’ (Gore-Langton 2000: 54), and Michael Gambon’s Eh Joe which also started out at the Gate and moved to the Duke of York’s in 2006. When it comes to the sheer weight of bricks and mortar there would seem to be clear differences between a production that opens in the West End and one that is brought in from outside. Most of the newer, or at least newly configured, spaces at some distance from the city centre are considerably more flexible than those West End buildings dating from Edwardian times or earlier. Nevertheless, their experimental success may well have encouraged directors and designers to be bold when confronted by an old-fashioned proscenium arch stage, once-ornate interiors and tiers of seats stretching ever upward. The Arts Theatre, scene of Beckett’s debut, was, and still is, very small and when it opened held 324. Converted from a previous building in 1927, it had even before the very first Godot operated as a

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club venue, thereby evading censorship, and had long been associated with the experimental and avant-garde. To that extent it was a West End anomaly, comparable with the Parisian theatres such as the Théâtre de Babylone where Beckett had made his original debut. The West End houses that have accommodated his plays in more recent years are large by comparison, products of the age of the architects Frank Matcham and W. G. R. Sprague. The Queen’s, built in 1907 but given a new frontage in 1959, seats 989; the Albery (now the Noel Coward), built for Sir Charles Wyndham in 1903, seats 877. The Haymarket is the oldest of the four, dating from 1821, although refurbished in the 1990s; it holds 888. The Duchess (1929) is later and smaller than average, seating 479. All feature a horseshoe-shaped auditorium designed so that members of an audience could be aware of themselves and observe their near and not so near neighbours. Perhaps surprisingly, Beckett himself does not seem to have been fazed by mere size. He even expressed enthusiasm when, in 1958, Jean-Louis Barrault had planned to stage Godot on the ‘really big stage’ of the Théâtre de l’Odéon in Paris (Beckett 2014: 226). Since the proportions of the human body remain reasonably constant, on a ‘really big stage’, as Beckett was surely aware, the amount of surrounding space affects an audience’s idea of what it is to be alive and alone, especially when that space is significantly empty. Such vertiginous potential of scale has been notably exploited in recent National Theatre and Young Vic productions of Happy Days (both have more compact studio spaces that might have been used). These larger playing spaces are all comparatively new, designed to order, built according to contemporary principles and preferences, and are only now beginning to accrue histories. Traditional West End theatres are different in that they provide no easy options, and tend, within the proscenium, to possess considerable depth, capacious and semi-visible wings and, above all, great height. Even more importantly they have the patina of age, faded perhaps but still very much perceptible. Billington’s review of Godot at the Haymarket in 2009 which was designed by Stephen Brimson Lewis, noted how ‘The governing notion



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seems to be that Beckett’s play is a self-reflexive study of theatre. Stephen Brimson Lewis’s set, with its crumbling masonry and shattered lighting-rigs, seems like a post-apocalyptic extension of the Haymarket itself. Pozzo’s entrance is greeted with a circus drum roll and his and Lucky’s final exit is marked by crash-bang-wallop effects’ (2009: 12). Culturally speaking, large buildings such as the Haymarket are condemned as relics yet committed for preservation, a paradoxical situation that Brimson Lewis had clearly grasped. In this production the vestiges of an earlier form of theatre were palpable: ‘rubble, a wall of broken brick and concrete and, oddly, a half-shattered proscenium arch’ (Nightingale 2009: 11). There were even shabby boxes placed to the side and a stage trap-door through which Godot’s ‘Boy’ would finally appear. It is striking how many other directors of ‘West End’ productions have incorporated this dual sense of ruin and survival into their realizations of Beckett. For Endgame in 2004, directed by Matthew Warchus, the designer Rob Howell set the scene with a tattered red curtain of the kind once found in variety theatres. Before this rose upon a dingy grey room we could hear sounds of busy chatter as if a company of performers were getting ready to appear. Indeed, curtains have become a signifier of theatre itself – and possibly of the outmoded traditions that Beckett needed to draw upon in order to advance, taking theatre into places both obscure and strangely familiar. When the heavy red curtain at the New Ambassadors was raised on the imported Krapp’s Last Tape in 2000 it revealed ‘a sea of darkness simulating his [Krapp’s] reclusive withdrawal from the world’ (Marmion 2000: 53). Beckett’s celebrated use of ‘metatheatrical’ devices can become in the hands of designers both precisely local and formally self-reflexive. Not every West End production has gone as far as the 2009 Godot at the Haymarket, but they have all responded to the opportunity for subversion of theatrical illusion. For an earlier Godot in 1991 the avant-garde artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman came up with an enclosed box-like set with a smudgy yellow backcloth (‘like the face of a ruined moon’, Peter 1991: 8) and a tree that most critics found

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very hard to define – though there was general agreement about its deliberate ugliness. One critic records ‘a huge, chunky tree shaped like a cross between a bull and a tyrannosaurus rex, with plaited rope for branches’ (Nightingale 1991: 18). Another described it as ‘a deformed stump that looks as if it has been hastily constructed out of modelling clay’ (Koenig 1991: 42). Even here, though, there were suspicions of a commentary on theatre history: ‘a deliberately ugly and patently polystyrene tree […] and a crude skyscape against which Mayall [Didi] impertinently leans in one of many fourth-wall-destruction exercises. The artiness represented by Giacometti’s anorexic tree in the 1961 Paris revival is unceremoniously dispelled’ (Coveney 1991: 56). As if to dispel any doubts that the set was intended to destroy theatrical pretensions, the movement of the actors brought the point forcibly home. Pozzo and Lucky entered through doors obviously cut into the flats, and at one moment ‘Vladimir stalks to the back and poses pettishly with his hand pressed flat against the scuff-marked yellow sky in Derek Jarman’s set, thereby turning it from part of the scenery to a piece of “scenery”’ (Taylor 1991: 18). These days such attacks on the fourth wall convention are unlikely to cause much of a stir. In a far more daring exploitation of an old-fashioned building the director Deborah Warner stepped outside of the proscenium altogether and for Footfalls in 1994 had Fiona Shaw pacing up and down a platform erected in front of the Dress Circle. This was despite the fact that the audience had been confined to a limited area in the stalls where wooden planks had been placed over the seats. The stage itself – where Shaw would eventually end up – was entirely bare, lit by three naked bulbs. Warner’s extraordinary production not only had ghostliness as its theme, it turned the building into a haunted house to the point where it became impossible to separate the performance from its interaction with the particulars of place. When Shaw spun around she pushed up against the Upper Circle ‘like a tormented caryatid’ (Coveney 1994: 11). Although the production famously prompted the Beckett Estate to withdraw permission for a European tour and a television version, largely on the grounds that lines of dialogue had been reassigned and



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stage directions violated, the deeper historical shift lay in the fact that the traditional spatial relation between actor and audience had been turned around. Nobody could claim that this West End production was in any sense comfortable; no ‘cosy charm’ here. In a reversal of the process normally claimed by avant-garde productions that aim to defamiliarize reality with unexpected effects and new perspectives, West End Beckett can still surprise us with its displacements. These days both Beckett’s austere dramaturgy and supposed West End values are familiar but in different ways – which is why the critics often find it hard not to feel quizzical when faced by their combination. In 1991 Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson were best known as the stars of television’s The Young Ones from the 1980s, a fact that appears not to have endeared them to the critics when the pair embarked upon Godot at the Queen’s, though the production was apparently a commercial success.2 Only one critic, Michael Coveney, seems to have come up with relatively up-to-date comparisons, arguing that the comic exchanges between Edmondson and Mayall were ‘no more dated than the best of Monty Python or The Goon Show’ (1991: 56). The majority of reviews concentrated on the outrageously scatological business carried over from the youth-orientated television programmes: [Mayall] likewise pretending to have a weak bladder […] he proceeds to produce carrots from this self-same erogenous zone and does so with as much nudging and winking as a male stripper at a hen party. (Tinker 1991: 3) ‘What am I to say to Mr. Godot, sir?’ the boy asks. ‘Tell him to f…’, retorts Mayall, who has previously only just restrained himself from lobbing a gob of phlegm into the stalls. (Wardle 1991: 21) This is a play about a play […] Several times they seem to be talking to each other about how the theatre works, sometimes they come out and address the audience directly […] Some of the language has been sharpened since the days of the censor. The line ‘people are bloody ignorant apes’ has reverted to ‘people are cunts’. There is more bawdy

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Staging Beckett in Great Britain – and a touch of sexual starvation – than there used to be. (Rutherford 1991: 21)

In short, the TV stars indulged in the professional crime of ‘mugging’, relying on their known abilities: ‘Asked to relate to other characters, or play totally within the confines of the script, they are visibly uneasy over the full distance, blossoming in those few moments where they are able to nudge the audience with an aside or a knowing wink’ (Morley 1991: 10). Mayall and Edmondson have ‘a mugging complicity’, concluded Paul Taylor in the Independent: ‘It’s not the actors’ fault that they have fans; it is that they play up to them and to their expectations’ (Taylor 1991: 18). Sometimes it helps to be old. Positioned on the antiquated stages of the West End famous actors have on occasion deliberately channelled fellow spirits from the past. Billington identified Stewart and McKellen’s Didi and Gogo as ‘a pair of down-at-heel entertainers’: ‘When Patrick Stewart’s Vladimir cries “together again at last” he does a little lightfooted shimmy across the stage. McKellen’s Estragon imitates Lucky’s dance with a Chaplinesque grace. And the famous moment when Didi and Gogo do every possible permutation with three hats has the practised skill of comic veterans revisiting an old routine’ (2009: 12). As if underlining Billington’s point, Stewart and McKellen finished the evening off with a rendering of Flanagan and Allen’s ‘Underneath the Arches’ and a soft-shoe shuffle. There was a strong element of selfdeprecating irony – or, depending on the critic, sentimental self-regard – in these performances. Interviewed before the London opening the pair put on their own off stage show. ‘What does a Morecambe and Wise routine mean?’ asked McKellen: It means something to Morecambe and Wise. To us it can be the overall expression of a relationship or it can tickle our funny bone. We have to delve into it. We know that in the past we have been in a professional relationship, which involved performing. It’s potent to me, that idea, because they don’t live together, no more than Morecambe and Wise lived together as real people. And they turn up every day.



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At which Stewart chipped in with ‘In the evening’, leading in turn to McKellen’s ‘And they seem to do the same act twice. Twice nightly. They come together to have a relationship.’ Finally, to make sure that the point wasn’t lost, Stewart capped that with ‘Just as we do’ (Edwardes 2009: 23). As Coveney brilliantly observed about their thoroughly professional double-act: perhaps this time round Godot was a casting agent (Coveney 2009: 3). Although, if so, he would surely not have kept such a profitable pair waiting. Of course, actors have always enjoyed acting actors, relishing their own absurdity and inviting the audience to join in the self-mockery. Hamm as played by Gambon (‘the veteran thespian’, Wolf 2004: 10) in 2004 came across as a ‘puffed up, barnstorming luvvie’ (Taylor 2004: 29). Five years later Rylance at the Duchess was receiving very similar comments: ‘Rylance’s fantastically funny and painful portrayal, a lofty, affected luvvie […] Rylance’s Hamm has a vast repertoire of actorly effects and wiles – from the mock modesty of the chatshow anecdotalist to the self-regarding thunder of the barnstorming tragedian’ (Taylor 2009: 15). And critics have been only too happy to elaborate the idea of self-conscious performance for themselves. One solution to the problem of describing a memorable representation is to draw on the resources of memory itself – summoning up in one’s review shades of another character (who might be fictional or real), of a painting, even of a puppet. Reviewing the Gambon/Evans Endgame critics found Hamm reminding them of a Francis Bacon pope, Dumbledore in Harry Potter (Gambon’s own film role, in fact), and Mole in a guignol version of The Wind in the Willows. Clov was variously reminiscent of Munch’s ‘The Scream’, Dickens’s Smike, and more predictably, Charlie Chaplin and Norman Wisdom. Susannah Clapp made an unexpected but exact identification of Nag and Nell as ‘desiccated relatives of that other potted duo from the Fifties, Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men’ (2004: 10). The effectiveness of such comparisons inevitably depends upon their making sense to a broad swathe of readers who might be typical of the West End audience with whom the critics had shared their evening. Nevertheless, confronted by Beckett, middle-aged reviewers

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do seem to be at their happiest when they can invoke legendary acts from the music-hall tradition such as Morecambe and Wise, Tommy Cooper and Frankie Howerd. In short, they tend to be more tolerant of dead rather than living reputations – which may well have contributed to their doubts about Mayall and Edmondson. If premature celebrity can be a professional curse, as Mayall and Edmondson discovered, could age and experience fare any better? Where youth had floundered could age, then, show the way forward? When Stewart and McKellen performed the play they, too, found themselves under scrutiny for telltale signs of previous parts. In their case, from years playing Shakespearean heroes from Lear to Macbeth, movie and television stardom in the X-Men, Star Trek and The Lord of the Rings series. Would their reversion to the northern accents of their youth (Yorkshire and Lancashire respectively) be enough to match Beckett’s concern with marginality? For Coveney, there was an admirable pathos in the mature actors’ attempts not to play upon a shared history. He even suggested that their ‘old association going back through the X-Men films to the RSC forty years ago’ would bring an ‘added sting’ to ‘the banter and the bitchiness’ of Beckett’s play. Nevertheless, McKellen, in particular, ‘never seems hampered by his trademark mannerisms or intonations. His huge hams of hands are eloquently deployed throughout and his big rheumy eyes rake the void, and the auditorium, without beseeching our sympathy or cheap laughter’ (Coveney 2009: 3). Few reviewers showed any wish to forget other achievements nonetheless. It was even suggested that Ronald Pickup’s Lucky, all wispy grey hair, was a sly take on McKellen’s Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings (Wolf 2009: 9). In his beautifully empathic tribute to Beckett’s own favourite Irish actors, Jack McGowran and Patrick Magee, the novelist Colm Tóibín has written of ‘their ability to hold the stage, to be lead actors in a state of permanent alienation from their true role at the very centre, a role that was being played in England by such figures as Olivier, Redgrave and Gielgud, actors who would be no use to Beckett’ (2007: 6). Substitute Patrick Stewart OBE, Sir Ian McKellen, CH, CBE, Sir



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Michael Gambon CBE, and even Sir John Hurt CBE, for Baron Olivier OM, Sir Michael Redgrave CBE and Sir John Gielgud OM, CH, and one realizes what the current English theatrical knights would have to forgo were they to be of ‘use’ in a form of theatre where glamour and status have little place. It has not always been apparent, at least to the critics, that they have been willing to make that sacrifice. What, though, about everyone else, the West Enders, the international tourists, the coach party pleasure seekers, the suburban commuters, all of whom fill those vast Edwardian buildings in quantities large enough for someone somewhere to make a profit? Who is to say whether, having paid relatively high prices, they felt let down by Beckett and that they didn’t make their own comparisons and associations? It is frequently held that Godot epitomizes post-war desolation, and that Endgame was a premonitory picture of nuclear disaster. How did the assorted members of a ‘West End audience’, the most diverse audience in the land, probably in the world, respond to all that apparent bleakness? We cannot simply dismiss them as a mere ‘market’ – a notional and potentially belittling category within which they would surely prefer not to be confined. Yet it is hard to be sure about the true nature of their night out. What if we assume that they made their own personal connections with the theatrical experience that Beckett has to offer not as vapid ‘consumers’ but as amateur experts knowledgeable about contemporary modes of entertainment, culturally discriminating about stand-ups, sitcoms, improvisation, performance art, and sci-fi futurist television, familiar with the talents of individual actors, especially the ‘celebrities’? Would it not then become possible to think of these imagined spectators as being, in the honorific employed by the currently influential French theorist, Jacques Rancière, ‘emancipated’? For Rancière the ‘emancipated spectator’ is someone whose individuality is neither dissolved within a supposed and invariably delusive ‘community’, nor placed in an inferior position to whatever is set before them. This new modern spectator is no longer to be treated as a naïve pupil ready to be instructed – indoctrinated even – but rather as

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someone who knows enough about the arts of performance to be able to appreciate the ways in which they mediate his or her understanding, his or her knowledge of life itself. ‘There are only ever individuals,’ says Rancière, plotting their own paths in the forests of things, acts and signs that confront or surround them. The collective power shared by spectators does not stem from the fact that they are members of a collective body or from some specific form of inter-activity. It is the power each of them has to translate what she perceives in her own way, to link it to the unique intellectual adventure that makes her similar to all the rest in as much as this adventure is not like any other. (2009: 16–17)

We might even ask how a Beckett spectator could fail to be ‘emancipated’ given the freedom for individual interpretation that this supremely undoctrinaire playwright has always conceded to his audience. Freedom to make sense and to feel according to the moment is part of Beckett’s bequest. How odd and unexpected, then, if that freedom should be made available via the box office – admittedly only to those who can afford West End prices. Rancière’s notion of ‘equality of intelligence’ is that it ‘links individuals, makes them exchange their intellectual adventures, in so far as it keeps them separate from one another, equally capable of using the power everyone has to plot her own path’ (2009: 17). As a vision of intellectual democracy this seems peculiarly appropriate to Beckett’s ideal audience wherever he is staged – even, or perhaps most of all, in London’s commercial and cosmopolitan heart.

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‘It’s all symbiosis’: Peter Hall Directing Beckett Sos Eltis

Fifty years after Peter Hall directed the English premiere of Waiting for Godot at the Arts Theatre Club in August 1955, the Times critic Benedict Nightingale mused that he could not ‘be sure that without Hall’s boldness Beckett would have remained what he was in 1954, a minor cult figure on the Left Bank’ (Nightingale 2005). That such a possibility could even be entertained is a tribute to the central role accorded to Hall in the history of Beckett’s reception in England. Directing Godot changed Hall’s life: Harold Pinter and Tennessee Williams approached him to direct their plays; he was appointed the first director of the Royal Shakespeare Company; Leslie Caron asked him to direct her in Gigi – and he married her (Hall 1997). What Hall did for Beckett is inevitably a more complex story to construct, but it is an important one, including two new productions of Godot, in 1997 and 2005, and of Happy Days in 1975 and 2003, starring Peggy Ashcroft and Felicity Kendal respectively. As founding director of the RSC (1960–8), director of the National Theatre (1973–88), founder of his own theatre company, and a devout admirer of Beckett’s plays, Hall’s role has been a vital one. Hall’s account of what first drew him to Godot has remained remarkably consistent throughout his memoirs, diaries, interviews and programme notes across more than five decades: the musicality and economy of form that made Godot, in Artaud’s terms, ‘poetry of the theatre, rather than poetry in the theatre’ (Hall 2010: 129). As against the verse plays of Eliot, Fry and Auden, whose poetry struck him as

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tacked on like a ‘collection of sequins on a rather homespun dress’, Beckett’s language was ‘selective and particular’, his haunting images ‘reduced to what is completely necessary for the meaning of the play. There is no decoration. And by this economy, Beckett regains a total philosophy of the theatre, where the words and action fuse’ (ibid.: 129, 132). For Hall, it was Beckett who freed the stage from naturalism, reintroducing imagination and reconnecting the audience to a stage that is no longer reduced to a framed picture. Above all, perhaps, Hall understands Beckett’s dialogue and action as concretely rooted in human feeling, so that Beckett, like Pinter, is ‘too fundamental and true in his emotions ever to be an Absurdist’ (ibid.: 150).1 This distinction lies at the heart of Hall’s understanding of Beckett’s theatre, as one whose action is always rooted in solid actuality and emotional truth. A lifelong admirer of Beckett’s genius and always eager to please him, Hall is nonetheless clear about where his own methods of direction diverge from those of the author. The emotional dynamism of Hall’s productions, remarked on by generations of reviewers, is intrinsically tied to his rehearsal methods. A great respecter of the playwright’s exact words, Hall also learnt from Beckett’s dismayed reaction to some of the gestures and movements in his Arts Theatre production of Godot that, as he put it, ‘Beckett’s theatre is as much about mime and physical precision as it is about words’ (Hall 1983: 14 October 1974, 124). Directing Happy Days for the National Theatre in 1974, Hall therefore invited Beckett to instruct Peggy Ashcroft in the precise notation of the ‘physical business’, but despite his excitement at working with ‘an absolute genius’, he remained critical of the playwright’s rehearsal techniques, which caused a recurring problem: unless [Peggy] is allowed to feel it all very strongly, she will never know what she is hiding. But the slightest sign of feeling disturbs Sam, and he speaks of his need for monotony, paleness, weakness. This is where, unlike Harold [Pinter], he is not finally a theatre worker, great director though he can be. He confuses the work process with the result. (Ibid.: 1 November 1974, 124, 127)



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Hall is scrupulous in following Beckett’s text exactly – which, as he notes, means referring to the Faber and Faber Theatrical Notebooks edition of Godot, despite its often considerable expense – but his attitude to the minutiae of Beckett’s stage business is more relaxed, regarding them more as a map for guidance than a rigid set of instructions. Hall’s rehearsal process works from the inside outwards, whereas Beckett’s minutely detailed instructions recorded in his Schiller Theater production notebook required his actors to work inwards from a set of constrained physical patterns.2 Hall has been content on occasions to diverge explicitly from Beckett’s staging. His 1997 production of Godot, for example, was explicitly based on the Schiller production text, yet Act II opened not with Vladimir and Estragon on stage, mirroring the Act I opening with their positions reversed, but rather with only Vladimir on stage, offering a more naturalistic sequel to their night apart (Beckett 1993: 50).3 Indeed, Hall has commented somewhat dismissively of Alan Schneider’s close adherence to Beckett’s instructions that ‘His fidelity could verge on the mechanical and his productions were sometimes more accurate than inspired’ (Hall 1999). Musicality is another central attribute of Hall’s productions. Hall has described how from the first he was drawn to Godot’s rhythms, finding in them ‘a shape that was very particular: lyrical, yet colloquial; funny, yet mystical’ (Hall 1993: 103). He has repeatedly likened Beckett’s (and Pinter’s) plays to Mozart operas, and James Laurenson, who played Vladimir in Hall’s 2005 production, described how the structure of the language was first established as ‘an armature’ which enabled them to then explore the rest of the play, with the director ‘actually vaguely conducting’ the play as he searches for ‘the music and the structure’ (Quarmby 2005). Here again Hall is ready to experiment and explore, bringing the text into new life with innovative phrasing. So Alastair Macaulay praised Hall’s ‘classical regard’ for Beckett’s sonorities in his 2005 Godot, noting in particular how Alan Dobie as Estragon ‘takes four successive clauses – “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!” – in a single firm sweep so brisk it crashes over us like an unforeseen wave’; and Laurenson’s Vladimir ‘utters the last great

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speech about “Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the forceps” with a full-bodied simplicity that leaves us gasping’ (Macaulay 2005). It is this immediacy that marks out Hall’s productions, manifested most clearly in the emotional connections between the characters, whose relations form the core of each performance and depend upon the particular dynamics of the actors. At the heart of Hall’s direction, therefore, lies the actors’ exploration of the emotional reality that underlies the action and the particular resonances between them – an approach that complements Beckett’s explanation to Peter Woodthorpe, who played Estragon in 1955, when he asked what the play was about: ‘It’s all symbiosis, Peter; it’s symbiosis’ (quoted in Knowlson 1996: 417). The 1955 Arts Theatre Club premiere was in many ways a happy accident, resulting from the failure of producers Peter Glenville and Donald Albery to secure Ralph Richardson or Alec Guinness, and Beckett’s losing patience with such star-chasing, urging them to get on with it, because ‘If the play can’t get over with ordinarily competent producing and playing then it’s not worth doing at all’ (Beckett 2011: 25 July 1954, 490). Fresh from Cambridge University, aged twenty-four, Peter Hall had just taken over the directorship of the Arts Theatre, which, as a small avant-garde theatre with private club status, offered an ideal venue for a pre-West End tryout production outside the jurisdiction of the Lord Chamberlain, to whose extensive cuts Beckett adamantly refused to accede.4 Hall was also personally well suited to the task, being an enthusiast for experimental French drama who had already directed plays by Jean Giraudoux and Jean Anouilh, and received an admiring review from Sunday Times critic, Harold Hobson, for his English premiere of Ionesco’s The Lesson at the Arts. Excited above all by a playwright’s individual voice, Hall had also demonstrated his sensitivity to what Hobson termed ‘the characteristic French capacity to raise the mystery of poetry out of hard, bright, concrete images’; reviewing Hall’s production of Giraudoux’s The Enchanted at the Oxford Playhouse, Hobson noted as particularly exquisite ‘the utterly quiet moment of transition, when even the trees seem to stay



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the rustling of their leaves in order to listen, before the harassed, longed-for ghost appears’ (Hobson 1955a: 6 February). Even before encountering Godot, Hall was alert to the power of silence. Hall cast Peter Bull as Pozzo, Paul Daneman as Vladimir (having failed to secure Cyril Cusack), Timothy Bateson as Lucky, and a twenty-three year-old Peter Woodthorpe, fresh from playing Lear at Cambridge, as Estragon. Rehearsals were conducted with a brio that was reassuring for actors hypnotized and disconcerted by Godot’s strangeness. As Bull reports, Hall cheerfully advised that ‘if we stop and discuss every line we’ll never open. I think it may be dramatically effective but there’s no hope of finding out till the first night’ (Bull 1985: 106). This might sound flippantly dismissive, but it is also a statement that the play simply is – that it is its own action and dialogue, no more and no less; as Hall repeatedly advised the cast throughout the run, ‘Don’t explain it to the audience – just do it’ (quoted in Bradby 2001: 79). The success of the production is well known. Greeted at first with bemusement and occasional hostility by the weekly critics, the play prompted Kenneth Tynan to declare himself ‘godotista’ in the Observer, while Hobson urged readers of the Sunday Times to see this ‘fourleaved clover’ which could ‘securely lodge in a corner of your mind for as long as you live’; resulting in long queues at the box office, heated critical debate, and a West End transfer (Tynan 1955; Hobson 1955b, 7 August).5 Hall has been generous in his acknowledgement of the limitations of the production – limitations which were brought home to him in the most uncomfortable way possible, by Beckett viewing it from the stalls and periodically informing his future American director Alan Schneider that ‘It’s ahl wrahng!’ – but, as Hall rightly points out, ‘I was journeying in a new country and finding my way’ (Schneider 1986: 225; Hall 1997). The incidental Bartok music that accompanied the production was a retrospective embarrassment, as was the cluttered set, designed by Peter Snow, its substantial tree surrounded by high reeds set on a sloping bank, and with a tar barrel accompanied by scattered stones downstage, on which Vladimir and Estragon frequently came

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to rest.6 The crowded semi-naturalism of the set diverged markedly from the stark and defined stage images of Beckett’s vision. The long reeds were intended to help the actors with the challenge of the bare stage, but this very notion of a supportive relation between the actors and their stage environment misunderstood a fundamental principle of Beckett’s artistic conception: the indifference of man’s environment to its inhabitants. It was precisely this quality that Beckett admired in Cézanne’s landscapes, as he wrote to Tom MacGreevy: ‘what I feel in Cézanne is precisely the absence of a rapport that was all right for Rosa or Ruysdael for whom the animising mode was valid, but would have been false for him, because he had the sense of his incommensurability not only with life of such a different order as landscape but even with life of his own order, even with the life […] operative in himself ’ (Beckett 2009a: 227). It is an indifferent landscape that Vladimir and Estragon inhabit, whereas Snow’s set reminded Beckett of a romanticized Salvator Rosa painting (Beckett 2011: 547–8). As regards the performances, Beckett was delighted with Peter Woodthorpe’s playing of Estragon with his natural Yorkshire accent, and loathed Hugh Burden’s Vladimir (as replacement for Daneman who failed to predict the success of Godot and transferred to a shortlived comic satire). Beckett found unbearable the ‘uniformity’ of Bull’s Pozzo who, he felt, failed to play Pozzo as the mad ‘hypomaniac’ he must be and instead tried to give him a unity which rendered him ‘lifeless and dull’ (ibid.: 586). A number of reviewers likened Godot to the nonsense writing of Carroll and Lear, which was, of course, a simple way of dismissing the disorienting unfamiliarity of dialogue that married music-hall crosstalk with the scraps and orts of halfremembered learning; but such reviews may also reflect the particular delivery of some of the lines. As Daneman recalled, he and his fellow actors developed techniques for controlling audience response by charging seemingly innocuous lines with immense weight, speeding up and slowing down at unexpected points, thus endowing the dialogue with the random rhythms and comic bathos of English nonsense writing (Hope-Wallace 1955; Daneman quoted in Bradby 2001: 78).



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In his second, and even more admiring, review of the play, Hobson argued that it was not religiously irreverent but instead ‘beautifully and musically’ questioning, and he picked out as particularly significant the moment when Vladimir is told by a young boy at the end of the play that Godot for whom he has been vainly waiting all his life has a white beard, his awed exclamation, “Christ have mercy upon us,” is the most solemn thing heard in our comic theatre for many years. Much is due here to the actor, Mr. Paul Daneman, whose momentary hesitation and sudden lifting of his battered hat when realisation dawns are gestures of extraordinary and moving delicacy. (Hobson 1955e: 14 August)

These particular emphases may have played a significant role in the heated debate that arose over the Christian symbolism of the play, and in particular whether Godot represented God, a discussion that played out over months in the TLS, for example.7 Beckett was quick to correct these implications, repeatedly emphasizing that Daneman’s line should be delivered as ‘a scarcely intelligible scarcely audible ejaculation’ and that there should be ‘No pointing to heaven’ (Beckett 2011: 573–9). Perhaps the clearest indication of the particular qualities of Hall’s production is provided by Hobson’s description of it as ‘one of the most noble and moving plays of our generation, a threnody of hope deceived and deferred but never extinguished; a play suffused with tenderness for the whole human perplexity; with phrases that come like a sharp stab of beauty and pain’, adding that it was ‘one of the four funniest entertainments in London’ (Hobson 1955c: 25 September, 11 December). Championing Godot in no fewer than seven articles between August and December 1955, Hobson implicitly accused doubters of lacking the Arnoldian critical capacity for disinterestedness in their ‘complacent inability to recognise the highest when they see it’ (ibid.). But when, in the following year, he saw a revival of the original French production, Hobson, in a review entitled ‘A Revelation’, contrasted Hall’s ‘masterpiece of desolate beauty, of subdued music, and of brooding compassion’ with what he realized was the real Godot,

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a play ‘as unforgettable as a knife twisted in the ribs’. On an empty stage which offered no comfort or distraction, was a Vladimir who offered, not the inextinguishable hope of Daneman’s performance, but mere delusive flashes before ‘darkness and fear descend again’, accompanied by the ‘private horror’ of Jean Martin’s shaking and quivering Lucky, making together an expression of compassion for mankind ‘intensely dramatic, and almost unlit by any hope’ (Hobson 1956). As Beckett wryly put it, the ‘redemptive perversion’ of the London production, ‘helps to account for its success’ (Beckett 2011: 573). It is worth noting that it was in this form that Godot was first performed not only in London but in the regional theatres, when a touring production starring Bull, Bateson and Woodthorpe, who proved unable to alter their performances, visited Harrow, Cambridge, Blackpool, Bournemouth and Birmingham. Its highly mixed reception – including the wonderful heckle from a retired military gent in Brighton: ‘No wonder we lose the colonies if they put on drivel like this’ – could be put down to a diversity of tastes in the various venues; it was rapturously received in Cambridge, and emptied theatres in Blackpool (Bull 1985: 118). But the performances themselves were clearly idiosyncratic, as Bull recalls they cut all the pauses and shortened the play by twenty minutes in order to catch the Saturday night train from Blackpool to London, and, despite the suggestion from the tour’s financial backer, the pianist Winifred Atwell, that some serious music like Schubert’s ‘Valse Triste’ would be better suited to the piece than The Desert Song and The Student Prince, the latter remained its accompaniment to please the tastes of provincial audiences – one wonders if Hall’s Bartok would have been forgiven had Beckett heard his play accompanied by 1950s sentimental show tunes (ibid.: 114–19). It was twenty years before Hall returned to directing Beckett with Happy Days for the National Theatre in 1975. The programme indicates an expectation that audiences would approach the play with trepidation; bemused and laudatory quotes from critics are juxtaposed, alongside an emphasis on the role of ‘ordinary theatre-goers’ who have responded with ‘intelligence, feeling, humour’ to Beckett’s plays and so



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established his reputation (see University of Reading Beckett Archive (UoR), Stage File HAP 1975). A cleverly chosen quote from Beckett’s Proust begins by describing the deadening effects of habit, and ends with the declaration that ‘when the object is perceived as particular and unique and not merely the member of a family, when it appears independent of any general notion and detached from the sanity of a cause, isolated and inexplicable in the light of ignorance, then and then only may it be a source of enchantment’ – simultaneously explicating the play’s concerns and describing the ideal state of mind in which to receive it. The casting of Peggy Ashcroft helped to cement Beckett’s relation not only to Pinter – in whose Landscape (1969) and Silence (1969) she had recently starred – but also to the rest of the repertoire, both classic and modern. A leading Shakespearean actor, Ashcroft had also won accolades for her performances as Catherine Sloper in The Heiress (1947), an adaptation of Henry James’s Washington Square, and as Hester Collyer in Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea (1952), in which Tynan described her as ‘a melted candle, burned down and beautiful’, noting in particular her unique ability to convey ‘a serious, raisonné interest in sex’ (quoted in Billington 1988: 142). Though starkly different in style, Winnie shares a thwarted romanticism, stoicism and suppressed desire with these women, and the casting drew upon what Hall described as one of Ashcroft’s key qualities, ‘the combination of a very English containment and decency with a hint of wild passion fermenting underneath’ (ibid.: 140). Instructed by Beckett in the precise ballet of Winnie’s movements, and their essential grace of economy, Hall and Ashcroft also agreed that Winnie should speak with an Anglo-Irish lilt, struck by how ‘beautiful, balanced, rhythmic, incantatory’ the text sounded ‘in Sam’s gentle Anglo-Irish brogue’ – a revelation that was to become a key element in all Hall’s subsequent productions (quoted in Knowlson 1996: 604). But obedience to Beckett’s wishes had its limits, and both director and actress were reluctant to follow his instructions that Winnie’s parasol should merely smoulder rather than burst into flames, with the consequent loss of accompanying dialogue,

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convinced that such edits were merely a reaction to previous productions’ technical difficulties. John Bury’s set faithfully offered a scorched grass mound under an implacable sun, reminding several critics of a post-nuclear landscape (de Jongh 1975; Anon. 1975). The play struck Irving Wardle ‘as an emblem of the interrogation chamber as of the universal fate of being walled up in a rotting body’; no accusation of softening sentimentality could be directed at Hall in this production (Wardle 1975). Rooted in a rehearsal method that allowed Ashcroft to find the ‘absolute reality’ of the role, the production was praised above all for the emotional journey that lay at its core (Billington 1988: 238). B. A. Young described the heart-breaking gaiety of Ashcroft’s performance as near perfection, and noted that between Acts I and II she aged ‘not 10 years, not 20 years, but a great slice of eternity’ (Young 1975). This visceral sense of Winnie’s slow-motion drowning, her anaesthetizing no longer sufficient to quell a continuous undertone of terror, was matched by an unusually vivid sense of her relationship with Willie; when Alan Webb appeared in moth-eaten top hat and tails, the point of the revolver became immediately clear, as Wardle reported, ‘At once we get a back perspective on their lives together; and when Dame Peggy launches into Winnie’s long-delayed song, it is not delicately pathetic, but harsh and out of tune’ – an ending which preserved the ambiguity of the play, giving it ‘a fearsome new cutting edge’ (Wardle 1975). The strength of the symbiosis at the heart of this production was made clear when John Neville replaced Webb, and his more forceful Willie subtly altered the couple’s relationship, as Hall commented: ‘it’s made Winnie more vulnerable, more dependent on her hateful husband. Yet he only says 42 words from a hole under the stage’ (Hall 1983: 14 September 1977, 313). As Wardle noted admiringly, Neville’s performance enabled the audience to imagine the piece from Willie’s point of view. Offering a ‘coarse, senile contrast’ to Ashcroft’s delicate patterns of tone and rhythm, Neville ‘plays the first act on a crescendo of exasperation; after which his long-held sadistic silence and ominous final transformation have their own emotional logic’ (Wardle 1977).



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It was not until 1997 that Peter Hall returned to Godot, by which time, he explained, he could not remember the details of his earlier production and would not have wanted to (Hall 1997). In the Peter Hall Company, an ambitious attempt to bring repertory to the West End, he had assembled a starry cast, including Ben Kingsley and Alan Howard, at the Old Vic, where he had first taken over direction of the National Theatre. Marketed strongly on Hall’s direction, the production was also deeply influenced by all he had learnt across the intervening decades, including his experience of Beckett’s own direction, such as the Schiller Theater production at the Royal Court in 1976, which Hall described as ‘a masterpiece’ and ‘quite, quite beautiful’ in its absolute precision, hardness and clarity (Hall 1983: 24 April 1976: 230). As the programme for the recast 1998 revival explains, the production’s text was ‘based on Samuel Beckett’s own direction of Warten auf Godot at the Schiller Theater in Berlin in March 1975, on two English-language adaptations of that production and on the various annotated scripts and notebooks that were prepared for three productions; particularly on the Schiller Theater and the San Quentin Drama Workshop’ (UoR Stage File ENA 1998/7). As this meticulously worded note indicates, Hall was scrupulous in respecting all the tiny cuts and additions that Beckett had made to the text over the years, but the production remained very much his own. John Gunter’s design was faithful to Beckett’s vision with a sparsely minimal tree and stone, and a comically rapid rising of the moon. Both the 1997 and the 1998 casts spoke with gentle Irish cadences in what Hall later described as the rhythm of ‘Catholic disputation’ (Hall 2010: 141). The emphasis on timing and phrasing enthralled many reviewers, producing a performance in which word and melody became inseparable, as Alastair Macaulay remarked, ‘Only a director of Hall’s musicality could so perfectly work Chopin’s Marche Funèbre (sung) into the action; or make “Didi” and “Gogo” sing, in grunting staccati, the Merry Widow waltz (echoes of Beckett’s Happy Days) while hectically dancing round the stage’ (Macaulay 1997). In accordance with Beckett’s own productions, physical contrasts underpinned the

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casting of the two tramps: Alan Howard’s loose-limbed, willowy Vladimir reminded Susannah Clapp of a philosophy don, with Kingsley’s compact Estragon playing his cheery stooge. Eschewing the shared mismatched suits and iconographic bowler hats of Beckett’s staging, each of the four principals wore a different hat to suit their personality. Kingsley’s jauntily reversed flat cap, for example, matched his earthy pragmatism as he undercut Vladimir’s flights of rhetoric, as Michael Billington reported: ‘“You and your landscapes,” he cries at one point, placing hand on hip and executing a camp little twirl’ (Billington 1997b: 30 June) Rather than reproducing the subtly diminishing repetitions and parallels of Beckett’s staging, Hall’s Godot moved towards intensity not entropy. Instead of playing the repeated exchange of ‘Let’s go’ as an antiphonal chant, it was delivered with mounting frustration, ending each time with a growl of despair from Estragon. Where Beckett requested a non-naturalistic acting style that would render the carefully repeated actions a ‘clear and transparent […] game in order to survive’, Hall’s production delivered a more urgent response, as Billington noted: ‘What Hall brings out is not just the pathos of the tramps’ plight but their rage at their entrapment and at the senselessness of their predicament: and, of course, by extension ours too’ (ibid.). Once again the recast 1998 revival impressed critics above all with the fresh and particular dynamics of its central relationships. Dobie’s wheedling Estragon became the dominant partner, rooted in the moment, as Wardle put it, ‘like a new-born infant confronting the world for the first time’, his cries of distress bringing Julian Glover’s Vladimir flapping to his side, to offer reassurance or remind him of what they would forget (Wardle 1998). Terence Rigby’s darkly humorous Pozzo reminded Paul Taylor of ‘a country squire punctiliously impersonated by an East End thug with a decadent taste for on-the-side amateur theatricals’ (Taylor 1998). Visibly inflating and deflating according to the attention he received, Pozzo’s fear of no longer being seen was palpable. This theatrical self-consciousness achieved an added piquancy through the refiguring of the Piccadilly



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Theatre to which the company had been forced to relocate after the Mervish brothers sold the Old Vic from under them. With the stage brought so close to the front row audiences that the actors could read their programmes, Estragon’s ‘Inspiring prospects’ gained greater force, while the production was given the immediacy that Hall sees as the strength of Beckett’s rejection of the picture frame, meaning ‘the performer and the audience inhabit one space not two’, and here making the audience the butt of the play’s dark humour as well as its witness (Hall 2010: 153). In 2003 Hall followed up this critical triumph by returning to another past success, Happy Days, located significantly at the Arts Theatre. The casting of Felicity Kendal, best known for popular television comedy roles alongside an impressive stage history, at first raised a few critical eyebrows. Referred to frequently in reviews as ‘pert’ or ‘winsome’, Kendal, like Ashcroft before her, amply fulfilled Beckett’s instruction that Winnie’s ‘gleaming opulent flesh’ should be missed by the audience in Act II (Beckett 2014: 17 August 1961: 428). Kendal’s essentially naturalistic performance of a woman defiantly fighting off despair from the first – her opening line ‘Another heavenly day’ being delivered through clenched teeth – won critical acclaim for its genuine emotional force. Witty and spry, Kendal’s Winnie was remarkable for the intensity of the moments when panic seemed about to crack through, ambiguously held back as Charles Spencer noted, either by ‘sheer strength of character, or a steely edge of madness’ (Spencer 2003). The power of her fear was matched by the strength of will that held it down, as Benedict Nightingale commented, ‘She is tougher and a bit brasher than I can recall Ashcroft being in the role – I don’t think that dame spat out her morning toothpaste with quite such fierce relish – but no less touching and no less purposeful’ (Nightingale 2003). Visually, the production was strikingly innovative. Designed by the director’s daughter, Lucy Hall, the set eschewed Beckett’s desired ‘pathetic unsuccessful realism’ in the form of a painted-canvas scorched grass mound, instead placing Winnie at the centre of a circular path of burnt earth, tilted up towards the audience (Beckett 2014: 17 August

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1961: 427). The stylized, surreal set contrasted sharply with Kendal’s performance style, but expressed vividly the entropic forces that underlie the play, in the words of Matt Wolf, pulling her down ‘as if centrifugal force had conjoined with Beckett’s own bleak vision to give the lie to Winnie’s would-be life force’ (Wolf 2003). The production’s break with tradition did not attract the ire of the Beckett Estate, unlike Fiona Shaw and Deborah Warner’s experimental 1994 Footfalls, and indeed was greeted not only as ‘revelatory’ by critics, but even as ‘definitive’ (Billington 2003; Spencer 2003). Hall’s 2005 anniversary production of Godot both drew upon and cemented his reputation as England’s foremost director of Beckett. Having been voted by theatregoers and professionals the most important play of the century in a National Theatre poll in 2000, Godot had, in the words of Simon Callow ‘joined the select stock of myths by which we understand ourselves’, and pre-publicity for the Hall Company’s production made much of the director’s role in establishing this status (Callow 2005). The production’s programme claimed that ‘No one is more appropriate than Sir Peter Hall to direct the 50th anniversary production of Waiting for Godot’ – though this was to be hotly contested when the Barbican Theatre subsequently refused permission for Hall’s production to transfer to the Arts Theatre to perform on the anniversary itself, on the grounds that this conflicted with a production at the Barbican, to whom, together with the Gate Theatre, Dublin, the Beckett Estate had granted performance rights (UoR JEK A/9/1/22; Barnes 2005). Hall’s production finally transferred to the Ambassadors Theatre in London the following year, but the heat generated by the dispute indicates how prominent Hall’s status was – and is – as a director of Beckett. Described by Billington as ‘a variation on his stripped down 1997 Old Vic version’, the 2005 production once again starred Dobie as Estragon and Rigby as Pozzo, now paired with James Laurenson as Vladimir and Richard Dormer as Lucky (Billington 2005). Kevin Rigdon’s set featured a skeletal tree, and the casting reproduced the central contrast between the tall, pseudo-elegant Vladimir and



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Dobie’s short, acerbic and practical Estragon. More than one critic used the phrase ‘beautifully modulated’ to describe the lyrical shifts and almost imperceptible movements from comedy to pathos, as their quick-fire vaudevillian patter fell away to reveal their underlying fear (Marlowe 2006; Hemming 2006). The essential tenderness of the central relationship was epitomized by Vladimir’s discovery of Estragon’s stinking boot at the beginning of the second act, as he picks it up, sniffs it and then cradles it lovingly. This compassionate sense of mutual human dependency extended vitally to Pozzo and Lucky. Allison Vale describes how, when Vladimir and Estragon pick over Lucky in the first act, Rigby’s etiquette-obsessed Anglo-Irish squire leaps to his Irish servant’s defence, at which expression of concern Lucky freezes, his shuddering and slobbering ceases and his fixed eyes express an understated glimpse of what lies beneath, revealing that ‘this is no unfeeling monster but a real man, who thinks and hurts just like any other. He clings to his role as servant as he clings to his bag of sand: desperate for some small recognition of his suffering’ (Vale 2006). The consolation of companionship was the core of this tender production, felt with inexpressible poignancy as Vladimir and Estragon ended the play together, staring at a series of empty tomorrows. Peter Hall’s position as the most renowned director of Beckett’s plays in England has been achieved despite the fact that he was not, at least in the early decades of his career, the author’s preferred choice. After viewing the Arts Theatre production, Beckett did become reconciled to the idea that Hall might direct the American premiere after realizing how receptive the young director was to taking notes and advice. Nonetheless, it was Donald McWhinnie whom Beckett repeatedly requested as his favourite director, after McWhinnie ‘unerringly’ directed Patrick Magee in Krapp’s Last Tape in 1958 (Beckett 2014: 20 November 1958: 176; see also 410, 420, 623). Having at first resisted George Devine’s appointment as director of the first English production of Happy Days, Beckett later insisted that Devine and the Royal Court be given first option on all his work, on the basis that he was ‘the nicest and most decent man one could meet’, and, though not a great director,

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was ‘most conscientious and painstaking and will always let me be in on productions’ – qualities he perhaps came to recognize in Hall as well (ibid.: 7 November 1962: 513). When Hall proposed a Beckett season at the RSC, with a permanent place in its repertoire, the playwright only agreed that rights should not remain exclusively with the Royal Court once he learnt that Devine would soon be moving on (ibid.: 623, 663). The critical and box-office success of Hall’s productions clearly played a central role in establishing Beckett’s plays as a vital part of the English dramatic landscape, but Hall’s role as director of the RSC, the NT, and then his own repertory company has also been crucial in promoting and integrating Beckett’s drama. This was not achieved without resistance; in 1964 Emile Littler, a governor of the RSC, complained to the press that ‘dirty plays’ such as David Rudkin’s Afore Night Come, Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade, John Whiting’s The Devils and Beckett’s Endgame had no place in an organization performing under the queen’s aegis (Fay 1995: 76–8). Hall championed the quality and importance of his repertoire robustly, and Hobson, like Hall a long-term admirer of Whiting as well as Beckett, sprang to his defence, writing in 1964 in the Sunday Times that ‘The Royal Shakespeare Company is the most alert and exploratory theatrical organization in Britain [...] It is they who discovered for England Samuel Beckett, the noblest, gentlest, and most saintly spirit now working in the theatre’ (quoted in Beckett 2014: 624–5). Vitally, it was Hall’s programming that moved Beckett from being seen as a fringe, avant-garde playwright, exclusively for ‘the highest of highbrows’ as he was first known, to being accepted as a writer whose work sat naturally alongside classics by Ibsen, Shaw and Shakespeare; so, for example, the National Theatre’s 1975 repertory season of Pinter’s No Man’s Land, Shaw’s Heartbreak House, Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman and Aschcroft in Happy Days was hailed by critic Clive Barnes as an ‘exuberant success’ for a rich collection of plays, bound together by ‘a certain Chekhovian sorrow’ (Barnes 1975). Notably, it was Happy Days that was chosen as the opening production when the National Theatre finally moved into its new home on the South Bank after long delays,



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thereby giving pride of place, as Billington has observed, to an apposite study of triumph over adversity (Billington 1988: 245). Hall’s deepseated belief in the value of an ensemble company working together across a range of plays has continued to integrate Beckett’s work in the repertoire over the decades. The value and resonance of such programming can be seen in the reception of the Peter Hall Company’s King Lear in 1997, where uncanny links to the company’s Godot were felt especially strongly in Gloucester’s suicide but reverberated throughout, with Edgar and his father played by Greg Hicks (Lucky) and Denis Quilley (Pozzo), and Lear by Alan Howard (Vladimir) (Billington 1997a: 26 September). Peter Bull recalls that when playing Pozzo back in 1955 he was periodically rung up by Robert Morley, who would announce that ‘I have been brooding in my bath for the last hour and have come to the conclusion that the success of Waiting for Godot means the end of the theatre as we know it’ (Bull 1985: 113). Theatre history has proved Morley’s prediction sound, but a multitude of studies of modern drama – such as Robert Hewison’s In Anger: Culture and the Cold War, 1945–1960 (1981), Michelene Wandor’s Look Back in Gender: Sexuality and the Family in Post-war Drama (1987) and Dan Rebellato’s 1956 and All That: The Making of Modern British Drama (1999b) – pronounce by their titles that it was John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956), not the Arts Theatre production of Godot, that marked the beginning of a new era. Periodically a debate breaks out over which play was most significant, with playwrights such as David Hare and David Edgar arguing for Osborne’s crucial role in bringing social and sexual issues to the fore, while Tom Stoppard and Hall champion Beckett for liberating the theatre from naturalism and defining a new minimum for theatrical validity (see e.g. Billington 1999). This supposed division between the forces of politicized naturalism and poetic experimentalism is, however, largely a retrospective construct, for what is perhaps most remarkable about post-war British theatre is the close interconnection and merging of these artistic currents – a phenomenon that owes much to Hall’s own production style. Hobson was the primary

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and vocal champion of Beckett’s plays, as Tynan was for Osborne, but both critics wrote equally admiring reviews of Godot and Look Back, just as both playwrights were performed under the same roof and often to the same audiences, finding their first regular home at the Royal Court, and subsequently at the National Theatre under Hall. As a correspondent wrote in Times in 1960, the ‘new Romanticism’ in the theatre was one which encompassed Pinter, Beckett, Ionesco, Osborne and Arden; writing of Ann Jellicoe’s The Sport of My Mad Mother (1958), the anonymous critic explained that the meaning of such plays was not to be understood scene by scene or line by line, but instead ‘by abandoning conceptual thinking altogether and sitting back in a sort of wise passiveness, a state of negative capability, to let the play work on one as a total theatrical experience’ (Anon. 1960). This poetic quality applied equally to The Caretaker, or One Way Pendulum, Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance, Waiting for Godot and The Bald Prima Donna. The legacy of Beckett’s theatre is to be seen in the plays of Pinter, Caryl Churchill, Edward Bond, Sarah Kane and Martin Crimp – plays in which a metaphorical theatre of the imagination and a language that is simultaneously concrete and poetic are grounded in the compassionate and urgent reality of human emotion, vulnerability and need. Exploring far beyond the limits of naturalism, their plays are inescapably rooted in the realities of human pain and desire, where power, injustice and the need to be heard are not theoretical but fundamental. It is no accident, therefore, that Hall’s productions of Beckett have become the most celebrated – productions characterized above all by their compassion, emotional immediacy, and robust humour, which together ensure that far from being fodder for highbrows, they remain resiliently angry protests at cruelty and injustice.

Part 2

Productions, Locations, Legacies

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Krapp’s Last Tape in Great Britain: Production History amid Changing Practice Andrew Head

As a mainstay of Beckett’s dramatic canon, productions of Krapp’s Last Tape occupy an enduring position in the history of post-war British theatre. Written during the flowering of new English playwriting centred on the Royal Court Theatre and emerging as one of Beckett’s major theatrical successes of the 1950s, the play continues to resonate and is often programmed as part of live events. Whether as part of planned repertory seasons in metropolitan or regional theatres; as part of an ever-burgeoning national festival culture; or when presented on alternative media platforms such as film or television, the play lends itself to differing cultural gatherings that are often quite removed from its theatrical origins. The varied and diverse contexts within which Beckett’s relatively short work for the stage has been performed since its genesis speak as much about the logistical and practical expediencies afforded by the text as they do of the play’s richly lyrical and wistfully autobiographical content. In addition to the play’s extended monologue of regret for an ultimately unfulfilled life, the work offers much in terms of its portability in production and the potential it has for presentation in a wide range of venues and performance contexts. This has led to its life in performance being framed in ways that have shifted according to venue and audience. The play can be regarded simultaneously as both a product of twentieth-century avant-garde performance practice – in which its position within Beckett’s oeuvre

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cements its status as a significant work in the wider context of twentieth-century drama – and an example of innovative civic arts provision for local and provincial audiences. At a time when the Arts Council of Great Britain (in its various manifestations since the Second World War) sought to democratize theatre-going and, in doing so, to wrest the instrumental benefits of the capital’s rich cultural experiences away from the metropolitan centres, early performances of this play provided directors and programmers with a conveniently scaled work that could be offered and framed for their audiences in a variety of ways that, for many, might have constituted a first introduction to the contemporary avant-garde. Since Beckett’s death, more recent productions have seen a shift of focus from the centrality of the writing (including an emphasis on its mournful lyricism as well as its reflective study of the nature of memory) and the starkly economical stage pictures offered in the text, towards an emphasis on performance and the challenges that the work poses for the actor playing Krapp. However, throughout its production history, the play’s position either as low-key, provincial production or high-profile, metropolitan event has tended to operate this distinction in parallel, sometimes simultaneously. The present chapter is as much concerned with the ways in which productions of the play have operated in the former context – in which the localized needs of provincial theatre institutions and their audiences have impacted on the production and reception of the play – as it is with the latter’s emphasis on the play’s performance in major cultural centres. From its presentation as something of an avant-garde curiosity in the wake of Beckett’s award of the Nobel Prize in 1969, to an increasing emphasis on its canonical status as the decades wore on, critical reception of the play has moved from early considered attempts at interpretation to later appraisals of various actors’ perceived abilities at tackling what has been seen by some as a growing challenge that increases in proportion to the text’s enlarging iconography. Examples of this duality in production and performance – between the provincial and the metropolitan or the poetry of the text and the



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challenge for the actor – are numerous. In performance, the work is usually between fifty and sixty minutes in duration and this alone has entailed a flexible approach to programming whereby directors and Artistic Directors have been able to insert productions in diverse and differing time slots. Lunchtime and daytime slots as part of festival programmes have been a feature of the play’s numerous presentations. Although its production history shows a marked reluctance on the part of Beckett himself (or the Beckett Estate since his death) to programme the work alongside works by other authors in repertory contexts,1 this has not prevented companies and theatre institutions from staging the work in novel ways. In the autumn of 1969, the Sheffield Playhouse staged the play as part of a season of lunchtime performances. Advance publicity for these events promoted the opportunity as ‘an initial experiment as part of a general move to make greater use of the theatre. […] Bring your own sandwiches and in the space of the office dinner hour you can have an extra taste of Orton, Pinter or Beatle  John Lennon’ (The Sheffield Star, September 1969). In review, critics acclaimed the idea with generally very good audiences in attendance and the varied fare provoking positive responses: ‘The previous three plays – by Pinter, Beckett and Lennon – all run on pretty bizarre  lines. […] The brief break at the Playhouse could have a disturbing effect on productivity rates in the city […] the theatre has been packed for each performance’ (The Sheffield Star, October 1969) However, production opportunities notwithstanding, it is the content of Beckett’s work that endures in terms of imagery and its thematic concerns. Before considering the play’s production history further, beyond the 1960s and in terms of its increasing status as part of the wider theatrical canon, it is important to consider some of the internal textual issues related to the work that impact on production. Beckett’s solo piece for a male actor was written in the early part of 1958. It is noteworthy for several reasons when viewed in the full context of his dramatic output. The play was written and first performed some five years after his first theatrical success with Waiting for Godot (1953). Subsequent to this major career breakthrough,

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Beckett followed up this success with Endgame (1957) and the short mime piece, Act Without Words, in the same year. Although both of these shorter plays display a theatrical complexity in their respective approaches, implied or otherwise, to the paradoxes of language and existence, both are replete with a similar attitude to physicality and a sometimes overtly presentational approach required of actors, as found in key passages from the earlier Waiting for Godot. It is this emphasis on a presentational approach to characterization, one in which Beckett’s acknowledged debt to the variety theatre or early silent cinema is made flesh in his rendering of character, that acquires greater complexity in Krapp’s Last Tape. One of the significant features of the play is the extent to which the performance of the text requires the actor to ‘turn in’ on himself visibly, and almost literally, in order to communicate some of the key moments in the text. It is this point of inward reflection, and the way it balances with a simultaneous outward projection, that often defines the approach taken by both actor and director. As explored later in this chapter, this role is also representative of an emerging approach to performance, and by extension, the practice of acting in Beckett’s early style. During Beckett’s career in the theatre, it is an approach which also can be seen to develop over time as his varying experiences across media, with changing collaborators, and in response to the development of his writing, entail revisions of approach as he returns to mount revived productions that would go on to define his later style in the theatre. For example, in Beckett’s 1977 production of Krapp’s Last Tape with Rick Cluchey in the role, Beckett’s injunction that the part be played with a close attention to the musical qualities of the verbal and visual dimensions of the text indicate a growing need to turn away from psychological portrayal and veer towards formalist image-making.2 This move towards abstraction is characterized by his demand that Cluchey ‘bring rhythm into every detail’ and that movements and gestures ‘be brought closer to the marionette ideal’ (Herren 2002: 162). Graley Herren argues that it was Beckett’s experiences working in television, specifically on Ghost Trio (1975), that enabled him to make the kind of changes that would not



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have been conceived at the time of the play’s first production in the late 1950s. Patrick Magee was the first actor to perform the role in the play’s original production at London’s Royal Court Theatre in October 1958. He subsequently reprised the role for a BBC televised performance that was screened in November 1972. Of all the documented performances of this piece, this perhaps remains closest to its theatrical original in terms of the style of delivery. Magee adopts a staged, bordering on mannered, delivery in which the rasping, forceful tone of his voice contrasts with the frailty of his physical disposition. He chooses to gaze away from the desk towards the middle distance while cupping his ear in such a way that is faithful to the original stage direction: He raises his head, broods, bends over machine, switches on and assumes listening posture, i.e. leaning forward, elbows on table, hand cupping ear towards machine, face front. (Beckett 2006: 217)

His is a poignancy that enables the audience to contrast the overt strength of the younger Krapp depicted on the tapes with the declining faculties of old age. Additionally, he is able to realize a listening posture that, by the end of the play, achieves a level of intimacy that befits his soulful reflection on the girl in the punt. In a letter to Alan Schneider in November 1958, Beckett reflected on Magee’s performance in the original production at the Royal Court: The most interesting discovery was the kind of personal relationship that developed between Krapp and the machine. […] At the very end, when ‘I lay down across her etc.’ comes for the third time, the head goes down on the table and remains down until ‘Here I end etc.’ […]. At this point too he has his arm round the machine. (Harmon 1998: 50)

One of the challenges for the actor comes with the way in which the play is structured. Beckett had become intrigued by the possibilities of the new medium of magnetic tape on a visit to the BBC in January 1958 when reviewing some recordings of his prose work that had been

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broadcast earlier in the previous year (Knowlson 1996: 444). He was fascinated by the potential that now existed for the human voice to be easily recorded and played back almost instantaneously. In Krapp’s Last Tape, we see Beckett exploring the possibilities for the selection and juxtaposition of fragments of human memory, as this frenetically punctuated stage direction illustrates: Long Pause. He suddenly bends over machine, switches off, wrenches off tape, throws it away, puts on the other, winds it forward to the passage he wants, switches on, listens staring front. (Beckett 2006: 223)

Here, not only is it possible to observe the physicalization of this act of selection and juxtaposition. We also witness the kind of tactile engagement between man and technology that would not only stand out in productions of the play but which would also go on to become a feature of contemporary performance practice in the ensuing decades. Writing in the context of postmodern articulations of performance in the mid-1990s, Elinor Fuchs focuses on the theatricalized, inanimate object as symptomatic of a ‘theatre of things’; a phenomenon used as a means of defining the progressive retreat from traditional notions of character and representation throughout the twentieth century. She argues that the insecurities and instabilities of character on the postmodern stage are perhaps substituted by the certainties of the inanimate object (Fuchs 1996). In addition to this ‘theatre of things’, a theatre of doing has also emerged as part of a tendency within contemporary performance practice that is born out of this retreat from character and which possibly accounts for the play’s enduring ability to resonate in production across the decades. As the production history of the play progresses, so does the nature of contemporary avant-garde performance. Perhaps prompted by Alain Robbe-Grillet’s assertion that the tramps in Waiting for Godot are ‘irremediably present’ (Robbe-Grillet 1963: 111), the question of embodied agency and the ways in which Beckett’s characters use their presence on stage has preoccupied artists and practitioners since the early theatrical successes of the 1950s. It is a preoccupation that



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has tended towards the exploitation of an essential paradox of the actor – the tension that exists between physical presence and literary invisibility – and which resonates strongly enough in Beckett’s early drama so as to provide a stimulus for future generations. Krapp’s presence, mediated through the actor cast in the role, is one that uses the concrete realities of objects and their immutable form as a means of occupying space and time. This is most acutely on display in the earlier stages of the play. In busying himself with the paraphernalia of Krapp’s besieged domesticity, the actor lends a heightened theatricality to otherwise mundane tasks: examining his pocket watch, a spool of tape, an old envelope; consuming bananas; loading a spool onto the tape recorder. In this sense, the chronic nature of the human condition suggested by Robbe-Grillet is axiomatic for Krapp. What is made available to the spectator is a sustained portrayal of the ways in which this man has chosen to occupy, to this point, his time. This study of the intersection between the quotidian in human agency and the performative realms of space, time and the exploitation of self is a feature of later performance practices that emerge within a postmodern tradition of performance making after this point. In this early example, not just of Beckett’s dramatic writing, but of the gradual drift towards postmodernity, we can see these phenomena prefigured. Krapp’s engagement with the tape recorder is seen as a tactile, almost visceral relationship of convenience in which the functional qualities of the machinery are subsumed within the physical interaction it requires. Beckett suggests that the relationship may go even further than the purely functional. In addition to the Schneider correspondence at the time of the play’s premiere (cited above), his notes for the 1969 Berlin Schiller Theater production comment on an identifiably emotional, as well as functional, relationship with the tape recorder. Krapp’s habitual documentation of his life can be seen as indicative of a ‘tendency of a solitary person to enjoy affective relationships with objects, in particular here with tape-recorder. Smiles, looks, reproaches, caresses, taps, exclamations’ (Knowlson 1992: 205). In the same volume, Beckett also identifies in his production notes ‘at least 5

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places where you can express […] this relationship’ (ibid.: 245). Pierre Chabert, when directing this play (as La dernière bande) in Paris during 1975, describes the kind of engagement required of the actor: ‘It is a law of Beckett’s theatre (the dramatization of physical effort) that we find at several levels in Krapp’s Last Tape: the effort to hear, to see, to get started, to bring back memory. The tension instead of lying in a clash between personalities, as in conventional drama, takes place inside the body of the character himself ’ (quoted in McMillan and Fehsenfeld 1988: 292). More recent productions have veered towards a more naturalistic portrayal with notable versions having been recorded for film following on from, or prior to, successful theatrical productions.3 Despite Beckett’s general reluctance to agree to the transfer of his work between media during his lifetime, this play can be seen as an exception (in his lifetime he sanctioned Radio, TV and gramophone recordings of the work). For that reason, it is perhaps no accident that subsequent productions have adopted more filmic acting performances as the reservoir of available reference material has proliferated. Both Harold Pinter (2006) and Michael Gambon (2010) employed a comparatively internalized, inward portrayal of Krapp in which the complexities of Krapp’s emotional state are expressed through a sometimes painful subtlety that reduces the poignancy of his situation to a series of hard-edged visual images. In performance, this approach is grounded in gestural stillness as well as symbolic action. In review, Gambon’s performance is seen by Charles Spencer to channel this complexity into Krapp’s relationship with the tape recorder: ‘As he listens again to his account of that last meeting with his lover, Gambon cradles the tape recorder in his arms, as if it were the body of his long-lost lover’ (Spencer 2010). Writing in the Guardian, Lyn Gardner focuses on Gambon’s stasis: ‘And then he sits immobile, as if welcoming the inevitable, smothering darkness. Only his eyes catch the light, two pinprick stars in a universe entirely without consolation’ (Gardner 2010). Gambon’s performance can be held up as a useful example of the fine balance that exists between the varied approaches taken



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towards this role. The inward, reflective register acquired could easily have tipped over into a more overtly theatrical style. It is his ability to practise an economical, bordering on minimalistic style, that sets this performance, and others, apart from an approach that consciously seeks to explore the more expansive aspects of the character. This expansive style can be seen in those earlier productions involving the more stylized renderings of Magee, and also Rick Cluchey. Video recordings of his 1977 performance reveal that Cluchey adopted a reverential, almost supplicatory stance towards the tape recorder as the prime means of access to the distant memories that Krapp finds it increasingly difficult to recall. The most thoroughly documented accounts of those who have performed the role since its premiere reveal that actors have tended towards one of two directions: a broadly representational style in which the implied reality of the character’s situation is allowed to influence an internalized, almost haunted rendering, contrasted with a presentational approach in which theatricality and the externalized virtuosity of the actor’s abilities is foregrounded for the spectator. An example of this virtuosity can be found in John Hurt’s performance (2001, reprised in 2011) in which his playful approach during the opening banana sequence was described by one American reviewer as ‘a clownish fillip of his own here, as Krapp playfully moves in and out of the square of bright light dividing him from the surrounding darkness’ (Isherwood 2011). Beckett is clear with regard to the extent to which the actor’s relationship with the tape recorder should be based on emotion. He is clear in his stage directions at the beginning of the play that the action takes place in ‘the future’ and that Krapp has had the opportunity to record numerous entries, presumably using this tape recorder or one very similar. Aside from the content of the taped entries, there is a tangible sense of childlike fascination with the machine. The posture adopted when in the listening position is almost one of a penitent sinner or remorseful supplicant at the mercy of their past experiences. In the same way as the eponymous characters in medieval morality plays are forced to account for their actions in order to gain access

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to paradise, Beckett’s Manichaean hero is forced to face the consequences of a life that has consciously turned away from the darkness of material, earthly preoccupations towards the light of spirituality in search of a similar fate. His act of worship at this twentieth-century altar is therefore imbued with a complex web of emotional torment and attempted reconciliation that requires careful playing both in terms of the actor’s posture as well as facial expression. Beckett was keen to highlight the importance of this in various items of correspondence. In a letter to Magee in March 1958, prior to the play’s London premiere in October of that year, Beckett wrote: ‘Krapp’s face as he listens is of course three quarters of that battle. I made no attempt to indicate its changes and unchangingess, feeling that these could safely be left with you’ (Beckett 2014: 120). Early in the following month he wrote to George Devine, the director of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court, with a similar, if less quantifiably emphatic, statement: ‘I made no attempt to describe Krapp’s face as he listens, though this is a good half of the battle. […] Expressiveness in blankness sums it up, I think, if that means anything’ (ibid.: 124). In describing his own attempt to realize these somewhat opaque directives from a writer still coming to terms with the play’s potential, Chabert talks of the physical manifestations of this relationship between man and machine in rehearsal and performance: ‘The look, the touching, the physical posture: moving from and returning to the machine. The changing expressions are important; they are reproachful, interrogative, defiant, excited […] at other times they are expressions of complicity, love, good humour, as when Krapp laughs with his recorded voice’ (quoted in McMillan and Fehsenfeld 1989: 294). It is also the musicality of the text that presents challenges for the actor in this role. As a consistently deployed aspect of the Beckettian approach to acting, Krapp’s Last Tape, at this relatively early stage of Beckett’s writing for the stage, provides a working set of analogies for the actor that become more pronounced as the material develops during the remainder of his career. In the 1975 production, Chabert’s notes reveal this emphasis on musicality having been broken down to three discreet



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elements: the text as score; the alternations between the two voices; and the relationship between the recorded voice and physical movement. Bringing these three elements together results in the completion of an overall final score when staged. A fourth element, that of the visual score, is also identified. Once the basic structure identified by Chabert is established, the task of the director when working with an actor is to identify discrete points of alternation between the two voices as well as their transition from one to another and how they might be distinguished musically rather than naturalistically. This dialogue, or literary duet between the two identifiable voices in the play can be articulated differently according to the actor playing the role and the priorities of the director concerned. Musically, and tonally, the delivery of the text benefits from a contrast that can be recognized as striking both in its sense of sonic difference an in its poignant associations. Actors appear to relish the optimization of this effect. The university academic and actor, Michael Patterson, has toured his own production of the play across a lengthy period since the early 1970s. When witnessed in the early 2000s, the gap in time between the taped diary entries and the moment of performance was almost the same as stated in the text (Patterson was thirty-four when he recorded his tapes in the 1970s contrasting with Krapp’s explicitly stated age of thirty-nine in the published text. By the early 2000s the performance of the play occurred more or less thirty years later). This level of authenticity created marked differences in the vocal and consequently musical qualities of Patterson’s voices. The strong, higher-pitched tone of his younger self contrasted starkly with the deeper and thinner resonances of the live performer. The distinction between the quasi-naturalistic dialogue of the earlier plays that precede Krapp’s Last Tape and the heightened lyricism and denaturalized, distanced interplay that exists between the two voices heard in the play, marks an important shift in Beckett’s approach to dramatic writing. The actor playing Krapp has increased license to increase the gap between a psychologically determined, naturalistic performance register and its alternative: a formal, patterned, structured

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approach to delivery that is closer to music. Consequently, the play’s production history reveals a range of performances that, depending on venue and context as well as the nature of the actors or the ethos of the company concerned, result in differing articulations of this distinction of approach – between the more conservatively representational, bordering on naturalistic, portrayals found mainly in the metropolitan centres, and the playfully experimental, quasi-musical delivery of the provincial underground. With regard to the latter, the critical record often describes some of these early productions as working with ‘considerable ingenuity in making the duller stretches palatable’ (South Wales Argus, 1969). It is perhaps this emphasis on a playful approach to delivery or the possibilities of musical experimentation that have led to a number of student or youth theatre productions that have been performed either at large-scale festival environments such as the Edinburgh Fringe (for example, The Swansea University Players at Edinburgh’s YMCA Theatre in 1969) or Youth Theatre events such as the Young People’s Festival at the Soho Theatre, London in the summer of 1970. Age differentials notwithstanding, critical reception of these productions has often been positive: ‘Mr Alexander’s performance was shambling, blinking, lost in age and memory and, for all the inanity of it, very real’ (The Stage, 1970). Somehow, in connecting audiences with the spirit of experimental theatre, fringe events such as these maintain an appetite for challenging drama for which there is a perceived hunger outside of the capital. One critic remarks as follows when reviewing John Warner as Krapp at the Thorndike Theatre, Leatherhead, in 1971: ‘There is a need for more experimental drama – it is this type of play that keeps the theatre alive and evolving – and there are the audiences for it’ (Surrey Advertiser, 1971). Punctuating this cultural undercurrent of provincial, festival and youth theatre productions that connect local audiences to an articulation of avant-garde or experimental performance in the first decade after the play’s premiere, is a series of key productions that emerge in the cultural centres of the UK that might be described as high profile



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in terms of their casting of a culturally significant actor. ‘Significance’, in this regard, might relate either to the actor’s connection with Beckett during Beckett’s period of theatrical activity or in terms of their perceived status in the cultural hierarchy of acting talent available at the time. Many of these actors also emerge from unexpected quarters that perhaps reflect Beckett’s authorial debt to forms of performance that owe more to popular entertainment and early cinema than the contemporary avant-garde. In 1975, Max Wall performed the role under the direction of Magee at London’s Greenwich Theatre. John Elsom, writing in 1983, described this performance as ‘the finest performance in Britain of that bleak biography’ (Elsom 1983: 265). It is no accident that Wall’s comic-grotesque, balletic approach to a presentational style is brought to bear on the character of Krapp at this still relatively early stage in the play’s production history. Under Magee’s direction, his talents as a physical performer with a playful tendency to experiment with the musical limits of language,4 can be seen to fit well with an early disposition towards the presentation of Krapp as a decrepit clown. Wall would reprise the role in 1986 at London’s Riverside Studios. Later productions have veered more towards realism, in which the outwardly manifested physical signs of old age and infirmity are of equal importance compared to the lyrical poignancy of the recordings or the slapstick of the opening comic routines. The playful and experimental clowning of the early productions give way to a gritty, more pessimistic naturalism that is sometimes reflective of the personal circumstances of the actor concerned. David Warrilow, one of Beckett’s most important actors, performed the role in 1990 at the Haymarket Theatre, Leicester followed by the Riverside Studios, London. A review for The Observer at the time describes his overall performance with an emphasis on its aged physicality: ‘Warrilow is performing Krapp’s Last Tape with a sepulchral croak and a devastating sense of wonderment and loss’ (Coveney 1990: 41). Warrilow’s performance clearly aims to provide a distinction between the light and shade of vocal patterning found in the two voices represented: ‘both the rich and glowing voice

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of the young man on tape, the harsh bark of the old man seated at the table’ (Leicester Mercury, 1989). Pinter’s more recent performance, in 2006, was greeted by the Guardian’s theatre critic, Michael Billington, as ‘the harshest, least sentimental reading of Beckett’s play I can recall. […] Pinter sits behind a desk in a motorised wheelchair. The dominant impression is of total entrapment’ (2006). The performance history of this play can therefore be seen as a developmental progression that echoes the patterning of light and shade found in the play text. In addition to the frailties of age found in both the central character as well as the actor playing Krapp, productions of the play can also be seen to operate within a strict ecosystem wherein the on stage aesthetics of performance sometimes rub against an off stage world in which the economics of arts provision can be uncomfortably located in close proximity. At the Lakeside Arts Centre in Nottingham during 2003, a ‘Krapp’s Last Supper’ was offered to theatregoers keen to include a night at the theatre as part of a romantic Valentine’s night treat. This was an experience that supplied dinner, the show and a signed programme; a package that could be purchased, at a favourable rate, during the week of the 14 February. This work is not immune from the changing funding arrangements of provincial British arts organizations and the status of this work as cultural capital – a commodity to be exploited for the economic survival of local and regional institutions – and this is a common theme that operates throughout the last three decades. Ultimately, perhaps it is the actor playing Krapp who is most instrumental in shaping a performance history of this work that, in keeping with the many textual revisions that took place during Beckett’s own theatrical interventions, has reflected the changing perceptions of audiences and those directors arriving at the work with fresh understandings of how the material might resonate within a contemporary cultural climate. Whether the actor is performing in the context of small-scale, low-profile productions as part of a festival or provincial environment; or as an established, iconic presence within the theatrical landscape, the role increasingly makes demands of the actor that



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reflect the growing significance of the work as part of the British theatrical repertoire. It is a work that also reflects our changing abilities to process memory. As we progress through an age in which recording technology, and the social media it facilitates, becomes increasingly embedded in our subjective experiences of contemporary culture, the tape machine – cumbersome and awkward in its materiality – diminishes in appearance and visibility as the decades wear on. As the technological means by which Krapp is able to record his recollections gradually disappears from view, and authentic renderings of the text in performance become increasingly difficult, what is left is a production record in which the embodiment of the character provides the enduring collective memory.

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‘An Unforgettable Image’: Staging Beckett’s Short Plays Derval Tubridy

Writing to Samuel Beckett on 2 March 1984, theatre director Alan Schneider describes how Billie Whitelaw’s performance of Footfalls and Rockaby (followed by a reading of Enough) at the Samuel Beckett Theatre in New York was both powerful and inexplicable. He describes how Whitelaw’s performance gained strength in the small space of the theatre: body, object and text working in rhythm with lighting, image and sound to produce a powerful experience for the audience: I cannot entirely explain what has happened. You did see Billie at the National. Here it has been, somehow, deeper and more moving than ever, a combination of the plays, her work, the theatre, and the timing. The combination of FOOTFALLS and ROCKABY, which we worried about […] turned out most effective. The audience is left absolutely riveted on her face. And Billie has found depths and intensity – in that tiny theatre – which leave an unforgettable image. Our lighting is the best ever; so is her makeup; the chair works better than anywhere; the sound of the tape is beautiful. (Harmon 1998: 472)

Staging Beckett’s short plays poses particular challenges to actor and director alike. Since many are too short to play alone, the decision of how to group them is key to the success of the production. The intimacy of the venue has a significant impact on how the work is received. Schneider’s production in 1984 was so successful that there was considerable pressure to transfer it to the larger Theatre de Lys in Greenwich Village which could seat 299 people, thus increasing revenue. Yet

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Schneider resisted, citing the fortuitous congruence of each element of the production that resulted in the success of the performance for the audience, actor and director. He acknowledges that the Theatre de Lys ‘is a suitable theatre, and I would not have minded starting there because its intimacy and warmth is very evident’ (Harmon 1998: 472). However, as the director cautions, ‘to move our production now would still be risky, both in terms of reproducing the intangible something we seem to have at the Samuel Beckett (!) and in discombulating [sic] Billie, who is torn back and forth’ (ibid.). Schneider’s metaphor evokes the rhythms of Footfalls and identifies very clearly the key concern of a director whose role is to bring the words of the text into play through an intangible yet precise orchestration of words, bodies, spaces, sounds and light. Recent stagings of Beckett’s short plays have addressed the challenges of the playwright’s later drama with concision, courage and a commitment to the contemporary. This chapter will analyse contemporary productions of Beckett’s short plays in Britain, with a particular focus on three sets of performances: Deborah Warner’s Footfalls at the Garrick Theatre in 1994, Katie Mitchell’s Shorts for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1997, and Walter Asmus’s production of Not I, Footfalls and Rockaby for the Royal Court in 2014. Each production is notable for a careful negotiation between the call of the text and the response of people and place, raising particular concerns about what it means to stage Beckett in our time.

Warner and Shaw: Footfalls Rhythm is key to Warner’s direction. Working in opera and in theatre, Warner is attentive to the distinctions between each, noting that in opera the rhythm of the work has already been mapped out by the composer, whereas in theatre it is the role of the director to establish a rhythm that is true to the text. The director must ‘find the rhythm at which it is going to play’ (Beavan 2015). The rhythm chosen by Warner



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was radical, yet responsive. Casting long-time collaborator Fiona Shaw as May (M), the ethereal daughter who paces along an illuminated strip while speaking to her mother’s offstage voice, and Susan Engel as Woman’s Voice (V), Warner devised an interpretation that, quite literally, brought the play out on a limb.1 Clara Armand characterizes Warner’s work with Shaw as one with ‘a strong critical and social outlook’ that ‘is guided by the principle of creating new audiences’ (Armand 2004: 226). Warner’s production created a new audience for Beckett (the weeklong run of two performances a night was sold out), and for some, a new play that – in subtle yet significant ways – deviated from Beckett’s text sufficiently to trouble the translation between play-text and stage. Writing in New York Theatre Katie Charles describes how ‘Warner cut five lines of text, allowed Shaw to move around the stage, and changed the color of her dress from grey to red’ (Charles 2007). Warner did not in fact cut Beckett’s text, but transposed three lines of text from the offstage voice of the mother to the onstage voice of the daughter. The lines were reinstated before the opening night on the insistence of the Beckett Estate. Warner also dislocated the figure of May from her tightly circumscribed strip of light on stage, allowing the taut energy of Shaw to travel from the stage across to a space erected on the balcony of the theatre. ‘That poor arm’ of the church on which May ‘began to walk, up and down, up and down’ becomes the space of the theatre in which Warner’s Footfalls is performed. The troubling intersection between the absence and the presence of a figure who is only a ‘tangle of tatters’ yet who insists ‘I was not there’ even though her mother reports ‘I heard you say Amen. [Pause] How could you have responded if you were not there?’ is intensified by the liminal positioning of the actor at the cusp of the fourth wall (Beckett 1990: 402–3). Paul Taylor explains how, under Warner’s direction, ‘Shaw’s May has two fields of operation: a rostrum erected at the front of the dress circle where, on each turn of her robotic shuffle, she has to clutch nervously at the overhanging masonry; and the dark vast void of the main stage’ (Taylor 1994). This translocation of May from the stage

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to the auditorium opens up the space of performance. Exploring the relationship between the printed text of drama and its staging in performance, W. B. Worthen argues that Warner remakes ‘the stage space’ of Beckett’s Footfalls, asking the audience to ‘rethink Beckett’s writing, not from in front of the stage box, but from inside the space we share with the play’ (Worthen 2009: 170). He interprets her direction as an engagement with the ‘authorizing gesture’ of the author himself, arguing that by ‘staging Footfalls as an environmental rather than a proscenium event, Warner refused to parade May before an invisible, voyeuristic public’ (Worthen 2009: 171). Additionally, the image of a figure in tatters created by May’s ‘worn grey wrap hiding feet, trailing’ is transformed into a figure with greater agency and presence through her costume, now ‘a dowdy, short red dress, drab lisle thread type of stockings, and flat Start Rite sandals’ (Worth 1999: 159). Critical response was divided. Mel Gussow reports how ‘Michael Billington, the critic for The Guardian, excoriated the production as “a bit like seeing someone doodling on a Rembrandt”. On the other side of the critical fence was Irving Wardle of The Independent, who considered the show “spellbinding”’ (Gussow 1994). Beckett’s nephew, Edward Beckett – charged with the responsibility to ensure that Beckett’s vision for his theatre endures – describes his concerns about the staging of Footfalls at the Garrick on the night of the preview: I had a seat in the back and I couldn’t understand why the front row seats were blocked out, until suddenly [Shaw] was a foot away, and clinging on to the front of the balcony for dear life. I noticed that some of the lines had been transferred from one actress to the other. (Gussow 2009)

In consultation with Jérôme Lindon, co-executor of Beckett’s Estate and Beckett’s long-time friend and publisher, Edward Beckett decided to end the production. The brief run at the Garrick finished, and the play was denied permission to continue its planned run in Paris. Shaw recalls how the decision was received by the co-producers of the programme, MC93 Maison de la culture de la Seine-Saint-Denis



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at Bobigny: ‘I remember the French co-producer saying with some panache, “Sometimes a vacuum is more important than a presence” – a generous theory given that their investment of £25,000 had just been lost’ (Shaw 2007). The Estate’s response to Warner’s direction of Shaw at the Garrick raises vital questions regarding the parameters within which a director works when engaging with a text, particularly when the playwright is a near contemporary. Shaw and Warner both recognize the contextual circumstance behind the decision to halt the production, as Shaw explains: ‘Beckett had died only five years previously and I think there was still a great deal of sensitivity to any interpretative change’ (Shaw 2007). In his review of Warner’s Garrick production, ‘Foot fault’, Billington underscores the risks to a play when it is unable to ‘survive successive recreation’, wondering whether Beckett’s later drama is ‘too unyielding, too fixed in its theatrical demands, to achieve the malleability of a classic’ (Billington quoted in Campbell 1998: 94). Billington disagreed with the decision to close the production, arguing that while the production was ‘misguided’, it should have been allowed to continue since the ‘acid test of great drama is that it can survive limitless reinterpretation’ (Billington 1994). In a letter to the Guardian, Edward Beckett emphasizes that the Beckett Estate ‘does not seek to restrict freedom of interpretation, the very life blood of music and theatre’ (quoted in Campbell 1998: 96). He proposes that Beckett’s dramatic texts be ‘given the same measure of respect’ as, for example, interpretation of the score of ‘a late string quartet by Beethoven’. The parallel between a playwright’s text and a composer’s score raises further questions about the interplay between the arts. Evoking, perhaps, Horace’s idea of ‘ut picture poesis’ elaborated in his Ars Poetica (1. 361) Edward Beckett’s position draws attention to the parallels, and differences, in how a theatrical play-text and a musical score are interpreted in the development of a production. While Horace urged that poetry be afforded the same attention as painting, G. E. Lessing argued, in Laocoön (1853), that poetry and painting – as ‘two equitable and friendly neighbours’ – operate within

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different material schema. Catherine Laws explains how music ‘of the western classical tradition involves an assumption that the performer must serve the voice of the composer, and the presence of this voice can therefore never be forgotten’, yet reminds us that ‘the performer’s interpretation is considered a vital and distinct contribution to the equation’ (Laws 1999: 143). Even the text itself cannot be relied upon to always accurately convey the voice of the author, since it also has a materiality, a contingency based on its mode of production. S. E. Gontarski reminds us of how the process of publication opens a text to difference. Eager to ensure that the play was available on the opening night Faber and Faber published a version of Footfalls which Beckett was not yet satisfied with. The publishers incorporated Beckett’s revisions in the subsequent publication, yet this introduced other differences, as Gontarski explains: ‘Faber indeed changed the number of May’s footsteps from seven to nine in the stage directions, for instance, but left her counting her steps one through seven in the dialogue’ (Gontarski 1983: 192). Gontarski’s notes on the development of Footfalls in production, and how these developments are incorporated in successive editions of the play-text, clearly articulate how the revisions of the play arose in response to the process of direction, yet were not always accurately conveyed.2 Worth acknowledges that in Warner’s production ‘May’s ability to move from one place to another did undermine, some would say destroy, the central image of a walking woman perpetually bound to a narrow strip of light’ (Worth 1999: 158). She acknowledges the losses, and the gains, afforded by Warner’s innovative direction: ‘It was possible to reel with the shock of Warner’s production and have reservations, as I did, yet find something in the new vision that recharged the play’ (Worth 1999: 158–9). Warner’s and Shaw’s decision to change the colour of May’s dress from grey to red was, she explains, in response to the predominant colour of the Garrick theatre: ‘The dull red of May’s dress, they suggested, so disconcerting to those with the original image in mind, might be expected in the context of the Garrick’s red plush to merge, red on red, a kind of equivalent to the “grey” of the text’ (ibid.: 159).



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Shaw’s angular frame transformed May into a figure of ‘awkwardness and mental desperation’ conveying a sense of psychological trauma and ‘the suggestion of something sadly immature and undeveloped’ (ibid.: 15). The pivotal phrase ‘dreadfully un-’, spoken by Shaw with violent emphasis, underscored the sense that Walter Asmus identifies in his ‘Rehearsal Notes’ that for the Mother in Footfalls, May was never quite born. Asmus notes that Beckett’s play is informed by Beckett’s understanding of C. G. Jung’s 1935 lecture at the Tavistock Clinic in London ‘about a girl Jung could not treat because she had never been fully born’ (Gontarski 1999: 284). In conversation with Worth, both Warner and Shaw explained how ‘the text had drawn from both actor and director a deep response to the awful feeling of being “not there” suffered by the being who knows she is immature, but also a woman’ (Worth 1999: 159). The longstanding collaboration between Warner and Shaw has produced a number of powerful and courageous productions of work by Sophocles, Euripides, Ibsen, Brecht, Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot and Beckett. Armand underlines how ‘Warner/Shaw’s artistic platform […] suggests a constantly searching and questioning way of thinking, and is guided by the principle of creating new audiences’ (Armand 2004: 226). Echoing, inadvertently, Beckett’s own frustration at literature in the face of innovative developments in music and painting expressed in his letter to Axel Kaun in 1937, Warner acknowledges the complexities of innovative direction. ‘Newness is a difficult thing, isn’t it?’ she asks, adding ‘I would be the last person to do something for the sake of the new’ (quoted in Armand 2004: 226).

Mitchell, Stevenson, Gillet and Cooke: Beckett Shorts Katie Mitchell describes her directorial style in terms of forensics. She is interested in getting us to ‘look at things as they are’; putting the viewer ‘in a very forensic relationship to what’s going on’ (quoted in Shenton 2004). Forensics is the scientific method of finding out about

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‘things as they are’, or rather, had been, for use in a court of law, and comparably in Not I Mouth finds herself at a loss when confronted in court with the obligation to ‘tell how it had been’ (Beckett 1990: 381). In her programme of Beckett Shorts for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s small experimental space The Other Place Mitchell placed the disembodied mouth of Not I in the company of Footfalls and Rockaby in part one of the programme called ‘Out of the Dark’. The second part of the programme, titled ‘Over the Years’, comprised a staging of the radio play Embers with A Piece of Monologue and That Time.3 Juliet Stevenson played Mouth in Not I, with Nigel Cooke in the role of Auditor. Stevenson also played May in Footfalls, with Debra Gillett in the role of Mother. Gillet played W in Rockaby, and also Ada in Embers. Nigel Cooke played Henry in Embers, Listener in That Time, and Speaker in A Piece of Monologue.4 Mitchell describes her early antipathy to Beckett’s writing, explaining how as a student at Oxford she had no interest in his work: ‘He was a writer for the boys. I went off and read Virginia Woolf instead’ (quoted in Christiansen 1997). Mitchell’s opinion changed when she directed Endgame at the Donmar Warehouse in 1996, and was ‘amazed by how powerful and humane it was’ (ibid.). Mitchell’s Endgame was, for theatre reviewer Paul Taylor, ‘a veritable tone poem in greyness and grime’ that conveyed ‘a profound, pained humanity’ (Taylor 1996). Humanity is at the heart of Mitchell’s direction. She challenges received conventions of theatre in order to more accurately convey human experience. For the director the ‘question is whether you think theatre is performing and speaking words, or whether you think it’s representing human behaviour’ (quoted in Higgins 2007). Her interest is ‘in being thorough about representing human behaviour and emotion’ (ibid.). ‘I love words’ she explains, ‘but I am not interested in doing live literary criticism’ (ibid.). ‘Beckett Shorts’ reconfigured the audience’s relationship with Beckett’s theatre, connecting the three plays in each part through spatial organization. Choreography is important to Mitchell, who names Pina Bausch and Siobhan Davies as seminal influences. Bausch’s



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development of Tanztheater – a form of dance emerging from German expressionism in the early decades of the twentieth century that combines elements of classical dance with those of theatre production to form an intermedial whole – underpins Mitchell’s understanding of how language, space and bodies work together in a production. Speaking of her collaboration with video designer and cinematographer Leo Warner, Mitchell explains how her use of many media arises from her loss of faith in ‘traditional theatre, linear narrative and the well-made play. I use sound, music and video to more accurately reflect our perception of the world – it’s not neat and organised and tidy’ (quoted in Barnett 2009). For Mitchell, ‘looking at live performance is like looking at a canvas. And I want every bit of that canvas to be alive’ (ibid.). Mitchell is acutely aware that everyone looks at a canvas differently, indeed, that in a theatre each member of the audience sees the performance from a distinct perspective, giving as an example the Lyttleton Theatre at the National Theatre which has ‘over 600 seats and therefore 600 different angles from which to view the action on stage’: After realizing this you go through years of trying to work out how you can satisfy every single different perspective and make sure that every audience member has a fair and equal experience of the action. Then you realize that you have to allow for the fact that some people simply will not see some of the action on stage but what matters is that everyone has something interesting to look at. (Davies and Mitchell 2009)

Speaking with Siobhan Davies about their different approaches to choreography, Mitchell explains how important her study of Impressionist painting was to her development as a director: ‘the Impressionists removed the hierarchy in the organization of people on the canvas, so suddenly every part of the canvas had equal value and meaning. I became interested in directing theatre like that and this is the main idea that determines the “geography” of my staging’ (ibid.). The geography of Mitchell’s staging of Beckett Shorts is crucial to the integrity of each of the two programmes. Robert Butler describes the

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experience of Mitchell’s Shorts in terms of the visual arts: ‘Throughout the two programmes, Mitchell’s authoritative approach to the texts, the impressively metronomic acting and the shifting settings, make us view these Shorts as much as works of art as stage plays’ (Butler 1997). Mitchell uses the word ‘choreography’ to refer to how she constructs ‘the action that the audience see [sic] and the environment in which that action occurs’ (Davies and Mitchell 2009). Speaking of Davies’s choreography for a performance at the Victoria Miro Gallery, the director points out that ‘working in a gallery space will be fascinating because you [Davies] will have to focus action for a mobile audience who can shape themselves as they want around whatever you choose to present them with and in whatever place you choose to put it in the gallery’ (ibid.). Though the audience of Beckett’s Shorts does not have quite the same autonomy of movement as Davies’s in the Victoria Miro Gallery, Mitchell’s direction guides it through the spaces of The Other Place to experience Beckett’s late plays in ways that are intimate and affective. Mitchell creates a complex geography of space, body and text through which the audience situates itself within Beckett’s work. Rupert Christiansen describes Mitchell’s spatial design for the production: ‘The small auditorium – the audience capacity in Stratford is only 60 – will feel like a large decaying room, stripped of seating and the usual stage–audience divide. The room will be divided into two, with a strip of corridor between the halves. Audiences will promenade between the areas for each play’ (Christiansen 1997). In Beckett’s Shorts the director takes the audience on a promenade through the spaces of the theatre so that their experience of Beckett’s work is contingent and distinct. Mitchell describes how she hoped to ‘develop linking journeys that would help [the audience] concentrate more deeply on the work’ (quoted in Campbell 1998: 98). Part of the reasoning for the spatially complex staging was the logistics of the sets; as Stevenson explained to Worth, ‘it made sense to have [the plays] set up in advance and make the audience move, rather than wait for changes’ (Worth 1999: 161). Additionally, as the critic explains, the peripatetic nature of the



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staging ensured that the audience ‘had an active part to play, one with some apprehension built into it’ (ibid.). The first programme, ‘Out of the Dark’, begins with Stevenson pacing the boards in Footfalls. Worth remarks on how close the audience was to the ethereal figure in a ‘simple, grey trailing dress’: ‘Ghostliness might have been reduced a little by this closeness but, strangely, was not’ (ibid.). After the half-hour performance of Footfalls the audience was ‘ushered through a corridor of black cloth to stand facing a wall. Small doors pull back to reveal an elderly Debra Gillett on a rocking chair’ (Butler 1997). After Rockaby the audience was guided along a small corridor in which sounds of birdsong (‘nothing but the larks’) and flashing lights (‘sudden flash’) picked up aspects of Not I, preparing the audience for the play which, as the direction states, had already started before the performance begins (Beckett 1990: 376, 382–3). As the audience enter into the space where Stevenson, as Mouth, was ‘already muttering into the dark’ they were guided to stand for the sixteen minutes of the performance, sharing, as Worth explains, ‘to some slight degree, in the physical and mental ordeal’ of the subject who ‘carried us into her agony, conveying a peculiarly sharp sense of a dialogue being passionately conducted with another, hidden self ’ (Worth 1999: 162). Reviewer Robert Butler describes Stevenson’s Not I as ‘a powerful hallucinatory experience’ (Butler 1997). Mitchell consulted with Billie Whitelaw on the production, particularly those plays on which the actor had worked so closely with Beckett. In an interview with Julie Campbell, Mitchell explained how Whitelaw’s position was close to her own: I think she feels that one should respect both the stage directions and the text equally, and that form and content are so intertwined that you can’t separate them out. I think that as long as one is operating within those parameters she is not someone who feels it has to be done only one way. […] She is much more concerned with the necessity of obeying the form of his drama, and within this lies the freedom and beauty of it. You don’t mess with the form, and that was one of her primary concerns. (Quoted in Campbell 1998: 98)

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Mitchell’s Beckett’s Shorts was not for the faint-hearted. After an hour-long interval, the second programme ‘Over the Years’ began. This, as a somewhat disgruntled Butler reported, was ‘even less consumer-friendly’ (1997). Where ‘Out of the Dark’ concerned plays about women’s identities forged through the visceral complexities of birth, death and the interstices of generation, ‘Over the Years’ focused on men’s identities figured through time, memory and the disjunctive palimpsest of voices. Nigel Cooke’s Speaker in A Piece of Monologue was positioned ‘motionless in a doorway’ (ibid.), flanked by the standard lamp from which a faint light is diffused, and in That Time Cooke’s expressive face, framed by ‘long flaring white hair […] outspread’ (Beckett 1990: 389), listens to the three voices that convey his past. Cooke’s ‘eyes open and close, he sighs, and on the voice-over he drifts through fragments of former selves’ (Butler 1997). Mitchell’s Embers was not so much a staging as a listening. In her astute analysis ‘Staging Embers: An Act of Killing’, Campbell describes her experience of being ‘guided into a dimly lit room with chairs on all sides, and we sat and listened to Embers’ (Campbell 1998: 99). Butler explains how he was ‘invited to sit in one of two rooms, with two tables displaying objects in wooden boxes (matches, a shoe, a Gillette tin) while in the semi-darkness we listen to actors’ voices broadcast a story that takes place in the mind of a late-middle-aged man’ (Butler 1997). Mitchell’s decision to retain the quintessential Beckettian voice coming out of the dark was informed by issues of authority and artistic interpretation. The integrity of her 1996 production of Endgame had enabled the director to develop a good working relationship with the Beckett Estate: ‘During rehearsals for Endgame, if I was in any doubt, I’d fax the estate’s representative, and he’d come down and help sort the problems out’ Mitchell explains ‘It was all very delicate, but co-operative. And ultimately you realise that there’s no writer whose rigid instructions are more helpful’ (quoted in Christiansen 1997). Campbell asked Mitchell if she had thought of adapting Embers for the stage. Mitchell replied that while she hadn’t been ‘allowed to consider it’, she also thought it would ‘ruin the piece’ (quoted in Campbell 1998:



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99). The provisional liminality of Embers, shifting between shore and sea, presence and recollection, troubles the certainties of self. The ‘whole point of the piece’ Mitchell explained to Campbell, ‘is that we cannot know whether Ada is alive or if she is dead’, concluding that ‘to translate it into the theatre medium would kill it’ (ibid.). Mitchell wants to draw her audience into the plays, to ‘recognise themselves in the characters’ (quoted in Christiansen 1997). She is against turning Beckett’s plays into ‘mummified museum pieces’, arguing that ‘It’s not that I want to depart from anything that Beckett has written. But we have to move on from what has become the conventional way of staging these plays, in a rather cold, abstract and over-reverent style, with the actors wearing white-face and long wigs’ (ibid.). At the heart of Mitchell’s work is the human figure. She understands the possibilities, and the limitations, of her medium in ways that evoke Beckett’s own frustrations with the word. Agreeing with Davies that choreography is both abstract and figurative, Mitchell concludes that ‘we can only work with the human figure. We can’t dissolve that figure in the way that the art movement, Abstract Expressionism, removed human figures altogether and just constructed meaning with colour, shape and light’ (quoted in Davies and Mitchell 2009).

Asmus and Dwan: Not I, Footfalls, Rockaby Shape and light are key elements of Asmus’s direction of Lisa Dwan in Not I, Footfalls and Rockaby for the Royal Court in 2014. Moving between the dim and the obscure, the production rearticulated Beckett’s insistence on complete blackout for the performance of Not I with Whitelaw which he directed in 1973, extinguishing all exit signs and placing the audience in a position of visual deprivation in which the only focus was the single spot illuminating the speaking Mouth. What was remarkable about the 2014 Royal Court production was how darkness drew together the three plays into a unified whole, placing the audience in the centre of a palpable obscurity out of which emerged

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the visceral voice of Not I, the penumbral steps of Footfalls, and the dimly gleaming figure of Rockaby. After Not I finished, the auditorium remained in complete darkness until Footfalls began: ‘Lighting: dim, strongest at floor level, less on body, least on head’ (Beckett 1990: 399). Because the eyes of the audience had become accustomed to the dark, and because there were no exit lights to distract the attention, the lighting of Footfalls was very low, creating a series of tonal greys which emphasized the ethereality of the play and the sense, as Amy explains in M’s narrative, that she was not there. Unusually for a production of Footfalls, M and V were both played by Dwan, though with sufficient phonetic difference to render both characters distinct. This shift away from the directions of the text had been proposed before. On 21 August 1980 Schneider approached Beckett with two concerns relating to a theatre production of Rockaby planned by Daniel Labeille for the celebrations of Beckett’s seventyfifth birthday at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The first concerned pairing Rockaby with another short play, possibly Footfalls, to make the evening performance more substantial. The second concerned allowing the actor in Footfalls to use her voice, recorded, as V. Beckett was keen on neither suggestion: I feel dubious about Footfalls as a companion piece, especially with recorded voice as you suggest, because 1) Tiresome duplication of same device, 2) Problem of 2 voices in F. 3) Extreme difficulty of coordinating inflexible recording with steps. (Harmon 1998: 391)

Yet, for the Royal Court production, as Fintan O’Toole explains, the change was so effectively implemented that it was ‘not mere caprice: it opens up a way of understanding the play in which May and her mother are not separate presences but have become one and the same’ (O’Toole 2014). Dwan’s concerns about not being old enough to play Rockaby5 were ill-founded. The ‘prematurely old’ face of the figure she plays becomes one element of the articulate orchestration of light and dark, interspersed with points of illumination: the ‘jet sequins’ of her dress that



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‘glitter when rocking’, and the ‘highly polished’ wood of the rocking chair that gleams as it moves in and out of the ‘subdued spot’ (Beckett 1990: 433).6 The collaboration between Dwan and Asmus emerged from Dwan’s first performance of Not I in 2005 directed by Natalie Abrahami as part of a double bill with Play at the Battersea Arts Centre.7 Dominic Cavendish describes how Dwan’s Mouth, ‘contorting and twitching away high up in the air and far back in the dark – makes an unforgettable sight, and in itself is worth the price of admission’ (Cavendish 2005). In Abrahami’s production the role of the Auditor in Not I was, unusually, played by the three figures of Play. The spotlight that animated the voices in Play shifted to focus on Dwan in Not I, with the figures of Play still visible, listening.8 In 2009 Dwan brought her performance of Not I to the South Bank as part of the London Literature Festival. Now without Abrahami, and without the figure of the Auditor, Dwan’s performance was guided by Whitelaw, whom she met that year, and who joined Dwan and Jude Kelly for a post-show talk. Beckett had directed Whitelaw in the role in 1973, beginning rehearsals in December 1972 (Harmon 1998, 296). Dwan remembers sitting in Whitelaw’s kitchen, going over the production notes she made with Beckett, rehearsing the rhythm and tempo so distinctive to Beckett’s direction of his short plays: I received a call from her out of the blue. ‘I want to give you his notes, I need to give you his notes. Can you come round?’ Soon she was conducting me over her kitchen table. ‘I can’t read or write music,’ she said, ‘but if I were a musician, I’d have put a crotchet here instead of a quaver.’ She recalled what Beckett had told her: ‘You can’t go fast enough for me.’ Also, ‘If the word has several syllables, use them. Ev-er-y-thing. No-thing.’ (Dwan 2013)

For Dwan, the connection with Whitelaw enabled her to make Not I her own. Beckett’s famous prescription – no colour – gained greater resonance through Whitelaw’s interpretation: She saw how I strained to hold back the tide of the Irish voices, the sounds and the effect of what the very notion of ‘HOME’ produced in

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me. Billie gave me permission to follow my instincts and bring all that in; ‘it has to come from you’ she said. I understood that Beckett didn’t want the actor’s craft, but he did want emotion, only he wanted all of it – the real stuff, the guts – not some polished fool’s gold. (Quoted in Morache 2015)

Nicholas Lezard describes the South Bank performance as ‘a canonical stage moment’ (Lezard 2009). In August 2012 Dwan performed Not I at Beckett’s old school, Portora, in Enniskillen as part of the inaugural Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival founded by Sean Doran. Dwan returned to Enniskillen the next year to play Mouth in the Marble Arch Caves in Enniskillen, a space which accentuated the complete darkness in which Beckett wished the play to be performed. Dwan also performed the play at the Bulmershe Theatre at the University of Reading, and at the Hay Festival that year, reprising the role of Mouth for the Royal Court in 2013 with Katherine Williams as lighting designer, and Michael Vale as set designer. The performance was complemented by the screening of an interview with Whitelaw, who was now too unwell to participate in the schedule of after-show discussions. Whitelaw described how Beckett directed her in Not I, and how she had worked with Dwan in the development of the performance. Significant thought went into the development of the programme, given its brevity, which included a consideration by Artistic Director Vicky Featherstone of presenting the play twice, as happens in Play.9 Dwan directed herself in the 2013 Royal Court production, and with Whitelaw now unwell, Edward Beckett stepped in: When Edward Beckett heard I was putting on Not I alone in the Royal Court Theatre without a director or support he came to my flat and using all his knowledge and skill as a professional flautist sat at my kitchen table and helped me rehearse […] tightening ellipses – balancing tempo, sharpening diction … with a musicians [sic] precision. (Quoted in Morache 2015)

Dwan was interested in developing her engagement with Beckett’s



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work to include other of his short plays, particularly Rockaby and Footfalls and, through an introduction from James Knowlson, began conversations with Asmus, the renowned German director who first assisted Beckett in the direction of the 1975 production of Waiting for Godot for the Schiller Theater, and subsequently worked extensively on Beckett’s theatre, often in collaboration with the playwright. Dwan explains: ‘Unbeknownst to me Walter Asmus was in the audience at the Royal Court Theatre. He had flown over from Berlin. Afterwards he announced himself to me and offered to direct me in Beckett’s other two; [sic] Footfalls and Rockaby and put them as a trilogy with Not I’ (quoted in Morache 2015). Director and actor began working together on the trio of plays at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Co. Monaghan, Ireland. Music and dance are the arts most closely associated with the staging of Beckett’s short plays, and the discipline required of the Beckett actor gains much from a background in both, as Dwan explains: ‘I respond to the musicality of the work like a dancer, but also I take the discipline required as a dancer for these roles’ (quoted in Patterson 2014). Dwan describes the rehearsal process: ‘There was one point in Rockaby when Walter wouldn’t let me get past the first six lines. That was fascinating. He kept taking me back again and again and again’ (ibid.): I only later realised what he was doing by getting me totally technically aligned – with my tone pitch perfect, my arms outstretched to allow the breath into the voice until suddenly one day he let me go and I caught what I can only describe as an invisible current. I felt like a glider, and I needed that momentum to take me right to the end of that piece. (Quoted in Morache 2015)

Writing for The Irish Times, O’Toole describes Dwan’s performance as ‘a fiercely original approach to the works. She honours Beckett’s wishes with supreme rigour but also with an understanding that, within the tight structures of these plays, there is still ample room for fresh interpretation’ (O’Toole 2014).10 Key elements of the innovative staging of Beckett’s late plays discussed

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here include an understanding that the relationship between text and performance in the development of a production is underpinned by the establishment of trust between the arbiters and custodians of that text, and the actors and directors that animate it. Research into the variants between publications of the plays, and of the changes made in the productions that Beckett collaborated on, indicate clearly the contingency and responsiveness that unites text and performance. Since Beckett’s theatre has much in common with forms of musical composition, or indeed performance art, the role of the writer as artist is more clearly foregrounded. What we learn from these contemporary stagings of Beckett’s late plays is how the radical use of theatrical space, and the choreography of that space, either through a reconfiguration of the actors’ engagement with the stage space, or the audience’s use of the auditorial space, troubles our engagement with Beckett’s work, and destabilizes our expectations. We also understand how darkness, conceived in Cagean terms not as an absence of light but as a palpable presence, is a texture that weaves together the elements of Beckett’s theatre to form a new whole. The voice that comes to us from that dark is always an embodied voice, with the inflexions and intonations that connect Beckett’s figures to a visceral history that roots his work in the time and place of its origin.

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‘The tree has four or five leaves’: Talawa, Britishness and the First all-Black Production of Waiting for Godot in Britain Kene Igweonu

This essay sets out to explore Talawa’s 2012 all-black co-production of Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece Waiting for Godot at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, a production that not only marked the departure of then Artistic Director of Talawa, Patricia Cumper, from the company she rescued from near failure in 2005, but, as Cumper’s parting gift to the British theatre-going public, signified a renewal of the company’s commitment to the vision of its founding members, particularly their belief that ‘The good and great work from all cultures belongs to everyone’ (Talawa quoted in Igweonu 2015: 237). The Playhouse and Talawa’s Godot – the first British all-black production of the play – was directed by Ian Brown, then the Playhouse’s outgoing Artistic Director and Joint Chief Executive. In exploring their co-production of a play, which, at its core, deals with the subject of what it means to be human, the essay also considers the critical reception Brown and Cumper received on their UK tour of the production at venues that, following the Playhouse run of 3–25 February 2012, included; The Albany, London (6–10 March 2012); The Old Rep, Birmingham (13–17 March 2012); Theatre Royal, Winchester (27–31 March 2012) and New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich (3–7 April 2012).

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About Talawa Theatre Company The history of black people on the British stage and their contemporary presence was seldom profiled or rarely discussed in the mainstream. The main change to this was in the development of black theatre companies in the 1980s. Talawa Theatre Company emerging in the midst of this and later becoming the longest running of these companies can be seen to have leant itself to the task of beginning to redress the balance. (Johnson 2001: 4)

In order to consider the impact of the 2012 production, one would need to understand Talawa’s place in British theatre and society since it was established in 1985. Founded in 1985 by the quartet of Yvonne Brewster, Carmen Munroe, Mona Hammond and Inigo Espejel as a response to what they perceived as the lack of representation and creative opportunities for actors of black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds, Talawa has grown to become Britain’s foremost black-led theatre company. It is crucial to note that Talawa’s emergence on the British stage came about due to the provision of culturally specific funding by the Race Equality Unit of the then Greater London Council, and as such the work that emerged with the company was ‘essentially black and political’ (ibid.: 71). Nearly three decades from their creation Talawa has presented a vast array of seminal productions, from work by award-winning Caribbean playwrights to African and Western classics and new writings. Some of the groundbreaking productions by the company include the work of influential authors like C. L. R. James, Ola Rotimi, Oscar Wilde, William Shakespeare, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, Arthur Miller and Beckett, among many others. Through their insightful and nuanced articulation of the politics of ‘blackness’ Talawa is able to project a unique view of Britishness – or better still of a shared humanity and providence – through the work of the aforementioned playwrights, and thus make a valuable contribution to British theatre. To date, the company has had four Artistic Directors: Yvonne Brewster (1985–2003), Paulette Randall (2003–4), Patricia Cumper (2005–12) and Michael Buffong (2012 to present).



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The name Talawa is derived from the Jamaican word tallawah (pronounced tàlawa), which is used to convey a basic sense of being materially strong and tough, but also ‘goes beyond the physical to mean dangerous’ as in the ‘proverbial Jamaican phrase: “Me lickle but me Talawa”: Don’t underestimate me’ (Talawa quoted in Igweonu 2015: 241). I have argued elsewhere (see Igweonu 2015) that Talawa’s choice of name encapsulates a unique philosophy, which allows for the astute political and social positioning of the company as not wanting to be seen as part of the establishment, but of having the power associated with it in the event they need to wield it. I contend that it is this philosophical positioning that enables the company to retain the possibility of mobility in many directions, and to be able to pick and choose their fights as well as when to fight. By adopting this approach Talawa is able to route backwards and forwards in multiple directions, to the West Indies, Africa and elsewhere, to contribute to a redefinition of the idea of Britishness to include, not only black people, but people of other races and ethnicities as well. Talawa’s principal objectives, since its inception, have been to provide a viable platform for nurturing and showcasing black talents, giving voice to the black-British experience and cultivating black theatre audiences, as well as developing mainstream audiences for black work. In his analysis of these objectives, David Johnson observes that the company’s continued determination in exploring and producing classic texts such as Godot is to bring to the text ‘relevant issues of black African/Caribbean and British life that may be ignored by the wider mainstream British theatre companies’ (Johnson 2001: 74). Today it can be argued that the company that started in 1985 has come a long way in helping to redefine the idea of Britishness, particularly what it means to be black and British.

West Yorkshire Playhouse and Talawa’s all-black Waiting for Godot: a footnote on Britishness There are idiotic assumptions about black British cultural tastes that are taking a long time to put to rest. (Buffong 2012)

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There had been previous all-black productions of Godot outside the UK: in 1957 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York, at the Rehearsal Room in Johannesburg in 1962 (directed by Athol Fugard), as well as the 1976 production at the Market Theatre in Cape Town that was directed by Benjy Francis. Speaking about the second South African all-black production of 1976 Francis recalls: Ultimately, Waiting for Godot is a very positive play, which talks about the resilience of human beings. The tree was central to my staging; when it started to sprout leaves in act two, that sent a powerful message to oppressed people – it suggested new life and resolution, an image of hope against all the desolation. Every night, the show received standing ovations. Its impact was monumental: Waiting for Godot provided a powerful metaphor of our struggle which allowed me to get past the censor and speak to my people. (Francis quoted in Smith, Carter and Carnwath 2009)

Evidently, one thing the aforementioned productions of Godot have in common, as a direct reflection of their racial casting, is what they say ‘about the oppressiveness of waiting and of being without power’ (Graver 2004: 82). Conversely the Playhouse and Talawa’s all-black production certainly adds to the political significance of the play, but without altering the acknowledged universality of Beckett’s masterpiece. Taken together, the circumstances of Talawa’s emergence in 1985, their longstanding and ideological objectives of showcasing black talents and giving voice to the black-British experience, as well as their well-established status as a black-led theatre company means that their all-black Godot was inevitably bound to hold a unique political significance ‘but not at the expense of Beckett’s existential vision that we’re all open to abuse, unsure who we are and where we’re going’ (Cavendish 2012). It is useful to note that Talawa’s work is never about anger or opposition, but about being astute and Promethean in positioning their work as a marker of their identity and belonging in British society. To borrow a phrase used by Dominic Cavendish to describe the production in his review for the Telegraph, ‘The evening



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feels like a marker, rather than a landmark’ (Cavendish 2012, emphasis mine). Seen from this perspective, of their all-black Godot as a marker of identity and belonging, it becomes possible to grasp the enormity of what it had to say about race and the black experience in Britain. However, as I have already noted, this political positioning does not undermine Beckett’s masterpiece, but instead it allows Talawa to mark and stake their claim to it in fulfilment of their belief that ‘The good and great work from all cultures belongs to everyone.’ Crucially, it is Talawa’s ideological and political positioning, along with the extraordinary platform that comes with excellent casting and performance of a Beckettian masterpiece that enabled them to use the production to put to rest some of those ‘idiotic assumptions about black British cultural tastes’ that Buffong alludes to in the quote cited above. The production’s impact in putting some of these ‘idiotic assumptions’ to rest can be seen in the ready acceptance and overwhelmingly positive reviews that the production received from mainstream theatre critics. For instance, writing in The Observer Clare Brennan enthused: Like all Brown’s productions, Godot is crisp, clear and assuredly crafted. The rhythms and cadences of Beckett’s 1955 English text transmit feelingly in the actors’ own West Indian accents. […] the clarity of the direction and the intensity of the acting fuse: comedy striates tragedy – or does tragedy striate comedy? Whichever, it’s soulscouring stuff. (Brennan 2012)

Brennan’s acknowledgement and affirmation of the significance of the actors’ West Indian accents in shaping the production is equally reflected in Cavendish’s (2012) ebullient comment about recognizing ‘the tang of patois’ in some of the phrasing. This is in stark contrast to my argument elsewhere that Talawa has not always received the sort of critical attention and acclaim it deserves, particularly in view of what they stand for as a black-led theatre company (see Igweonu 2015). In the same essay I quoted David Johnson, who, in trying to understand why mainstream British theatre critics responded well to Talawa’s production of American plays in the early 1990s but not to

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other productions, imagined that ‘the critics considered the [Talawa] performers to be acting rather than copying the voices of their parents as they may have been perceived to be doing in the Caribbean and African plays’ (Johnson 2001: 231). However, by acknowledging the West Indian accent adopted by the actors in their performance of Godot, the critics seem to recognize and accept what they were witnessing as talented acting and not a mere imitation of their parents’ accents. Gillian Fisher writes in her review of the production: With Jeffery Kissoon in the role of Vladimir the pensive existentialist musings roll off the tongue in a thick Caribbean accent, his animated bursts of dancing with elbows jolting and hips swaying present a protagonist with a background rooted in domestic rhythm and bass. Patrick Robinson as Estragon swings his arms and pouts his lips with the air of a belligerent child, his desperation to break free from [a] never ending cycle of waiting and his desire for sanctuary can be viewed differently from this position of the displaced. As the two men laugh, play games and argue their constant elaboration upon each other’s comments become musical with their extended vowels and upward inf[l]ection. (Fisher 2012)

This represents another way in which the all-black production helped to dismantle one of those ‘idiotic assumptions’ about what a British theatre production should sound like, as well as its attendant supposition that black actors are not as talented as their white counterparts because they choose to perform in a West Indian or African accent. However, in helping to put down ‘idiotic assumptions’ such as those about the ability of talented black actors to successfully undertake and bring something new to significant roles in a classic like Godot, some of the commentaries and reviews lend themselves to premature triumphalism in the sense that they appear to celebrate Talawa’s Godot as evidence of a post-racial utopia to which British theatre had attained with the success of the all-black production. Especially considering that it seemed suddenly possible to adopt the same professional standards in critiquing an all-black Godot as would be applied to any other



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mainstream production of the play by white actors. On the one hand, that mainstream theatre critics view Talawa’s production in this way is a phenomenal achievement that speaks to the company’s existential aim of nurturing and showcasing talented black actors who can be judged by the same professional standards as their white counterparts. For example, Cavendish observes that both Jeffery Kissoon (Vladimir) and Patrick Robinson (Estragon) were ‘terrific, though, as the inseparable old-timers. [...] At its warmest the pair’s camaraderie suggests that their character-forming struggle has made them brothers-in-arms – something that’s both about skin colour and not at all’ (Cavendish 2012). On the other hand, Talawa’s seeming readiness to accept what I consider as premature triumphalism, which acknowledges the talent of their actors while simultaneously predicating the success of the production on the play’s dramaturgical structure in a way that is dismissive of the actors’ blackness or what the all-black production has to say about the black British identity, inadvertently locates Talawa in a difficult position. Confronted with a situation where many of the commentaries and critical reviews of the production, including notes commissioned by Talawa and written by Patrick Duggan for their Godot resource pack, do not appear to acknowledge the company’s founding ideology and politics of blackness, Talawa does not appear to question these opinions, particularly in view of their usual persistence in projecting a sense of Britishness that is not essentially white, and Cumper’s comments about their choice of Godot. As I read and reread it [the play], I began to feel that this was a play that talked about a great many experiences that would resonate with Black Britons. It talks about a world where you wait for someone else to tell you whether or not your life can improve, of constantly having to negotiate with someone who holds themselves just out of reach. It speaks about having to sleep in a ditch and endure regular beatings, of living in uncertainty and fear. It also explores the power of friendships forged against adversity yet it also looks at how power makes those who have it insensitive to those they hold power over. […] Fifteen years on it is my job to put together a programme of work for Talawa

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Theatre Company – which describes itself as Black British and whose mission is to explore the Black British experience – that will fittingly celebrate the company’s 25th year. (Cumper 2012)

Duggan’s notes for Talawa’s Godot resource pack include a quote from the play from which the present essay takes its title: ‘And, of course, there is hope in the play – “the tree has four or five leaves”’ (Duggan 2012: 2). It is also with this inkling of hope, implied by the presence of four or five leaves on the tree, that the first all-black production of the play in the UK differs from other British productions. In a sense, the Playhouse and Talawa’s all-black production offered a counter-reading of a play that is often considered not to be about anything in particular (or to be about hopelessness and an existentialist quest for an illusory meaning of life). However, while the play is not necessarily about anything in particular – in other words, not about blackness, whiteness or Britishness, which are some of the words I employ in this discussion – it evidently lends itself to the treatment of underlying issues represented by these terms. This is amply suggested in Cavendish’s statement, which no doubt implies an awareness of Talawa’s ideological agenda: ‘Brown’s boldest stroke lies in the figure of Guy Burgess’s hapless Lucky – lackey to the overbearing Pozzo – so ghostly pale, you wonder if he’s playing “white”’ (Cavendish 2012). Also, Duggan acknowledges this much in his discussion of the play’s ‘malleability’ by citing David Bradby’s assertion that Godot has the ‘“ability to speak, like a parable, to [the] particular conditions” of any given social context but especially to those living within “oppressive circumstances”’ (Bradby quoted in Duggan 2012: 3). Ironically, Duggan concludes, ‘So while Talawa’s “all-black” production may offer a mirror to the “state of things” now, it is doing so because of its dramaturgical structure and the conditions of the context in which it is staged and not because of it’s [sic] all-black cast’ (ibid.: 4). What Duggan appears to forgo in his conclusion is the possiblity that Talawa’s all-black production provides a unique performative lens through which black people can appraise the ‘state of things’ within



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British socio-cultural and political landscape today that is not about anger or confrontation. As a commentary on Britishness, the all-black production reflects the complexity of contemporary British society and as Ian Brown, the director, puts it, ‘doing the play with an all-black cast would produce something quite interesting – I wanted to see what that would do to the play’ (Talawa, 2012: 16). Brown’s curiosity in casting an all-black Godot is taken up in Stewart Pringle’s review of the play at The Albany. From its first moments the power of the casting is clear. When Didi asks ‘they didn’t beat you? [...] The same lot as usual?’, a history of suppression and injustice cannot help but burst forward. Godot is a play of whips and ropes, of masters and slaves, servitude and subjugation, and though they retain their symbolic universality, here they also take on a very real and disturbing life. This is making a very different point than the Cape Town production of 1981, in which Pozzo was the Afrikaner landlord throwing scraps and cracking his whip. Here Pozzo is black and the actors perform in their own accents, their West Indian inflections marrying well with what Brown terms the ‘slightly Victorian turn of phrase in the play’. (Pringle 2012)

Alfred Hickling observed in his review of the Playhouse production that a consequence of Talawa’s all-black cast is that ‘Inevitably, certain lines come loaded with additional significance. Estragon declares, “We’ve lost our rights.” To which his companion wearily replies, “We got rid of them.” In this reading, the play becomes a drama about subjugation’ (Hickling 2012). Like other critics Hickling acknowledges the apparent talent of the actors, but goes on to show an astute grasp of Talawa’s ideological politics of blackness in contrast to many other critics who seem to focus more on the play itself and the ability of the actors, as exemplified in Duggan’s argument that the race background of the actors did not have a fundamental impact on the production of the play: ‘Importantly, though, one thing that an all-black cast can and should highlight is that it is entirely credible and possible to cast a black actor in a role in a canonical play that is traditionally associated with

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white performers without fundamentally changing the meaning and impact of that piece’ (Duggan 2012: 3). The blossoming of the solitary tree in Talawa’s Godot forms part of a wider narrative that paints a picture of hope in the bleak landscape of a play that echoes deepening anxieties about the place, identity and belonging of black people in contemporary British society. This narrative is aptly foregrounded in Talawa’s use of an all-black cast for the production. At the same time it speaks to the company’s belief that ‘The good and great work from all cultures belongs to everyone’ and, perhaps more importantly, it invokes Talawa’s confidence ‘that blackBritish actors can be judged by the same professional standards as their white counterparts’ (Talawa quoted in Igweonu 2015: 237); a possibility attested to by the many accolades accorded the production. With specific regards to Talawa’s production, however, I argue that attempts to dislocate the fact of blackness, to borrow a phrase from Frantz Fanon, from ‘the conditions of the context in which it is staged’ and to locate the success of the production primarily in terms of the ‘dramaturgical structure’ of the play, fail to recognize Talawa’s underpinning philosophy, which renders any work they do deeply political; specifically, as a vehicle for projecting the identities and aspirations of black people on the British stage, notwithstanding the idea that focusing on the blackness of the actors’ bodies invariably raises questions about the point at which racial identity gives way to professional competence. In other words, does Talawa’s desire for racial embodiment override the material and dramaturgical structure of Beckett’s text? A direct answer to this question would be an emphatic no. In fact Vicky Ellis notes for instance that ‘Resonances with African colonial history aren’t to be lost on directors Ian Brown (WYP) and Patricia Cumper (Talawa), with the latter noting the experiences ring especially true for the Caribbean setting; these parallels aren’t crowbarred in, but sit uneasily well with Beckett’s text’ (Ellis 2012). However, I hasten to add that Talawa’s stance on the projection of blackness on the British stage retains its relevance until such a time as black people feel confident to proclaim a sense of equality and shared Britishness with



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their white counterparts, within the cultural mainstream of British society, as opposed to being simply identified by the qualifier ‘black’ British. This is why I consider Duggan’s post-racial reading of the production, as well as Talawa’s tacit acceptance of this view following the many positive reviews acknowledging their actors’ talented performance, is too ahead of itself, as the context foregrounded as being required for his reading to be wholly valid is not the one that is actually in place – we are not yet at this stage of equality, so the actors’ being black is still of importance. I also contend that not only draw on the play to speak to the idea of a shared humanity and a shared sense of Britishness, but crucially they equally use it to underscore the idea of ‘getting on with life’ despite the feeling of existing within an interminable liminality and of waiting for the arrival of a utopian post-racial society; after all, Godot never arrives. As in Waiting for Godot itself, every reason for doing something could also be seen as a reason for doing nothing. Every instance I’ve found in the play that might resonate with the Black British experience could equally well be interpreted as totally universal or specific to some other cultural context. That is the genius of the play. (Cumper 2012)

However, in discussing part of her rationale for wanting Talawa to perform Godot in the same year she was leaving the company, Cumper signifies her feeling that the play ‘talked about a great many experiences that would resonate with Black Britons. […] of constantly having to negotiate with someone who holds themselves just out of reach’ (ibid.). Cumper also discusses the company’s founding philosophy as instituted by its first Artistic Director, Yvonne Brewster, which has seen Talawa regularly producing classical plays that have resonance within the mainstream British theatre circuit. Consequently, Cumper acknowledges that her choice of Godot was also as a ‘tribute’ to Brewster’s continuing influence on Talawa. According to her, Ian Brown ‘had immediately seen how the casting could create a fresh way of approaching the play’ (ibid.). Ultimately, Cumper points to a key

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factor that is also acknowledged by Duggan and many theatre critics who recognize that the quality of Black British acting talent is beyond question […] It consisted of a cost-effective five actors and one set and so allowed attention to be focused on the text and those playing it, an approach I particularly wanted. These five parts had never been on offer to Black British actors before and so I felt we would attract a quality cast who would relish the challenges the play presented. I also felt that the voices the actors would bring to the play would create a different sound, enrich the already poetic rhythms of Beckett’s language and their life experiences would bring depth and richness to their interpretations of Didi and Gogo, Pozzo, Lucky and the Boy. (Ibid.)

Also discussing Talawa’s Godot in relation to the history of the company’s development, Michael Buffong, current Artistic Director of Talawa, notes that ‘Back then there was the idea that we needed to explain who we were in this country, theatre was used to explain our past’ (Buffong 2012). ‘Those years have gone. Black people now are a part of Britishness; the way we perform now is much more about how we are part of this society rather than how we got into it’ (ibid.). Buffong goes on to observe that ‘Britishness has changed, and we are British in a way that is not the same as our parents’ (ibid.). It is such understanding that is at the heart of Talawa’s Godot and perhaps explains why the company did not want to be seen as emphasizing their politics of blackness or the blackness of their actors once the positive reviews started pouring in. The cyclical nature of Vladimir and Estragon’s existence in Talawa’s production is such that while their interminable wait for Godot is not without its attendant despair, it nonetheless brings to the fore a host of existentialist ideals about ‘finding ones [sic] self and the meaning of life through free will, choice, and personal responsibility’ (Talawa 2012: 6) that is more about ‘getting on’ with life in the moment. Even though it is not uncommon to hear Godot described much in the same way as by the Irish critic Vivian Mercier, who notably designated it as



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‘a play in which nothing happens, twice’, Talawa’s production, like many others before it, showed that a lot can indeed happen in that moment of endless waiting. Brown picked up on this theme in an interview in response to a question about Godot being a play in which ‘nothing, more or less, happens’ (Talawa 2012: 16): I think it’s a little bit of a myth that nothing happens actually. It is true to say that the play doesn’t have a clear plot, because they’re waiting and they’re waiting for something that doesn’t happen. But they do lots of things while they are waiting – they play games, they play act, they argue, they philosophise, they insult each other – so quite a lot happens. We spend our time watching it, with them, waiting for Godot to appear. So as an audience member you are feel [sic] involved, you share their frustration, you get to know them and I think you grow quite fond of them. So you have a lot of things to occupy your mind while you’re watching it. There are also three other characters that come in during the course of the play and entertain us. They give us lots to think about. More things happen in this play than in lots of other plays I know – in fact I’d say it’s action packed! (Talawa 2012: 16)

Brown’s response points to the idea of getting on with life and living in the moment despite the uncertainty and ominous sense of despair portended in the play. As a black-led theatre company, Talawa is staunchly political; their aspiration remains to articulate and give voice to the collective experience of black people in Britain and to continue to develop mainstream audiences for black work. The West Yorkshire Playhouse and Talawa’s reading of the play does not only take from the idea of a shared humanity that Beckett speaks to; it reinforces the shared humanity of all races and peoples, while at the same time opening up the potential to highlight and explore the unique identity of black people through the embodied presence and actions of the black actors on stage. Consequently, Talawa’s aspiration of projecting the collective experience of black people in Britain through the play is first about underlining the idea of our shared humanity and a shared sense of Britishness that is not essentially about

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a black- or white-Britishness per se. According to Pringle, ‘What Talawa Theatre Company prove in this, their 25th anniversary production, is that two things do inevitably change: the actors on stage and the world outside the theatre, and that Beckett’s play is receptive to their magnificent transformative power’ (Pringle 2012). However, it is also about underscoring the fact of blackness, which is etched in the bodies of the actors, and ultimately using the production to say something about being a black person in today’s Britain and the importance of getting on with things and not standing still, waiting for the utopian bliss of a post-racial society.

Conclusion It’s hard to get very excited about a breakthrough that’s long overdue. This is the first all-black production of Waiting for Godot in the UK. Beckett’s masterpiece was first presented in English in 1955. The Empire Windrush docked in 1948. About time, you might well think, to see a non-white contingent enter the scene. (Cavendish 2012)

One may indeed try to undermine the role of race or the fact of blackness in Talawa’s Godot, but it is perverse to do so in view of an all-black cast from a company like Talawa performing Beckett’s classic text on the British stage for the first time. What this evokes is a powerful image that cannot be rendered unimportant. Until we come to that place where it becomes the norm for talented black actors to perform classic Western plays and character roles that are traditionally associated with white actors, Playhouse and Talawa’s co-production of Godot, indeed any all-black production of Godot, will continue to resonate in its articulation of blackness. The American and South African all-black productions mentioned above highlighted the blackness of the actors due to the history of racism and apartheid respectively in both countries – again showing what Beckett has to say about race specifically and the human condition in general. Conversely



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Playhouse and Talawa’s 2012 co-production has a lot to say about race in Britain, that in Pringle’s words ‘celebrates equality in the shadow of ongoing injustices and persistent discrimination’ (Pringle 2012). Eventually, the statements that an all-black production make about race and inequality in today’s Britain are that Beckett is ultimately arguing for a society in which it is normal for us to see ourselves first as human, to see the Other as an equal, where our shared humanity is more important than the colour of one’s skin or racial origin. It is this understanding that is at the heart of this essay and thus my reading of Beckett’s contribution to British culture as seen through the lens of West Yorkshire Playhouse and Talawa’s 2012 co-production of Godot. After all, ‘“Godot” is hope, “Godot” is life – aimless, but always with an element of hope’ (Beckett cited in Graver 2004: 82).

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Mindscapes Among Thistle: Producing Samuel Beckett’s Plays in Scotland Ksenija Horvat

When Scottish dailies such as The Scotsman and The Herald first announced in April 2015 that preparations were afoot for the upcoming fiftieth anniversary celebrations of The Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh in autumn 2015, the production earmarked to open the season was Waiting for Godot, starring Brian Cox and Bill Paterson, which was programmed to run 18 September–10 October.1 Beckett’s play was also chosen to be Mark Thomson’s penultimate directing project before his scheduled stepping down from the position of artistic director of the Lyceum after thirteen years (2003–2016) at the helm of this most significant Scottish theatre company. Thomson steered the Lyceum through troubled waters of major changes in Scotland’s creative funding policies and succeeded, where others might have faltered, in bringing a new generation of audiences to theatre, as well as keeping the long-term subscribers firmly in their seats. Thomson suggested in an interview for The Stage that he was pleased to have Cox and Paterson open this celebration of the Lyceum company’s fifty years: We wanted something that wasn’t nostalgic – I didn’t want to do The Servant o’ Twa Maisters, which was the first show in 1965 […]. But there is something very important about legacy and about someone like Brian walking on that stage as a 19 year old under Tom Fleming and wanting to come back and play again. (Quoted in Dibdin 2015)

Cox, one of the original members of the Lyceum company and an

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honorary patron since 2012, said that working at the Lyceum was the most formative experience of his career: To be afforded the opportunity to observe and work with the greatest Scottish actors of their day – a formidable roll call that included Duncan Macrae, Fulton MacKay, Russell Hunter, Una Maclean, Calum Mill and Eileen McCallum, all led by the visionary Tom Fleming – introduced me to the tremendous heritage of world-class practitioners that is unique to Scottish Theatre […]. This anniversary production of Waiting for Godot very much continues that tradition. (Quoted in Ferguson 2015)

Cox hints that Beckett’s work also – and on many levels – feeds into Scotland’s heritage of world-class practitioners. He acknowledges the significance of Beckett as representative of a second generation of European Modernist writers in the post-Second World War era, but also gives credit to many Scottish directors and companies who have introduced Beckett’s work to Scottish audiences, sometimes to the detriment of their own reputations and careers. The experimental realm that Beckett’s plays occupy has particularly hit the spot with his Scottish contemporaries, among whom were N. F. Simpson, Stanley Eveling, Edwin Morgan, Joan Ure, Fionnlagh MacLeoid and Donaidh MacIlleathain, the latter two fervent authors in Gaelic, reminding us that Beckett’s pictorial and verbal abstractions speak to those artists interested in expressionist and minority languages writing. MacIlleathain’s use of absurdist language and setting in An Sgoil Dhubh (A Dark School) (1974) resembles Beckett’s abstract settings and dissociative lines, though MacIlleathain uses both to explore a more immediate threat of non-native external sources for the survival of Gaelic culture in Scotland, as Michelle MacLeod and Moray Watson seem to suggest in their chapter on the twentiethcentury Gaelic short story, novel and drama published in volume 3 of The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature (Brown et al. 2007). While these Scottish authors sought to express their anxieties over the ambiguities of personal, national and cultural identities in modern



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Scotland, they seemed to have found refuge in Beckett’s portrayal of humanity as mundane and deconstructed, and in his sagacious use of language and characters as blueprints of life’s many contradictions. This essay has a dual purpose: to offer an overview of landmark Scottish productions, as I see them, of Beckett’s plays between 1967 and 2015, and to critically reappraise the continuing popularity of Beckett’s work in Scotland. While not seeking to include all of the productions by Scottish and other companies, of which there have been many in this period, the essay does aim to highlight those performances which I hope will offer enough variety of approaches to Beckett’s dramaturgy as to confirm the sense of his indisputable relevance to contemporary Scottish theatre. Since the 1960s Beckett’s plays, and plays about Beckett, have been performed regularly across Scotland by theatre companies such as Traverse and the Royal Lyceum (Edinburgh), Citizens and Tron (Glasgow), The Byre (St Andrews) and The Lemon Tree (Aberdeen), to mention but a few, as well as by touring companies who visited Edinburgh International Festival and Edinburgh’s Fringe. These productions, so deeply rooted in concerns of Beckett’s own time, also reflect the preoccupations of each generation who stage them, as well as individual directorial visions complementing or jarring with the author’s staging guidelines. Thomson chooses to go back to a simplicity and purity of presentation of Beckett’s language in performances by two members of Scottish theatre royalty. Cox and Paterson bring to the performance the signatory physical humour that marked their previous roles. While Thomson chose to close the door on his time at the Lyceum with a new version of a Greek classic (Chris Hannan’s adaptation of The Iliad), his direction of Godot will imprint him in the lasting memory of Scottish audiences and critics. Among recent changes in Scottish theatre and society one may be inclined to mention increasingly abstruse funding policies, the formation of Creative Scotland that takes on duties previously held by the Scottish Arts Council, the rising pressures upon Glasgow’s Playwrights’ Studio to produce new writers through their recently introduced mentoring scheme, budgetary constraints and a loss of

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funding by theatre companies such as Traverse thus placing constraints on their programming policies, and the closures of The Byre in St Andrews and of The Arches in Glasgow. The Arches lost its all-night licence in April 2015, rendering a great number of small-scale avantgarde companies and artists homeless or driving them underground, thus making it more difficult for a representative voice to be heard of those experimental companies who do not toe the National Theatre of Scotland’s party line. These events seem to render Thomson’s production of Godot either an ironic commentary on current affairs or a bleak prophecy regarding the future of Scotland’s theatres. Given the mixed critical reception Godot received during early performances,2 and the rigidity of the author’s instructions of how the play should be performed which often led to artists’ failure to find humour in Beckett’s writing, it is no wonder that Beckett came to be perceived as a bloodless and apolitical figure in the Scottish art world – his work was frequently seen as an act of ‘nihilism’, and it was accused of being ‘nonsensical’, ‘unperformable’ and ‘absurd’. Dan Rebellato quotes Bill Hopkins who in Declaration claims that Beckett makes ‘a mockery of attempt, accomplishment and greatness’ (quoted in Rebellato 1999: 137), while Charles Marowitz opines that ever since Godot the absurd ‘has been under fire […] and is now reaching that delicate juncture at which even its staunchest supporters are beginning to defect’ (ibid.). In 1965, on the occasion of the eightieth anniversary of the Edinburgh International Festival, Brian Levin laments the disappearance with the passing years of ‘The overwhelming cultural luxury of those early festivals’ (1965). Levin goes on to suggest that such loss was inevitable as changes in public taste and the audiences’ increased opportunities ‘to be choosey’ meant that instead of providing everything for somebody, Edinburgh’s festival grew to provide ‘something for everybody’ (ibid.). Behind this seemingly innocent statement lies a profound critique of the avant-garde theatre that has appeared on the Festival’s and Fringe’s many stages, which can be seen particularly if one compares it with David Douglas’s record of the troubles brewing at the Fringe that year. Douglas writes in ‘Sniping at the Festival’,



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published on the cover page of The Glasgow Herald 25 August 1965, about one particular case of censorship and cancelled productions: Students from Worcester Teachers’ Training College, proposing an ambitious scheme of things in the Epworth Hall, have had their latenight show cut by four items because of objections by the Methodist Church authorities.

While not met with the book, the bell and the candle like some other Fringe shows, Worcester Players’ dual production of Endgame and Act Without Words I did not exactly light up the Epworth Halls’ stage either. In a review from 26 August, ‘No Multitude or Joy at Endgame’, the controversy was labelled the ‘dust-up over dustbin drama’ (Kerr 1965c), and the actors were accused of being too young: ‘As Hamm Gordon Cooper seemed rather young which meant that Nagg, played by Don Thurgeson, and Nell, played by Christine Galie, were less senile than one expected; surely this pair of outcasts should be only slightly younger than Methuselah?’ (ibid.). Act Without Words I fared even worse, as the reviewer called it ‘a ten minute problem posed, without words […] on – well, on what?’ although Ian Frampton got off the hook for doing well ‘as a man apparently surrounded by an electric fence’ (ibid.). Not a stellar entrance for Beckett to Scotland’s largest festival, but then again, not all of the artists agreed with the established view that the weird and transgressive avant-garde was behind the slipping of the cultural standards of the Festival compared to earlier years. Neither, in the eyes of the establishment, was such a responsibility placed exclusively on Beckett’s shoulders; he kept fine company with the likes of Ugo Betti, Eugène Ionesco, Edward Albee and Antonin Artaud, the productions of whose works galvanized a change in attitude towards what theatre was and should be in relation to society. Scottish actor John Cairney made a public plea at the Festival Fringe Club on 23 August 1965 that theatre should be a place for gaiety and audience participation, ‘the cultural fun palace’ (quoted in Kerr 1965a). His insistence on the stage belonging to everyone as opposed to being ‘a rendezvous for bourgeois ladies in pretty hats’ was fuelled

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by frustration at the absence of the teenage audience from the Festival (ibid.). Cairney believed that this was due to ‘the tendency to genuflect at row F and by members of audiences whose attitude is so coloured by their beliefs that they will even buy their tickets in a reverent manner’ (ibid.). He ended his attack on bourgeois classes and the clergy by saying that the Festival should never be treated as ‘a gaudy, painted, slightly drunken lodger who wanders into the house for three weeks of the year, makes a lot of noise and leaves a lot of litter’ (ibid.). A few days later, he was joined in his protestations by Michael Geliot, who was still recovering from being decimated by critics for his unconventional interpretation of witches in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and by Louisiana-born Jim Haynes, a co-founder of Traverse Theatre and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and the former owner of the Paperback Bookshop on George Square in Edinburgh. Geliot accused Edinburgh of being governed by ‘narrow parochialism and conservation, which prevents new ideas from flourishing, and a wicked pseudo-morality’ (quoted in Kerr 1965b). For Geliot, the purpose of tragedy was its ability to ‘shock, appal, and horrify, because it is working in the interest of making one realise that life can be shocking, appalling and horrifying unless we do something to ameliorate it’ (quoted in Kerr 1965b). Kerr completed his article with the following sarcastic description: Mr Geiot, in a new departure for him, will pursue the tragic muse next week at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh where he joins actors David Baxter and Leonard Fenton in readings from Beckett’s plays, novels and poems selected by John Calder. (Ibid.)

Kerr must have felt rather smug in his concluding words, not realizing his faux pas in attributing Beckett’s writing to a ‘tragic muse’. Calder was careful to choose a melange of texts that showed Beckett in his changing moods, from tragic to comic to outright farcical, which must have made for an interesting evening of readings by seasoned actors such as Geliot, Baxter and Fenton. In his address to Traverse Club members on 31 August, Haynes proclaimed that theatre needed to raise awareness, and in order to do



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so, one had to move away from the concept of theatre as entertainment towards a theatre of ideas. He claimed that the former was based on an outdated educational system in Britain that was ‘orientated to “turning people off ”, to making them incurious. More imaginative efforts were needed to stimulate enthusiasm and awareness in young people’ (quoted in Kerr 1965d). Haynes insisted on focusing on theatre through the writer. He claimed that ‘one should come out of a theatre not dazed but in some way changed’ (ibid.). Haynes certainly practised what he preached as he transformed the Traverse Theatre Club by offering its members the newly written experimental plays that were inspired not only by the European avant-garde but also by socialist ideas evident in the work of such Scottish theatre practitioners as author, director and folk singer Ewan McCall, and director Gordon McDougall (the latter became artistic director of the Traverse Theatre Club in 1966 and remained in the post until 1968). And it is here that we can find the roots of the diverse approaches Scottish practitioners and visionary patrons of theatre have taken to Beckett’s writing, from a purist faithful following of his staging instructions, via philosophical inquiries into the heart of humanity, to socialist and other politically engaged approaches. Perhaps Calder’s selection of readings in September 1965 was in many ways the most traditional in its interpretation. However, this Scottish-born publisher, author and patron of arts, who had remained a close friend of Beckett’s ever since they met in Paris in 1955, was also most reverent in his endeavour to capture Beckett’s elusive essence. At his first press conference for the Traverse Club in July 1966 Gordon McDougall expressed his intention to ‘prise the theatre free of its traditionally middle-class audience and to […] produce shows which related to contemporary issues’ (quoted in McMillan and Carnegie 1988: 46). In December 1967 McDougall showed exactly what he meant when he chose a rather unorthodox Christmas show, Waiting for Godot (22 December 1967–3 January 1968) with John Sheddon and Richard Wilson playing Estragon and Vladimir respectively. On 18 December 1967, The Scotsman theatre critic Allen Wright, while

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writing about the fickle ‘fairy godmother of the arts’ that was Scottish arts funding, commented on some curious choices regarding which productions qualified for Arts Council support, mentioning in passing that McDougall’s Godot qualified alongside Perth Rep’s Cinderella and the Citizens’ Rookery Nook out of eleven Christmas shows that opened in that week. Wright admitted that Traverse’s Godot stuck out ‘incongruously from the usual list of pantomimes and frolics’ (1967a). McDougall disagreed; he believed firmly that the play was relevant to Christmas: The play is predominantly an illustration of man’s indifference to his fellows and his inability to find satisfaction with himself. […] It is a direct comment on a city like Edinburgh at Christmas time. We wish you a merry Christmas, but we want to remember the citizens of Edinburgh who will toast it with surgical spirit and wake up to a Christmas stocking in a Salvation Army hostel. (Quoted in Wright 1967a)

To help his actors prepare for their roles, he sent them to spend a whole day in Edinburgh’s Grassmarket sitting in the doorway of a local men’s hostel with the down-and-outs, ‘whose presence in the heart of this self-consciously respectable city disturbed McDougall’ (McMillan and Carnegie 1988: 46). McDougall’s reminiscences are recorded by Joyce McMillan and John Carnegie in The Traverse Story (1988): ‘We did it […] to remind people of what the Traverse building had been and that the tramps were still there’ (ibid.). Wright disagreed with McDougall’s approach and said so in a review entitled ‘Misguided Parochial Twist to Godot’ that came out in The Scotsman on Christmas Day 1967. In it he accused the Traverse of taking itself too seriously and turning Vladimir and Estragon into homeless men of the Grassmarket, and Beckett into a modern-day Dickens: the play would appear to be more concerned with man’s relation to infinity than his relations with his fellows. ‘They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant then it’s night once more’ – Pozzo’s



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parting words, beautifully spoken by Philip Manikum seem to express the real significance of the play. It is metaphorical and universal, but McDougall has tried to make it realistic and local. This misguided originality is disconcerting, but it does not prevent it from being a very impressive production that certainly should be seen. (1967b)

Wright recorded that the writing was of a high standard, singling out Manikum as Pozzo ‘whose arrogance turns to pathetic dependence on his servant’ (ibid.). He called Richard Wilson’s performance as Vladimir ‘subtly varied’, while he thought that Clive D’Urban’s Boy was ‘truly angelic’ (ibid.). There was nothing but praise for Sheddon’s Estragon and Michael Harrigan’s Lucky. However, the brunt of Wright’s critique is on the localization of language and setting of the play which he felt ‘resisted translation from a surrealistic wasteland to the pavements of Edinburgh where, it is suggested, the tramps are loitering outside bright shop windows’ (ibid.). What eluded Wright was that the Traverse Club’s production brought home an idea that Beckett’s writing was fervently and intimately socially engaged through its questioning of religion, science, philosophy and bourgeois art. It brought Beckett into the tradition of politically engaged drama that permeated McDougall’s and later Max Stafford-Clark’s (McDougall’s successor, 1968–70) theatre work, and that demonstrated the lasting significance of the documentary, the epic and the verbatim in theatre. McDougall had no intention to either alter or emulate Beckett’s dramaturgical techniques on the Traverse Club’s intimate stage; instead his aim was to bring the characters close to the audience so that every breath, sob and chuckle was made more immediate and hence much more urgent. McDougall’s Didi and Gogo were products of social oppression in a specific physical, geographical and historical moment, and while his production did not lose any of Beckett’s humour, it gained socio-political relevance in representing those living on the margins of our society without clear leadership. Wright further noted that the actors played their characters in Scots, in a nod to a long tradition of Scots adaptations of European texts. However, where Robert Kemp et al. had succeeded when adapting

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Molière, McDougall only made a faint attempt to lend Godot a bit of Scottish flavour. Ultimately, Wright felt that ‘all this parochialism is irrelevant’ and that the play would have worked fine without it (ibid.). But where Molière’s humour is explicit, Beckett’s is often hidden under the surface, and while Molière’s sarcasm is directed at the political and religious authorities, Beckett’s irony is directed at everyone and no one in particular. Three years after McDougall’s show, two productions of Godot overlapped – that of the Royal Lyceum’s (11 February–26 February 1971) in Edinburgh and of Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre (18 February–6 March 1971) – born at the time that the Conservative government’s measures were becoming increasingly unpopular in Scotland (where Labour had won a majority in the General Election the previous year, though lost elsewhere in Britain to the Conservatives). The Ibrox disaster that occurred on 2 January coincided with rehearsals for both productions, followed shortly by the first wave of strike actions (the postal workers’ strike in the early months of 1971 and the strike of Upper Clyde shipyard workers later that same year). Both productions focused on comedy as a way of expressing the randomness and irony of human existence, represented by a whirlwind world of circus, turning Didi and Gogo into clowns and the wasteland setting into the big top under which they repeat their tired routines. Allen Wright interviewed the directors of both productions in advance of the opening nights. He reminisced about the time, fifteen years previously,3 when Godot was brought to Scotland and was received with ‘a mixture of hostility and mystified awe’ (1971a), and recalled an unnamed Herald correspondent who had accused Beckett’s work of ‘infecting the stage with the same disease of obscurity, discord, ugliness and gloom that has attacked music, painting, sculpture and poetry’ (ibid.). Wright referred here to the original Paris production of Godot (5 January 1953, in the Theatre de Babylone), which highlighted existentialist themes and played down Beckett’s highly developed sense of irony and black humour. Keith Hack at the Citizens and Barry Hanson at the Lyceum were determined to bring out the comedy



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and avoid ‘treating it as a bleak and solemn discourse on the human condition’ (ibid.), having instead been attracted by Godot’s inherent spirit of music hall and circus. They both chose to interpret Vladimir and Estragon as ‘clowns, actors, or any kind of threadbare entertainers’ (ibid.). This was not a new idea; Bert Lahr and E. G. Marshall deployed the same concept in the first American production of Godot some fifteen years earlier. Keith Hack said that in earlier productions there was a tendency to ‘go for the pathos and labour the philosophy. […] It was first staged at a very pessimistic time, when the cold war and the H-bomb depressed people. It was all a bit gloomy and pompously intellectual’ (Hack quoted in ibid.). He felt that the mood shifted in the 1970s, hence it was his intention to present Godot’s themes in a more hopeful and positive manner. With hindsight, looking at the events that were soon to unravel in Scotland, politically, economically and socially, we may now look on both his and Hanson’s interpretations of Godot as belonging to a more innocent time and a society that was as yet unaware that it was standing on the verge of the abyss. And yet, the setting of both productions and the choices the directors made aesthetically and dramaturgically hinted that they were not unaware of this undertone. For example, Hack defended his choice of circus as a setting: In Godot the fun and games and the circus gags are part of the whole and are not just thrown in. […] Beckett’s statement about the human situation seems to work through comedy. The absurdity is used to clarify things – not to confuse the audience. (Ibid.)

When asked how he approached the text, Hanson admitted that he steered away from Beckett’s instructions and directed Scotland’s seasoned actors Tony Haygarth and Walter Carr in their respective roles of Vladimir and Estragon as a couple of old entertainers suspended in a never-ending dream, going through familiar routines in which something always goes wrong. It is true that in the play Beckett drops enough hints to suggest that he likened life to an evening in the

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circus. However, Hanson’s Lyceum production seemed to be so intent on proving that Godot can be fun that it came ‘dangerously close to the travesty of Beckett’ in the first act, though Wright found that the second act was ‘beautifully poised between absurdity and melancholy’ (Wright 1971b). The play’s set, designed by David Collins, was a drab colourless big top housing an abandoned circus ring with a long rope dangling from the roof and the big-top post instead of a solitary tree, all of which ‘added an extra dimension of absurdity to the text’ (ibid.). This absurdity was magnified by yet another peculiar choice of Gerald Ramage as Godot’s emissary appearing out of the darkness of the big top, dressed in the uniform of the Boys Brigade. Haygarth and Carr brought their different physical and verbal traits to Vladimir and Estragon, with Carr bringing ‘broad Scots comedy and Haygarth gentler buffoonery’ (ibid.), thus creating a delicately balanced act that was reminiscent of well-rehearsed old music-hall routines of the past. They were complemented by the amiable pomposity of Pozzo (Paul Brooke) and over-the-top mental spillage of Michael McKevitt’s Lucky. Hanson’s production seemed to have struck a fragile balance between irreverent comedy and melancholy sadness; at one point, ‘For one fleeting moment they froze like the crucified thieves on Calvary in a terrible image of mankind’s suffering’ (ibid.), only to be thrown immediately after it into yet another ridiculous belly-laugh-inducing situation. Hack’s production at the Citizens went further in providing a consistent circus theme where ‘Vladimir and Estragon are dressed for slapstick; the swaggering Pozzo is every inch the ring-master, and the menial Lucky wears the classical outfit of a clown’ (Wright 1971c). For most of the production Tony Meyer played Lucky as a mime which makes ‘his single outburst of speech all the more astonishing’ (ibid.). Vladimir and Estragon were played by Gregory Floy and Mike Gwilym, and James Aubrey made for a devilishly arrogant Pozzo. The Boy was played by Tony Hayes with an equal measure of innocence and impudence as a trapeze artist ‘who glides down a rope-ladder as if from heaven’ (ibid.).



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The point where the similarities between Hack’s and Hanson’s interpretations cease is Hack’s peculiar and rather unnecessary departure from the text as Vladimir and Estragon’s attachment to each other is represented as a homosexual relationship. Wright comments on this: Friendly embraces become voluptuous, and bouts of horseplay acquire sexual connotations. Certainly it sheds new light on the play, but it has the effect of trivialising it. Estragon simpers and whines petulantly, and Vladimir is aggressive and domineering. They squabble and make up like ‘The Boys in the Band’ Estragon coyly teasing his companion. […] This curious exhibition made several people walk out of the theatre at the first performance on Friday. (Ibid.)

While Wright found strengths and weaknesses in both productions, he certainly did not mince words in his warning that if Beckett intended us to read more (or at all) into circus or homosexual themes he would have provided clearer clues. It would not be until Terry Wale’s production of Godot at Perth Theatre that finally Scotland produced a reading that lived up not only to the author’s description of it as a tragicomedy but also to his stage directions: Roger Kemp and Jake D’Arcy bring out the absurdity of the tramps’ effort to pass the time, and they engage in cross-talk with all the deadpan humour of a vaudeville double act. (Wright 1977)

This production’s main strength is that it did not labour the text; neither did it indulge in fanciful elaborate settings. Instead it offered all the simplicity and heart-wrenching tragicomedy that is inherent in the play, making it one of the most respectful and memorable treatments of Beckett’s writing in Scotland for a long while. Other shows followed over the next couple of decades: Traverse’s 1975 version of McDougall’s earlier production, opening on 5 December, this time performed in French with a cast that included Peter Allen, David McMillan, Yvan Nadeau and Michael Worton; Kenny Ireland’s production of the play at the Royal Lyceum between

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10 March and 1 April 1995 with Tam Dean Burn playing Vladimir and David Shaw-Porter in the role of Estragon; and the Scottish Theatre Company’s touring at the Adam Smith Theatre in Kirkcaldy and the Mitchell Theatre in Glasgow in May 2005 (followed by short stints in the Cumbernauld Theatre and the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh between 16 May and 1 June 2005). However, no major Godot emerged after the late 1970s and Wale’s wonderfully understated interpretation until Thomson’s 2015 production. In the meantime, Beckett’s other dramatic output started to attract the overdue attention of Scottish audiences. Two years after McDougall’s production, McDougall’s successor at the artistic helm of old Traverse, Max Stafford-Clark, directed Play (1 May–10 May 1969) with Sue Lefton, Ann Russell and Toby Salaman, as a double bill with Leo Lehmann’s Another Town. Stafford-Clark’s decision to direct Play and not another Godot was an inspired choice. Beckett gave detailed instructions on the lighting and the manner in which each actor’s lines should be spoken, and Stafford-Clark’s direction was ‘a work of great precision’ (Wright 1969), particularly when taking into account the shape of the Traverse stage which made it near impossible to position the three urns into a chorus line staring at the audience. Instead, the chorus effect was ‘lost by placing the actors in a triangle facing towards each other’ (ibid.). Play transferred to the New Traverse on 29 August 1969 where the production continued to build audience interest in Beckett’s writing. In 1974, Rick Cluchey brought the New York-based San Quentin Drama Workshop company’s experimental production of Endgame to the Traverse (22 May–2 June). The company’s cast included Richard Stewart as Clov, Brendan Dennison as Hamm, Lawrence Held as Nagg and Terry Garcia as Nell. It originated from a workshop that Cluchey and his company facilitated among the inmates of San Quentin Jail, and the production built upon the inmates’ experiences of life in captivity, boredom and dependence on each other. Under Cluchey’s direction, the cast recreated the bleakness of Hamm and Clov’s existence. Stewart portrayed Clov as a ‘hobbling snarling black slave’ with sardonic humour, Dennison’s Hamm was ‘the blind chairbound master […]



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with a right blend of authority and anxiety’, while Lawrence Held and Terry Garcia presented suitably grotesque and chilling portrayals of Nagg and Nell respectively (Wright 1974). The other two prominent productions of Endgame included the 1996 (5 March–23 March) production at The Tron directed by Michael Boyd with cast including Forbes Masson, Jan Wilson, John Castle and Phill McCall; and a co-production with Theatre Workshop Edinburgh4 and Sharmanka Theatre Glasgow,5 directed by Robert Rae with Garry Robson and Nabil Shaban playing Clov and Hamm, and Scotland’s notable actors Dolina MacLennan and Raymond Short stepping in to portray Nell and Nagg. Sergey Yakovsky designed lighting, Ronnie McConnell provided sound design, and costumes and background set were designed by Janis Hart. After the Scottish Arts Council backed the Theatre Workshop to become a national touring company, Rae’s production opened on 1 November 2007 at the Theatre Workshop and after five performances toured to five other theatres6 across Scotland as well as appearing at the disability arts festival DaDa Fest in Liverpool. In February 2008, the tour was extended to a further seven Scottish theatres.7 In Rae’s own words, the work at the Theatre Workshop led ‘to a growing number of fine professional disabled actors choosing to live in Edinburgh and Nabil and Garry have really been extraordinary pioneering actors who have paved the way for professional disabled actors in theatre, film and TV’ (Theatre Workshop website 2015). Sharmanka was first inspired by Beckett’s play in 1990 when Eduard Bersudsky and Tatyana Jakovskaya created a sculpture entitled The Dreamer in the Kremlin (now included in the collection of the Glasgow Museum of Modern Art). In collaboration with Theatre Workshop Sharmanka created an ingenious kinetic set designed especially for this co-production of Endgame. In her online review, Joyce McMillan stated that Rae’s production inverts the usual staging to play the servant Clov in a wheelchair, Hamm in a high mobile cage that seems both throne and prison. And

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like everything else on stage, Hamm’s rusty gilded cage is designed by Eduard Bersudsky’s Sharmanka workshop in a floridly exotic Heath Robinson style that’s both poignant in its sense of a civilisation living off its own scraps, and slightly distracting from the spare outlines of Beckett’s bleakly metaphorical text. (McMillan 2007)

Mark Brown wrote in a review in The Telegraph of Endgame in The Arches entitled ‘Glasgow: Another Side of Beckett’ that Rae introduced ‘a dark, brooding soundscape (by Ronnie McConnell), emotive music (by Alexander Knaifel) and fascinating set and prop designs (by the Russian kinetic sculpture collective Sharmanka), but he has also made […] innovations in character’ (2007). Brown’s claim goes beyond the changes that Rae made to characters’ appearance and mobility and to Nabil Shaban’s and Garry Robson’s performances, ‘both Hamm […] and Clov are performed with an emotional energy that – although they occasionally add to the bleak comedy of the piece – ultimately detracts from Beckett’s resounding, disappointed humanism. Dolina MacLennan and, especially, Raymond Short give lovely, controlled performances as Hamm’s dustbin-bound parents, Nell and Nagg’ (ibid.). The focus here was no longer on socio-political engagement but rather on the aesthetic and artistic values of Beckett’s texts. A number of productions of the shorter pieces by Beckett strove to keep the performance within the instructions given by the author, or turn them into a tour de force for performers such as Grupo Sobrevento’s production of Beckett: Act Without Words I/Act Without Words II/Ohio Impromptu at the Tramway Glasgow (17–18 October 2000), or Calder and the Godot Company’s 2004 production of three short plays Ohio Impromptu/Rough for Theatre I/Rough for Theatre II at Traverse. In his review for The Herald, Gareth Davies noted that Ohio Impromptu adhered ‘pretty closely to the common misconception of Beckett’s work. Stark, static and without much in the conventional way of narrative content, it offers no easy answers to the questions it provokes’ (2004). However, the two other shorts fared better in his eyes, as Rough for Theatre I presented a ‘Drily witty, while still



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starkly existential’ mindscape in the elegant interpretation by Anthony Jackson and Michael Howarth, while the third play in particular, Rough for Theatre II (also performed by Jackson and Howarth) came across as ‘funny and accessible […] witty, profound and performed with real feeling’ (ibid.). The company’s passion led Davies to ask of himself, and of us, if the Godot Company’s interpretation of this piece came closest to raw emotion in a Beckett play and concluded that it was possibly so, and was ‘the more eye-opening for it’ (ibid.). Another eye-opening medley of shorter monologues was presented in The Arches’ production of Beckett 2: The Basement Tapes/Krapp’s Last Tape/Rockaby (24 February–20 May 2005) in Glasgow’s Arches and Selkirk’s Bowhill House Theatre, directed by Andy Arnold, and performed by Andrew Dallmeyer and Kay Gaillie. Arnold’s production emphasized the ‘lessness’ (Beckett’s own term, quoted in Federman 2000) of Beckett’s work. On this occasion, it was not only the benefits of Beckett’s script but also the otherworldly feeling of one of the Arches’ spaces and Arnold’s insistence on having the limited audience that enhanced ‘the chilly alienation’ exuded by The Basement Tapes (Fisher 2005). The Basement Tapes comprised two monologues, Rockaby, here performed austerely by Kay Gaillie sitting in the dark in her rocking chair reminiscing about her past, and Krapp’s Last Tape in which Andrew Dallmeyer – Scotland’s acclaimed actor and writer – played an elderly man, haunted by his chequered past, reviewing recordings made thirty years ago. Arnold returned to Beckett in his 2015 production of Happy Days at the Tron (15–23 May) in which Winnie was played by Karen Dunbar, a fine comedian who is better known for her role in BBC Scotland’s Chewin’ the Fat, and as Rose in the National Theatre of Scotland’s revival of The Guid Sisters. When Neil Cooper interviewed Dunbar in The Herald, she highlighted the need for creating a balance between comedic and dark, both in the character she was playing and in Beckett’s opus in general: There’s such darkness in it. There’s such sadness, so I feel like I’ve got a bit of responsibility as well, to make sure it’s the right level of humour,

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that it doesn’t become a caricature, but that it is believable, because I want it to be the same when it comes to the dark stuff. […] Comedy’s a huge deflector, […] and it’s a great relief sometimes as well, I quote it often, but what is laughter but making the unbearable bearable. The majority of comedians, there’s always sadness underneath, it’s why the comic character comes out of a person in the first place, as a balm for the pain. (Dunbar quoted in Cooper 2015a)

Cooper described Arnold’s production as an ‘exquisite revival of Samuel Beckett’s classic piece of existential vaudeville’ with Dunbar being perfectly cast to play a mercurial creature who uses ‘The assorted rituals constructed from domestic minutiae […] to survive’ (Cooper 2015b). Willie is played by Arnold himself ‘with quiet desperation’ (ibid.). The set was a post-apocalyptic landscape designed by Carys Hobbs, but Dunbar and Arnold continuously disrupted the bleakness of this landscape so that it became ‘as akin to a saucy seaside postcard come to life out of season as to surrealism. Winnie and Willie are the ultimate end of the pier double act giving their all with a kiss me quick routine that will kill ya if it doesn’t get them first’ (ibid.). Here we are back in the realm of self-mocking jesting Beckett, unpredictable elusive Beckett, and Beckett that escapes pinning down to a single interpretation. Beckett’s writing and personal life continue to capture the interest of Scottish theatre practitioners. For example, Theatre Cryptic’s director Cathie Boyd was the driving force behind organizing Beckett Time, Cryptic’s cross-media celebration of Beckett’s work produced in partnership with the Tron Theatre (2000), and which included film, theatre, dance, visual art and puppetry and brought together artists from the United Kingdom, Europe, Asia and South America. Beckett Time was billed as Scotland’s biggest ever tribute to Samuel Beckett (Cryptic Theatre website). Moreover, in 2012, Robyn Hunt’s play Never Enough Silence, about Beckett’s relationship with his mother May, was developed through Playwrights’ Studio Glasgow’s mentorship scheme, in collaboration with theatre and opera director Stasi Schaeffer. It would be an impossible task to try and understand all of the reasons why theatre makers and audiences in Scotland remain



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fascinated with Beckett the man and Beckett the artist. Perhaps the nearest that we can approach a possible answer lies in Allen Wright’s evaluation of Beckett’s contribution to European theatre offered all those years ago in 1971 on the eve of the two similar productions of Godot produced in Scotland’s two major cities, Glasgow’s Citizens and Edinburgh’s Lyceum. Wright saw Beckett’s work as a major artistic upheaval ‘comparable to the great developments in other forms of expression’ (Wright 1971a), albeit he felt it was rather unfortunate that John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger opened shortly after Godot and sidetracked British critics and audiences into believing that it was Osborne who was at the helm of the theatrical revolution. Wright commented that ‘“Look Back in Anger” now seems a very conventional play – almost Rattigan with a bad temper. But “Godot” still defies all attempts to pin it down; it always remains one jump ahead of us’ (ibid.). These words, written over four decades ago, still ring true and linger as a long shadow over the most recent Lyceum anniversary performance of this timeless play.

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Contracts, Clauses and Nudes: Breath, Oh! Calcutta! and the Freedom of Authorship Graham Saunders

It would make for an elegant pub quiz conundrum: ‘Which Samuel Beckett play has enjoyed the longest continuous run on-Broadway, or off-Broadway’? The first American production of Waiting for Godot in 1956 would be a good guess, with Bert Lahr in the role of Estragon helping to achieve over one hundred performances (Knowlson 1996: 423), but in fact it was what Beckett came to call one of his ‘dramaticules’, a play lasting less than forty seconds called Breath that ran for a year of continuous performances at the Eden Theatre off-Broadway from 1969. Breath also ran concurrently in two other productions that opened in San Francisco during September and Los Angeles in December 1969. However, the success of Breath did not come out of a sudden vogue for Beckett’s work, even given the announcement that October of his being the recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature. A more likely explanation came from Breath’s inclusion in Oh! Calcutta! – a theatrical revue that featured full-frontal nudity and sexually explicit material. Conceived by the theatre critic and writer Kenneth Tynan ‘to be elegantly but intensively sexy’ (Tynan c. 1967b), Oh! Calcutta! has subsequently become synonymous with the changing sexual mores of the late 1960s. Oh! Calcutta! also claims a distinctive performance history, having played to over 80 million people in over 140 cities in fifteen countries

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worldwide. In fact, the final performance of its 1976 Broadway revival closed as late as August 1989, prompting the critic Frank Rich, who reviewed the final show, to find it astonishing that a revue, originally conceived in 1969, was still being performed well into ‘era of video porn’ (1989). Sadly, Breath’s additional claim in the pub quiz aficionado’s arsenal as Beckett’s most frequently performed stage play to date, was not to be. Beckett withdrew permission for Breath to be included in a planned 1970 production of Oh! Calcutta! in London, and once the rights have ended for the off-Broadway production also did the same.

The Pinter problem Beckett’s involvement in what he called ‘the Tynan circus’ (Knowlson 1996: 565) has always appeared remarkably uncharacteristic. Received lore attests to Beckett having already written Breath prior to the invitation to submit to Oh! Calcutta!,1 yet his willingness to collaborate with Tynan in the first place is puzzling given the nature of their history. Tynan started off as an early vocal champion of Waiting for Godot (1953), even declaring himself a ‘Godista’ after seeing the first British production in 1955 (Tynan 2007: 72). Tynan’s review talks of the play as a physical experience, one that ‘pricked and stimulated my own nervous system’ (ibid.), and which he sought to replicate over twenty years later for Oh! Calcutta! where he spoke about trying to find ‘artistic means to achieve erotic stimulation’ (Tynan 1994: 353). However, this early support for Beckett’s work soon changed, and by the time of Endgame (1957), Tynan’s allegiances had shifted towards more Brechtian-inspired work, as well as drama such as John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956), that attempted to reproduce the texture of real life. For Tynan, Beckett seemed to advocate a passive acceptance of the world rather than a Brechtian call to change it. Tynan also felt that Endgame lacked the essential humanity that so distinguished Godot (Tynan 2007: 89),2 and in 1958 these sentiments were expressed in a famously excoriating review for the Observer, when Endgame was



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performed again at the Royal Court, in a double bill with Krapp’s Last Tape. Entitled ‘Slamm’s Last Knock’, Tynan’s review took the form of a cruel, if witty parody of Beckett’s dramatic style, where the figure of the critic Slamm concluded that the two plays represented, among other things, ‘Just another dose of nightmare gibberish from the so-called author of Waiting for Godot’ (Tynan 2007: 195). Notwithstanding his admiration for Patrick Magee’s performance as Krapp, it seems difficult to comprehend why, after being the recipient of such a wounding attack, ten years later Beckett would be providing material for Tynan’s Oh! Calcutta! In fact, Beckett and Tynan’s relationship was to deteriorate even further in 1964 during the production of Play at the National Theatre. Although directed by George Devine, Beckett, who attended some of the rehearsals, insisted on the pace of dialogue being considerably speeded up by the actors. Tynan, who by this time had been appointed as the theatre’s Literary Manager, directly intervened in the rehearsals, arguing that Beckett’s approach would make the play unintelligible to audiences, pointing out to Devine in one letter ‘that we are not putting on “Play” to satisfy Beckett alone’ (1994: 292), and in another that ‘Beckett, by his own honest admission, has little personal knowledge [of audiences]’ (ibid.: 294). Not unsurprisingly, Devine and Beckett were incensed at what they considered Tynan’s crass interference. Devine called Tynan ‘impertinent’ and ‘presumptuous’ (Tynan 1994: 294), while John Beckett recalled that the incident provoked an anger in his cousin that he had never witnessed before (Knowlson 1996: 517). Given these circumstances, the likelihood of Beckett ever acceding to Tynan’s request for a sketch just four years later becomes even less likely. However, one documented account does exist that attempts to explain Beckett’s involvement in Oh! Calcutta! This comes from a letter to James Knowlson from Barbara Bray, a longstanding close friend of Beckett’s. The letter was prompted after reading a lengthy 1990 feature on Oh! Calcutta! in the Observer Magazine, to mark the twentieth anniversary of its London debut. Aware that Knowlson was compiling material for a biography, Bray wrote:

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I thought you might wish, now or later, to correct the false impression it [the Observer Magazine] gives about Sam’s involvement […] ‘Provided’, indeed!3 No doubt the idea in the article and before, was to suggest that Sam was a voluntary contributor. But it wasn’t at all like that. As I remember, Tynan, who was then at the National, persecuted Sam for some time to let them ‘adapt’ ALL THAT FALL, which of course he didn’t agree to […]. Anyhow, when Tynan asked – maybe it was even by telephone – for something for a show of his, Sam didn’t want to be too stand-offish, and agreed to let him use BREATH, which was already written. It wasn’t made at all clear to him what use it was going to be put, and when that emerged he rightly felt he had been taken for a ride. I don’t remember what steps were taken, or through whom, it must certainly have been because of his displeasure that it was ‘dropped’ from the London production. (Bray 1990)

Knowlson takes Bray’s account entirely at its word in Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, and, in what must be a common snare for the biographer, even attributes a further reason of his own, based on the supposition that Beckett still felt a lingering debt of appreciation for Tynan’s early support of Waiting for Godot (Knowlson 1996: 565). Given the cruel mockery of the Slamm’s Last Knock review, followed by the bitter row that had exploded over the staging of Play at the National Theatre, Knowlson’s explanation might be called into question. While Bray was correct in saying that both Tynan as Literary Manager and Laurence Olivier as Artistic Director of the National Theatre wanted to produce a theatrical adaptation of Beckett’s first wireless drama, All That Fall (with the frankly bizarre idea of casting John Gielgud as the rural Irishman Mr Rooney), and that the period during which these negotiations were taking place – mid-1967 – coincided with the time Tynan was contacting potential contributors for Oh! Calcutta!, given their fractious history, Beckett’s refusal to grant Tynan and Olivier permission to stage All That Fall seems in keeping, whereas acceding to Tynan’s request to contribute to Oh! Calcutta! does not. An alternative explanation is that Tynan did not approach Beckett directly, but used an interlocutor, someone acting on his behalf who



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persuaded Beckett to contribute – someone who was both liked and trusted by Beckett, and who at the time was also significantly involved with Tynan in producing Oh! Calcutta! Enter Harold Pinter. Given their long friendship, Beckett would have been less inclined to refuse his request for a sketch, especially when at this stage Pinter was not only going to be submitting material, but also directing the show. Pinter’s appointment diary as well as other archival sources consulted in William Baker’s A Harold Pinter Chronology also reveal that the pair met in October 1967 (Baker 2013: 22).4 At the same time Pinter was holding meetings with Tynan, and early approaches were also being made to other potential contributors, so it is at least conceivable that this coincided with the time that Pinter approached Beckett for help. In fact, Pinter’s involvement with Oh! Calcutta! goes back as far as December 1966, when Tynan, in a letter to the novelist Mary McCarthy requesting material, cites himself and Pinter as co-devisors, with Pinter directing (Tynan 1994: 370–1). The Pinter Chronology also records meetings held with Tynan during November and December of that year, the last of which included the film director Roman Polanski, who planned to submit a number of short erotic films to the revue.5 There are also two final meetings with Tynan in May of the following year (Baker 2013: 23, 25). The degree of Pinter’s formal involvement can also be found in a letter that Michael White received from fellow producer Michael Medwin on 6 January 1967, the heading of which reads ‘“Oh Calcutta” by Kenneth Tynan and Harold Pinter’, and offers five thousand pounds in preproduction costs in return for Medwin’s company, Memorial Enterprises, being able to co-present with White (Medwin 1967). Whether or not this alternative account is true, and Pinter had indeed persuaded Beckett to submit material for Oh! Calcutta!, in what would be a supreme irony Pinter was already starting to lose interest in the project. Even at the moment when their partnership was being legally formalized, archival materials reveal that Tynan was already considering the possibility that Pinter might withdraw from the production. In an undated letter to White, but likely to have been

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written at the same time as the letter to McCarthy, Tynan calls for ‘dead secrecy: suppose March [1967] comes and Harold doesn’t like the material: you and I might want to go ahead anyway in which case any previous publicity involving him would be highly embarrassing’ (Tynan, n.d.). These fears increase in a further letter to White in April 1967 where Tynan writes ‘I lunched with [the novelist] Penelope Mortimer yesterday who now has had an idea [for providing a sketch for Oh! Calcutta!] and is getting down to the typewriter. She said she had seen Harold in New York and had rather got the impression that his interest was drifting. I hope she isn’t right’ (Tynan 1967b). By June, Jacques Levy, who was chosen to direct the New York production, reporting in a letter to White on preparations for the show, gives further credence to Pinter’s withdrawal from the project: ‘Spoke to Pinter in New York. I’m convinced he will not do a piece for us. Do you have any idea why? Perhaps he [Tynan] would know’ (Levy c. 1967).6 In this proposed account so far, a recognition is needed both for the allure of the archive, together with its attendant snares. While the degree of Pinter’s involvement outlined here is a speculative explanation for Beckett’s involvement in Oh! Calcutta!, it should be added that it is no more speculative than the existing account, in that it takes no account of the bad blood that existed between Beckett and Tynan prior to the invitation to contribute to Oh! Calcutta! Archival evidence clearly demonstrates Pinter’s far greater direct involvement in the revue and so invites at least a reconsideration of Knowlson’s account that Beckett offered Tynan the sketch out of a misplaced sense of obligation, based on Tynan’s original enthusiasm for Waiting for Godot.

The contractions and spasms of Breath Within Beckett scholarship, Breath’s relationship to Oh! Calcutta! is chiefly understood in terms of the public nature of the dispute, and Beckett’s withdrawal of the sketch after discovering an additional stage



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direction had been inserted that called for the inclusion of nude bodies – a direction that later found its way into the published Grove edition of the revue. The Michael White archive both confirms the veracity of this story, and even provides a record, in a letter from Beckett, preserved in the form of verbatim quotation by his agent, expressing displeasure at the vandalism perpetrated on his text. However, other archival materials also reveal that this incident was only the final part of a dispute that had begun far earlier and for very different reasons. The starting point arises initially from terms included in Beckett’s contract and the ensuing correspondence between his agent at Curtis Brown and the theatre producer Michael White. Beckett eventually signed his contract on 21 April 1969, shortly after his 63rd birthday, but not before returning a previous contract dated 19 February. In a letter to White, Beckett’s representative Warren Brown points out that not only is the sketch entitled Breath, not Mime, but ‘the only rights Mr Beckett agreed to release to Mr Tynan were for inclusion of Breath in the revue. All film, radio, television and other subsidiary rights are to remain the property of Mr Beckett, though the stage performing rights are to cover the English speaking world’ (Brown 1969). White’s reply includes an amended contract and an unconvincing apology that explains, ‘the contract was drawn up in [Kenneth] Tynan’s absence, and one of his secretaries misinterpreted his hand writing’ (White 1969). This explanation becomes even more dubious when, in a letter to the show’s American producer Hilliard Elkins, Tynan is still calling Breath ‘The Beckett mime’ (Tynan 1994: 437), just several weeks before. While Bray’s account casts Beckett as a naïve innocent, duped into the whole affair by a wily and manipulative Tynan, his signing of the contract under the watchful eye of his agent clearly demonstrates that Beckett was fully aware of what he was doing, but was quick to intervene when he thought the terms of his contract being contravened. The letter Beckett wrote to the author John Kobler, which Knowlson cites in full along with its concluding joke, ‘If this [Breath] fails to titillate I hand in my aprob’ (Knowlson 1996: 565), also points towards Beckett being fully aware of the kind of show he was contributing to,

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and clearly enjoying the anticipated effect Breath might produce on its audience’s libido. In accordance with the other contributors to Oh! Calcutta!, Beckett received an advance of twenty pounds, payable even if the sketch was not finally used and royalties based on 6 per cent of the weekly gross takings of the show; these in turn were expressed as a ratio percentage based on how long each sketch lasted. While this meant that Breath, at approximately forty seconds, was on a miniscule royalty, if Beckett had not finally decided to withdraw the sketch, both the longevity of the show together with its numerous productions worldwide would easily have made Breath Beckett’s single most commercially successful play. Less than three months after the New York opening White received a letter from John Bassett at Curtis Brown informing him, ‘Our client, Samuel Beckett, does not wish his sketch BREATH in OH! CALCUTTA! to be included in the proposed British production slated for 1970’ (Bassett 1969a).7 Tynan was clearly perturbed by Beckett’s response. In a letter to the show’s American producer Hilliard Elkins on 22 November, Tynan says that he has written to Beckett ‘setting out the most persuasive arguments for letting us do his piece in London’, and saying that he will try and meet him in Paris on either the fourth, fifth or sixth of December (Tynan 1969). Presumably the meeting did not take place, or if it did, it failed to change Beckett’s mind. Existing archival correspondence does not give the exact reason for Beckett’s decision to withdraw the sketch, and up until now the received account has always been that it was Tynan’s insertion of nude bodies into Breath that led to the dispute. However, correspondence in the Michael White and Kenneth Tynan archives reveal that initially arguments focused around an additional San Francisco production that took place in September 1969, shortly after the official opening of the New York show on 16 June 1969. It is this issue that is referred to in a further letter sent to White by Bassett on 8 December 1969, stating ‘The fact that he [Beckett] has written so swiftly can be taken as a sign that he is more than usually disturbed by the situation.’ Bassett cites the terms of the contract, and



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in particular the clause that relates to permission being granted solely for New York and London productions. Bassett concludes, ‘therefore I think it would be upheld that there has been no permission for the San Francisco production […] He [Beckett] has asked me to refuse all royalties from this, for which he claims he never gave permission.’ The letter then goes on to discuss a second cause of dispute – namely a proposed book and gramophone recording of the production, pointing out that here too, no formal permission had been given by Beckett in his contract. The letter then takes a strange turn, with Bassett seeking to provide a covert explanation for what he believes are the true reasons for Beckett’s objections to these breaches of contract: Between ourselves, I think that what is annoying Mr Beckett is that there is no direct link between his name and his work, so that if the attribution of authorship could be effected, in San Francisco, I could reapproach [sic] him on your behalf to see if this would mollify him. It may be that within the style of the thing that you do not wish to attribute the sketches to their authors, in which case I would have no alternative but to ask you to desist from presenting it but if it was possible to fall in with what I think are Mr Beckett’s wishes (reading between the lines) then I would willingly write to him again. My feeling that this is what Mr Beckett is annoyed about is amplified by his attitude to the book, which you have admitted to me over the phone is in breach of the contract, where nevertheless he [Beckett] says that he accepts inclusion of the piece on condition that it is entitled BREATH and specifically attributed to him. This is also his attitude to the record. He is prepared to accept the royalties from these on condition ‘that the piece be given its correct title and that no doubt exist as to authorship’. (Bassett 1969a)8

Far from ‘reading between the lines’, the last sentence with its direct quotation marks look to have been taken directly from correspondence between Beckett and Curtis Brown, and seems to confirm that at this stage it was not the question of the nude bodies preoccupying Beckett, but rather the attribution of authorship. Whereas Tynan wanted the sketches themselves to have primacy over individual authorship, this

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clashed with Beckett’s attitude regarding his own work. Intriguingly, this alternative account for the initial cause of the dispute, while ostensibly hidden inside the archive, must also have been in circulation at the time; for instance, it is later verified by one of the authors of the 1978 Student’s Guide to the Plays of Samuel Beckett, who outlines the familiar story of Tynan’s alleged failure ‘to respect Beckett’s stage directions’, but also ‘to attribute the contribution to its author by name’ (Fletcher et al. 1978: 190). Beckett’s response over the authorship of Breath is somewhat puzzling given that Tynan had been clear from the start that the revue would be conceived on the basis of the sketches being anonymous, with contributor’s names alone being given in the programme. For example, in an undated letter sent to White (but likely to have been written sometime in 1967), Tynan writes ‘In order to let your imagination run freely riot we’re proposing to list all contributors in alphabetical order at the top of the programme leaving it to the audience and critics to decide who wrote what (though this isn’t obligatory)’ (Tynan c. 1967b). Tynan’s archive also contains the draft of a letter sent out to all the contributors outlining this plan quite clearly, a letter Beckett presumably received. Tynan’s comment about alphabetical billing is referred to in all the author’s contracts, although the wording is admittedly vague in that it states ‘alphabetical billing’ only, without being clear that this would refer to surname only and would not be attributed directly to the work.9 Another later cause for dispute, but one curiously not mentioned in any correspondence at the time, was the decision taken by the creative team of Oh! Calcutta! to change the title of Breath. Despite clearly being a flagrant breach (and the reason Beckett sent the first contract back to the producers unsigned after they had mistakenly called his sketch ‘Mime’), once Breath had been chosen to open the show, both the theatre programme and other accompanying publicity material renames and refers to it as Prologue: yet, inexplicably, this calumny does not appear to have reached the attention of Beckett, his agent or his publishers.



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One possible explanation for Beckett’s insistence on Breath being directly attributed to his authorship was an attempt to distance himself from the production by imposing a form of quality control. We know that Beckett never saw the New York production, but he may well have heard stories about the variable quality of the other sketches. By clearly ascribing his own name to Breath, Beckett would at least have been spared critical speculation over whether he was among those responsible for sketches that included a history of women’s underwear or the embarrassments encountered during an evening of wife swapping. This explanation seems more likely because Beckett could quite legitimately have refused permission for the sketch to be included in the accompanying book and gramophone record10 as it constituted a flagrant breach of contract, yet his willingness to relent over the former issue, under the proviso of Breath being associated with his name, points in this direction. The Grove edition of Oh! Calcutta! confirms that Beckett won the day over the matter, with his sketch exceptionally being the only one to have its authorship disclosed. However, this acquiescence by the producers to Beckett’s demand has led to a confused understanding of the affair. Knowlson points out that within the illustrated Grove Press script for Oh! Calcutta! Beckett is the only author whose name is directly attributed to his sketch (Knowlson 1996: 566), and understandably assumes this to be a further breach of contract, whereas correspondence between Curtis Brown and Michael White provides an alternative explanation – namely that by restoring Beckett’s name to his sketch, the producers were simply trying to make amends following his objections to the San Francisco and Los Angeles productions, and so could legitimately claim to be carrying out Beckett’s wishes. While this attribution of authorship never saw its way into the theatre programme, where each author’s name was still listed separately from their sketches, White’s correspondence gains credence in Bassett’s follow-up letter in early January 1970, where he again makes mention of the ‘completely unauthorized’ presentation of Breath in San Francisco

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and Beckett’s ‘wish for me to send you an injunction completely prohibiting its production’. However, Bassett is clearly still keen to resolve the dispute amicably and refers back to his previous letter and the belief that the need for an acknowledgement of authorship lies at the heart of the dispute: ‘I beg of you, – as Ken Tynan is in town, to put your heads together and let me know the points I raised particularly as to whether the sketches are now being individually credited’ (Bassett 1970). However, all this was to no avail, as Bassett explains in a letter to White the following month: ‘Having read the Barber article in the Telegraph, I wrote to Samuel Beckett quoting those parts of it that would be most helpful to your cause, but I fear my letter has crossed with his received this morning’ (Bassett 1970). John Barber’s review of the New York production was one the few positive critical responses to Oh! Calcutta!, with Barber calling it ‘the work of gifted artists’ and commenting enthusiastically on the ‘dazzling costumes […] sophisticated effects [and the] stunning [nudity of the] virile men [and] lovely girls’. Barber also believed the show deserved credit for its spirit of experimentation by attempting to fuse ‘the pure poetry of its celebration of the human body and the sane laughter of men and women when together’ (Barber 1970). These sentiments clearly did nothing to sway Beckett, for whom Oh! Calcutta! had now provided fresh causes for affront. Bassett quotes directly from Beckett’s letter to White: You may be interested to learn that the text of BREATH as published by Grove Press there appears a phrase not written by me. It occurs after the words ‘unidentified rubbish’ and reads ‘including naked bodies’. I presume this forgery is the work of Tynan, just as he changed the title from BREATH to PROLOGUE to O.C. Grove must have received from Tynan the script thus altered and printed it in all good faith as my original. My final foolishness in this wretched affair was not to have asked for the proof. (Bassett 1970)

After quoting from Beckett’s letter, Bassett, with rueful understatement adds ‘I am afraid this would seem to have knocked any approach on the



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head’ (Bassett 1970). Beckett’s letter provides the narrative and explanation for his final withdrawal from Oh! Calcutta! – and the account we are now all familiar with, but it is also interesting to note that along with the incident of the nudes, it is the unauthorized change of Breath’s title that most seems to exercise Beckett’s anger. Also, in a short piece written two months later for Dublin’s Evening Herald entitled ‘Beckett Annoyed with Tynan?’, an anonymous author provides a report of the dispute over the nude bodies appearing in Breath, but also cites from the ‘Dublin people’, who had seen the show in New York, and who report that the sounds in Beckett’s text – described as two ‘faint brief cr[ies] […] of recorded vagitis’ (Beckett 1986: 371) – had now been supplanted by ‘erotic ones’ (Anon. 1970a)11 instead. Given the hostilities that had marked their past relationship, Beckett not unsurprisingly blamed Tynan as chief architect behind the mischief, a verdict that has been sustained in Beckett scholarship.12 Yet, it should be remembered that the accusations levelled against Tynan are only circumstantial. Deidre Bair recalls a telephone conversation in 1974 in which Tynan denied adding any new stage directions to Breath (Bair 1978: 603), and it is also worth considering that the unwelcome co-author of Breath could equally have been Oh! Calcutta!’s director Jacques Levy. While Tynan attended some of the rehearsals in New York, his work at the National Theatre in London kept him on the other side of the Atlantic for much of the time when the American production was taking shape. Levy had been given a free rein to come up with the look of the show, and his artistic decisions ranged from the choice of beat group The Open Window in providing the show’s music to the use of projected film sequences. Tynan’s input was restricted mainly to the choice of sketches and their running order. If ‘erotic stimulation’ was the show’s governing principle, then the idea to place nude bodies among the ‘miscellaneous rubbish’ and populate it with erotic cries could equally have come from Levy. If Tynan did have a hand in doctoring Breath, this could have come at the behest of Levy, or Tynan simply not noticing, either when he saw the show in rehearsals, or later when it came to approving the script for Grove; conversely, if

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Tynan had noticed, he may also have chosen to keep quiet over the matter. Speculation aside, what can be said with certainty is that relations had broken down irretrievably. Bassett now set about in earnest extricating Beckett from his contract. Earlier, in November 1969 Beckett had written to his UK publisher John Calder pleading ‘Extricate me from that [Oh! Calcutta!] and God will reward you’ (Knowlson 1996: 566), and it is interesting to note that the Knowlson biography also contains a letter from Bassett to Beckett dating back even earlier to 8 September 1969, confirming legal grounds to withdraw the sketch (ibid.: 810). This is also verified in the letter of 5 September, formally withdrawing Beckett’s permission for Breath to be included in the London show (Bassett 1969b). However, in the light of Bassett later offering a potential olive branch to the show’s producers in his letter of 8 December over the San Francisco production, on the proviso that acknowledgement of authorship be given, Beckett’s withdrawal from both the New York and proposed London show was still in a state of deferral. We should also not discount the possibility that financial concerns might have been motivating factors behind Bassett’s desire to reach an accommodation over the matter. It was already clear that by the end of 1969 with the success of the New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles openings, together with plans underway for London and Paris productions, Oh! Calcutta! was likely to be a highly lucrative show. Notwithstanding miniscule royalties owing to its length, cumulatively a series of long-running multiple productions of Oh! Calcutta! around the world would have been an attractive proposition for any agent. However, once relations had gone beyond the point of repair, it was a relatively easy matter for Bassett to withdraw Beckett from the obligations of his London contract. In an earlier letter to White, written at the time when withdrawal had first been threatened, Bassett had stated ‘As you have not taken your option as outlined in clause 3a of the contract I must regretfully inform you that your rights in this sketch for a London production are terminated’ (ibid.).



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Bassett did not follow up this threat until the following year, but the referenced clause three can be found in Beckett’s contract where the producers had made an undertaking that they would secure a West End production; if so, they would be granted rights for a further five years. Unfortunately, despite the removal of the Lord Chamberlain’s powers of theatre censorship in September 1968, West End producers were still fearful of prosecution on the grounds of obscenity, which the revised Theatres Act still allowed for. As a result Oh! Calcutta! was first produced outside the West End at the Roundhouse in North London, a venue generally associated with fringe theatre and rock music acts. It was not until September 1970 that the production reached the West End, via the Royalty Theatre. The terms of Beckett’s contract only gave the producers of Oh! Calcutta! until April 1970 to secure a West End production, by which time the rights had lapsed, so Beckett’s withdrawal from the London production was a relatively simple matter. This was not the case with the New York show, where the contract had given the producers an option of securing either a Broadway or off-Broadway venue; consequently Breath stayed in the repertoire of Oh! Calcutta! until April 1970 when the producer rights expired. Oddly, despite being in clear breach of contract, the Grove edition of Oh! Calcutta! still went ahead with the rogue stage directions left unchanged. News of the dispute did not reach the public until several months before the London production was due to start in July 1970, with the issue of the inserted stage direction of nude bodies being cited as the principal reason for Beckett’s withdrawal.13 The dispute around Breath and Oh! Calcutta! is a small but significant incident in Beckett lore. Knowlson points out that it became ‘one of the few occasions where he [Beckett] allowed his anger to become public’ (Knowlson 1996: 566), but it also illustrates an early and significant example of Beckett’s inconsistent behaviour when it came to asserting his rights as author over the production of his work – at one point threatening to withdraw permission from the San Francisco production, yet at the same time keeping channels open for compromise via his agent. In this case it seems as though it was the

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series of further calumnies perpetrated on the text itself that finally prompted Beckett to act decisively. It is well documented that Beckett would allow considerable licence without comment if his work was in the hands of someone he liked and trusted. Breath, however had the misfortune to be in the hands of Tynan, a figure whose previous behaviour towards Beckett had engendered a strong dislike, and who after the incident he would reportedly brand a ‘liar’ and a ‘cheat’ (Bair 1978: 603).

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‘That first last look in the shadows’: Beckett’s Legacies for Harold Pinter David Tucker

That Harold Pinter might be read in terms of connections between Beckett and British drama is hardly a surprising proposition. In 2005 the Nobel committee called Pinter ‘the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century’, while Pinter has discussed Beckett on many occasions, and a number of scholars have written, in passing or more detail, on the topic. In one sense then, thinking of these two authors together can seem obvious and is certainly not unprecedented. What the current chapter attempts is to try to push beyond what is already known and to see what might be revealed by more fully historicizing the relationship, while also paying attention to textual comparative possibilities, and thereby to broaden the received wisdom regarding the relationship between the two authors as a narrative of complex, variable and productive indebtedness. It focuses on three main areas which track a chronological progression from Pinter’s initial encounters with Beckett, through until-now less well documented affiliations tracked via mutual acquaintances and Pinter’s Proust screenplay, before looking at a particular performance, that of Pinter in Krapp’s Last Tape.

Early encounters The now well-known stories Pinter often recounted of how he first found Beckett were of how he stumbled across (already a Beckettian

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way of arrival, we might note) an extract from Watt published in Poetry Ireland in 1953. He subsequently borrowed a copy of Murphy from Battersea Reserve Library that hadn’t been borrowed in more than a decade, and he still had the edition decades later. As might be expected, echoes from these prose novels can be heard through the dialogue of Pinter’s early drama (even while by this time Pinter had read Beckett’s middle period major novels in French). His first play, The Room (1957), for example, contains a description of events not unlike those in Murphy, of the title character’s trouble playing chess against the inviolable Mr Endon: Mr Kidd. How do I know who he is? All I know is he won’t say a word, he won’t indulge in any conversation, just – has he gone? that and nothing else. He wouldn’t even play a game of chess. All right, I said, the other night, while we’re waiting I’ll play you a game of chess. You play chess, don’t you? I tell you, Mrs Hudd, I don’t know if he even heard what I was saying. He just lies there. It’s not good for me. He just lies there, that’s all, waiting. (1996a: 104)

Similarly, we might see the influence of Watt in 1958’s The Hothouse, where much like how Beckett’s protagonist Watt follows Arsene, Roote takes up a position of serial subservience: Roote. I was standing where you’re standing now. I can tell you that. Saying yes sir, no sir and certainly sir. Just as you are now. I didn’t bribe anyone to get where I am. I worked my way up. When my predecessor … retired … I was invited to take over his position. And have you any idea why you call me sir now? (Ibid.: 196)

Compare this to the departing Arsene in Watt: Haw! how it all comes back to me, to be sure. That look! That weary watchful vacancy. The man arrives! […] For he knows he is in the right place, at last. […] No. Let us remain calm. He feels it. (Beckett 2009d: 31–3)



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Then bringing ideas of serialism and power relationships together, in a description that recalls how Murphy also feels intertwined with the patients in his care and how Watt sits beside fireside embers waiting for ineffable consolations and a purpose, Pinter writes in The Hothouse: Remember that you are not alone, that we here, for example, in this our home, are inextricably related, one to another, the staff to the understaff, the understaff to the patients, the patients to the staff. Remember this, as you sit by your fires, with your families, who have come from near and from far, to share this day with you, and you may be content. (1996a: 319)

Relatedly, Beckett’s interests in permutation and demotic mathematics – which find their most wilfully atrophied manifestations in Watt – are also echoed in Pinter’s The Dwarfs, written for radio in 1960. Recalling Molloy’s statement that it is ‘Extraordinary how mathematics helps you to know yourself ’ as he counts his farts (Beckett 2009b: 28), Len in The Dwarfs exclaims cheerfully ‘There’s nothing like a bit of calculus to cheer you up.’ Len then goes on to outline a kind of cod-phenomenology of stasis and movement, with himself as the still point on a train in relation to whom the world moves: ‘I can only appreciate such facts when I’m moving. When I’m still, nothing around me follows a natural course of conduct. I’m not saying I’m any criterion, I wouldn’t say that’ (Pinter 1996b: 86–7). We could even go as far back as Beckett’s first novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women to compare how that novel’s protagonist Belacqua stands at the prow of a ship and senses the poisoned wonder of what he calls the ‘Cartesian earthball’ (1992: 134), ever revolving yet ever still. But it is in L’Innommable/The Unnamable where these issues are the most focused, where the narrator says of location in their dimly lit purgatorial non-place that ‘I like to think I occupy the centre, but nothing is less certain’ (Beckett 2010b: 5). Letters acquired by the British Library in 2014 shed further light on Pinter’s early explorations of Beckett’s work, particularly of the middle period prose. For example, Pinter first mentions Beckett to his friend Mick Goldstein in correspondence of June 1955, where he informs

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Goldstein he should become a member of the Arts Theatre for five bob because Waiting for Godot will play there that August. The following month he is reading Malone meurt with a French dictionary to hand, though despite the difficulties of reading in a second language he ‘can see what’s going on’ and tells Goldstein ‘Beckett is the most important writer of this decade’ (BL Add MS 89083/1/1/2, letter 8). Pinter even offers an extended, three-page summary of Malone meurt’s narrative which quotes the book’s final sentences and ends with Pinter pointing out ‘I don’t know whether the dying of Malone takes place in a moment or takes thirty years’ (ibid.: letter 91). ‘Molloy and Malone have knocked me from here to yesterday’ (ibid.: letter 12), he admits. It is clear that not only was Beckett a major figure for the young Pinter, but Beckett also provided Pinter with something substantial to struggle deeply with, if not alone then in a small group. That is, Pinter grapples with his discovery of Beckett as a new author, not as the established figure Beckett would come to be. Pinter was so impressed by Beckett in these early years that he would even defend Beckett’s work without having read or seen it. In Ireland performing during August 1955 Pinter was a little out of the loop of his London friends who were eagerly talking about the Arts Theatre’s run of Godot. He responded to a letter from Goldstein about the play, which Goldstein had seen and clearly had reservations about. Pinter hadn’t seen or read the play, but nevertheless he responded forcefully to Goldstein’s accusation that Beckett used unspecified (what Goldstein called) ‘tricks’. Saying that he prefers to talk about Beckett’s art not as a question posed, but as a necessity, Pinter in this letter even sounds not unlike Beckett’s narrator of The Unnamable in his reasoning: ‘The necessity to what? The necessity to say. To say what? Whatever’s to be said. What is to be said? Nothing is to be said, all is to be said. It is to be said. It is said. Some people say it better than others. Say what? What is to be said. Why? I ignore this question’ (Pinter 2009: 17–18). However, Pinter’s defence of Beckett with phrases that sound a lot like Beckett is intriguing beyond the overt textual rhythms because it also points to a deeply shared, rather than only borrowed, theatrical



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aesthetic. This is an aesthetic concerned with a form of radical present or presence on stage; with the presentation of characters who must say ‘Whatever’s to be said’, and who for the most part ignore issues of how they got where they are, of ‘Why’ they are saying what they are saying. Much as Beckett did (as his frustration revealed when the English actor Ralph Richardson, who was scheduled to play Vladimir in the UK Godot premiere, had wanted the lowdown on Pozzo, on what Beckett called in a letter to his American publisher Pozzo’s ‘home address and curriculum vitae’ (Beckett 2011: 507)), Pinter also preferred characters as stated. This sense of the dislocated present points towards a further shared aspect of their drama, that of anti-didacticism. Asked in an interview for BBC Radio’s European Division in 1960 about what the interviewer rather ambiguously called Pinter’s ‘ambiguous meanings’, Pinter railed against what he called ‘the explicit form […] so often taken in 20th century drama’ that he said was ‘itself cheating’. Characters subject to such explication, Pinter said, ‘don’t create themselves as they go along, they’re being fixed on the stage for one purpose, to speak for the author who has a point of view to put over’ (Pinter 1960). However, while many of Beckett’s indigent temporizers might also offer few clues as to origins beyond the margins of the stage or page, when Pinter’s characters lack history they often lack a different kind of history, what is perhaps a more realistic sense of history. For example, Davies asks Aston – the caretaker of that play’s title – where he was born, to which Aston replies: I was … uh … oh, it’s a bit hard, like, to set your mind back … see what I mean … going back … a good way … lose a bit of track, like … you know … (Pinter 1996b: 23)

On the one hand Aston implies that in order to remember where he was born he would need to recall the actual event (the problem being that it is hard to ‘set [his] mind back’), which is perhaps the sort of inspired but literalized extrapolation one might expect from Beckett’s Molloy such as when he infers his own name from his mother’s. On the

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other hand it is clear that the information does exist, Aston’s real past does exist, but it has rather faded, and is therefore no longer knowable, even though it once was.

Contiguities and convergences Given the various points of textual and historical contiguity outlined above it is little surprise that as the ‘Staging Beckett’ project has scoured archives for Beckett’s UK and Irish performance histories, it has found productions staging Pinter alongside Beckett. Krapp’s Last Tape, for example, has been paired with Pinter’s Landscape at the Northcott in Exeter in 1978 and with Night School at the Progress in Reading in 1980; Happy Days was produced alongside The Birthday Party at the Glasgow Citizens in 1992; and a Bristol Old Vic production of 2012 paired Krapp’s Last Tape with A Kind of Alaska. There are more such productions, while in addition a number of amateur productions have combined the two authors; no doubt practicalities of running times have played a part alongside the subtler shared aesthetics. The onstage relationship reached a kind of climax with Pinter playing Krapp in Ian Rickson’s 2006 production at the Royal Court, discussed in more detail below, while Pinter has also performed in other Beckett works such as Lessness in 1971 and Rough for Radio II in 1976 (both for BBC radio), and as Director in the ‘Beckett on Film’ production of Catastrophe in 2000. Yet intertwined with the dates and places of performance history are a further set of constellations that also help track the dispersed impact of Beckett upon British drama via Pinter. Pinter and Beckett knew a number of the same people, and it is worth spending some time exploring some of these and the ways in which they inform the broader issues of influence and legacy at stake in the present book. Pinter first met Beckett in 1961 in Paris, while The Caretaker was showing in the city with Roger Blin, who had directed (and played Pozzo in) the first Paris production of Godot in early 1953, performing as Davies. Blin suggested Pinter might like to meet the great man (the



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only proviso being to not treat him like a great man). Pinter had written to Beckett not long before, in August 1960 when he also sent a copy of The Caretaker. Beckett had replied at that time saying that he had read the play ‘with much pleasure and am now reading again’, while he also pointed out that when it comes to staging it ‘In French its chances will be lessened a little, but I think it should do well nevertheless’ (Beckett 2014: 355). Beckett’s gently worded instinct about a difficult French response was spot on, and his next letter written shortly after the two had met in person says that ‘Jean Martin [who was playing Aston in the Paris production] is too upset to write to you, so I’m doing it for him.’ He went on, ‘Both Blin and Martin are excellent in my opinion and Mick [the character’s rather than actor’s name] more than adequate. The more I know and see the play the more I like it. We are all very upset and ashamed for French criticism’ (ibid.: 395–6). So although Pinter’s further dramatic prospects in France will have seemed greatly damaged, he also presumably took much heart from this new personal relationship with an encouraging Beckett, a relationship which would lead to correspondence spanning the years until Beckett’s death.2 The period of the late 1950s and early 1960s is a particularly interesting one in terms of Pinter’s and Beckett’s radio work, and other names involved here are familiar within Beckett scholarship. For example, Pinter had asked Alan Schneider – the noted director of Beckett’s plays in the US – to direct The Birthday Party in 1960, while Donald McWhinnie was directing the play in London.3 McWhinnie also commissioned Pinter’s first radio drama A Slight Ache in 1959, this after he had produced Beckett’s first All That Fall two years earlier. McWhinnie also produced Beckett’s Embers in 1959, having overseen radio adaptations of Beckett’s Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable shortly before, as well as Krapp’s Last Tape.4 In a 1959 radio interview conducted alongside McWhinnie, Pinter discusses learning lessons from working with radio as primarily being about not overdoing the visual aspects of theatrical onstage presentation. They talk about Pinter’s characters sitting still on a bed, for example, talking for two full minutes, and accordingly stripping back the onstage visual information

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to something that allowed the text space (a lesson it might be posited that was similar to what Beckett must have also learned in between writing Eleutheria and Godot around ten years earlier). Pinter goes on to say the following: I must say, about radio, I was fortunate enough to hear very recently All That Fall and I found in that all the best things in radio, and something which I think the stage finally must lack, and All That Fall allowed you to – as the listener – to go, to go way ahead, to make a voyage with, with the play in a kind of imaginative way, but when you’re looking at a theatre picture, whatever it is, I don’t think you, you don’t give that exactly the same – I’m not a theorist but it seems to me that there’s a certain uniqueness about radio. (Pinter 1959)

There are other names that are also familiar in Beckett studies and that come up when looking through Pinter’s performance history. Pinter kept James Knowlson abreast of progress on the Proust screenplay, for example, having been awarded an honorary degree by Reading University in 1970 (Reading was the first university to award Pinter such a degree) and given a speech at the launch of Reading’s Beckett exhibition in 1971.5 Peter Hall also regularly directed Pinter’s plays. So regular in fact that he directed a Pinter production every three to five years between 1967 and 1980.6 One of these was 1975’s National Theatre premiere of No Man’s Land, perhaps one of Pinter’s greatest achievements, with Pinter’s biographer Michael Billington writing that it is this play’s constant switching between opposite poles of ‘paralysis and activity, resignation and resistance’ as one character tries to reinvigorate another’s creative imagination that gives the play its dynamism, and even going as far as claiming ‘It is also what makes the play superior to its obvious ancestor, Beckett’s Endgame, in which the sense of four characters passing the time until death and engaging in desultory exchanges comes to seem enervatingly hermetic’ (2007: 246). Another BBC contact who collaborated with Beckett, Martin Esslin, also had an important role in Pinter’s career. Esslin’s personal archive has recently been acquired by Keble College, Oxford.7 The collection



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contains a number of items of interest in relation to Beckett, Pinter, and Esslin’s conceptions of so-called absurdist drama more broadly, one of which is a typescript draft of Pinter’s particularly Beckettian Silence from 1969. But it is Barbara Bray, whom Knowlson called in Bray’s obituary ‘the third most influential female figure in Beckett’s life’ (Knowlson 2011: 96) – having been romantically linked with Beckett from 1958 until his death in 1989 – who perhaps had the strongest connections with both writers. Bray features repeatedly during the twenty-eight years of Beckett and Pinter’s correspondence, with Beckett often noting that he was forwarding copies to Bray of the plays Pinter was sending. Bray worked with Pinter over a number of years in her role as drama script editor at the BBC, and she would occasionally advise on Pinter’s drama from a director’s point of view. In a letter to Pinter of 1965, for instance, Bray warns that the character Teddy in The Homecoming could be tricky to direct at a certain section, and says the character needs ‘a touch of the genuinely academic now and then, say II, 17, even when he’s struggling’ (Bray 1965). One intriguing way in which these professional and personal relationships can be triangulated is via Pinter’s attempt to produce a screenplay based on Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. The team behind the project comprised Pinter, Bray and Joseph Losey, a film director who previously worked with Pinter’s screenplays for The Servant (1963), Accident (1967) and the 1971 Palme d’Or winning The Go-Between. Presumably buoyed by that triumph at Cannes (something Beckett congratulated Pinter on in a letter of 28 May 1971) the trio undertook the huge task of adapting Proust’s multi-volume novel to film, all the while hoping to avoid resorting to much voiceover. There are a number of points of interest in this collaboration, not least of which is Pinter the master of condensed dialogue grappling with the monumental first-person narration of the recherche. As Pinter noted in an unpublished draft of notes entitled ‘First Thoughts on Proust’, ‘The question of selection is formidable’ (see BL Add MS 88880/7/7, fols 40–1). Pinter’s solutions were often highly creative, and broadly speaking it is the visual that

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predominantly drives Pinter’s Proust screenplay. One might even go so far as to say that Pinter manages to adapt his own usual and brilliantly honed tendency towards linguistic brevity to cinematic montage, and it is often the dialogues set up between visual scenes that constitute Pinter’s achievements with this still un-filmed text. There are, however, moments when Pinter’s pithy brutalism comes into play, such as where the three parties are debating words to give the cook, Françoise, as she chases a chicken trying to catch and kill it for dinner. The Scott-Moncrieff translation from which the group were working has Françoise declaring ‘Filthy creature’, yet someone in the group was not happy with this, and Pinter suggests a progressively blunt series of options: ‘I don’t honestly think that Barbara’s “Come here you devil – curse you” is either shocking or brutal. If you don’t think “Filthy creature” is any good what about “Dirty beast” or if not “You fucking chicken”?’ (BL Add MS 88880/7/7, fol. 67).8 Intriguingly, there might be a little more of Beckett in the screenplay than is widely recognized. Bray wrote to Beckett about the project in August 1972, and while he replied with the following, which does sound like his involvement was minimal, if it was to be anything: ‘I am very glad to have such good news of Proust & contacts with Harold & Losey. I’m afraid I won’t be of any help – it’s too far back. I wish I had brought it with me, perhaps I’ll have another go at it when I get back’ (5 August 1972, TCD MS 10948-1-515), nevertheless Beckett kept up to speed with developments, writing to Bray a month later when the film trio travelled to France to visit Proustian locations to say that it was ‘Good to hear the Proust is going so well. Hope you go to Cabourg and there add to your imaginations’ (16 September 1972, TCD MS 109481-522). Though he admitted that his own visit to Cabourg had been ‘a wash out and gripes into the bargain. Tell Harold to be on his guard’ (28 September 1972, TCD MS 10948-1-527). Yet Bray was in such close contact with Beckett that it seems highly likely the two would have discussed the project in person on more than one occasion. Indeed Bray reported as much to Billington: ‘Actually, the basic structural idea came from Sam Beckett. I was



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talking to him about it and he said that you really ought to start at the end with Le Temps retrouvé and so that’s what we did’ (quoted in Billington 2007: 223–4). Further information on this suggestion about the film’s broad structure can be found in a letter from Pinter to Losey of 17 March 1972, in which Pinter confirms that it was indeed Bray who suggested the film’s narrative thrust. This is something he describes in the published screenplay’s introduction, rewriting the text of the Losey letter (removing, for example, ‘Barbara made this observation to me a while ago: “The architecture of the film […]”’) such that in the published version he describes a group decision: ‘We decided that the architecture of the film should be based on two main and contrasting principles; a movement, chiefly narrative, towards disillusion, and the other, more intermittent, towards revelation, rising to where time that was lost is found, and fixed forever in art’ (Pinter 2000: vii–viii). The art that regained time is fixed within, however, is not only the literary work constituted by the narration Marcel undertakes and which the film re-presents. It is also the visual image which in volume five of the Recherche the writer Bergotte dies after viewing, Vermeer’s View of Delft. Bergotte goes to view the Vermeer and notices a little patch of yellow wall within the picture. This makes him dizzy with revelation and he says to himself: ‘That’s how I ought to have written. […] My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of colour, made my language precious in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall’ (Proust 2000: 207). Bergotte sees his own life weighed in a scale against the patch of yellow wall and believes he has produced one, his life, at the expense of the other, a transcendent art. He collapses and dies while repeating to himself ‘Little patch of yellow wall, with a sloping roof, little patch of yellow wall’ (ibid.: 208). Proust had also seen this Vermeer while quite ill only the year before he died. He had written in correspondence that View of Delft is ‘the most beautiful painting in the world’ (quoted in Carter 2013: 318), and having also seen it some nineteen years earlier in the Hague, saw it again on a morning in Paris in May 1921. Indeed the final photograph

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taken of Proust alive is of him visiting the exhibition at the Jeu de Paume, where like Bergotte Proust suffered some kind of attack of vertigo. The first thing the camera shows in Pinter’s screenplay is a fully yellow screen, while the bell of a garden gate sounds before a series of scenes are shown to the camera – open countryside, the sea from a high window, a towel hanging on a towel rail, a window in a Venice palazzo, water pipes, the dining room at Balbec – with each cut punctuated by a return to the yellow screen. Then after we see Marcel tripping on cobbles the camera pulls back to discover that the yellow screen is the yellow of Vermeer. Similarly at the very end of the screenplay: The bell at the garden gate. Swann opening the garden gate and departing. Marcel as a child looking out of his bedroom window. The bell ceases. Vermeer’s View of Delft. Camera moves in swiftly to the patch of yellow wall in the painting. Yellow screen. Marcel (VO) It was time to begin. (Pinter 2000: 310)

While the importance of the Vermeer to Proust is of interest in and of itself (and accordingly it has been widely written about), the pertinent lineage here is that the little patch of yellow wall was also familiar to Beckett, who despite his admiration for Vermeer apparently had less time than Proust for the church wall.9 Beckett had taken extensive notes from Reginald Wilenski’s 1929 Introduction to Dutch Art. The notes are held at the University of Reading, and in them Beckett transcribed the following: Vermeer was concerned with the enlargement of his architectural experience, & with the creation of an architectural picture in which all the detail, whether figures, furniture, walls, windows, or what not, are of equal importance & all equally organic parts of an architectural



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ensemble; & that ensemble was his preoccupation from the start. (UoR MS 5001)

This sense of equilibrium in ensemble is disrupted for Proust by the little patch that draws the attention, and thus it appears that Beckett was aware of both types of gaze in relation to Vermeer. His story ‘Yellow’ in More Pricks Than Kicks surely derives its title from Vermeer via Proust, with Belacqua’s sunny-morning hospital wall described as ‘the grand old yaller wall’ with its encroaching sunlight creeping up on Belacqua and prompting him to think of ‘this dribble of time […] like sanies into a bucket’ (Beckett 2010a: 159). Belacqua would draw the window-blind against time if it weren’t for his being interrupted by the matron. Then finally on the operating table, when ‘His heart was running away’ and like Bergotte there are ‘terrible yellow yerks in his skull’ (ibid.: 164), Belacqua dies.10 When the Proust script was finished Beckett read it and told Pinter that he was ‘Very impressed by your Proust script so finely devised. Too moidered at the moment with one thing on top of another to say anything worth hearing. It sent me back to [itself] and to the end of Time Regained to begin with’ (SB to HP 31 November 1972, BL Add MS 88880/7/2). Beckett’s influence here is in the background, as part of a semi-occluded literary and aesthetic lineage, as well as manifesting in a more explicitly directional and practical way via Bray. So while in earlier dramas Pinter’s answer in a 1961 interview with New Theatre magazine to a question about Beckett’s influence – ‘If Beckett’s influence shows in my work that’s all right with me’ (quoted in Taylor-Batty 2005: 108) – might indicate that we are right to track the more explicit, textual comparisons that are central to how one can read The Room, The Hothouse and The Dwarves as indicated above, nevertheless the Vermeer / Proust / Wilenski / Beckett / Bray / Pinter lineage also reveals the impact of Beckett at the margins of British theatre practice and cultures, working at the European edges of British drama in what Pinter called ‘the best working year of my life’ (Pinter 2000: viii).11

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‘Did I ever sing’ / A ‘swan song’ Perhaps the greatest, certainly the most high-profile, acknowledgement by Pinter of the older writer’s importance both creatively and personally came in the form of Pinter’s ten performances in Ian Rickson’s production of Krapp’s Last Tape at the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs between 12 and 24 October 2006. Billington reports that tickets sold out within sixteen minutes of going on sale, and describes the production as ‘the most rigorous, unsentimental and overpowering interpretation of Beckett’s terminable drama imaginable’ (2007a: 429). Pinter was very ill and the decision was taken to confine him, in what was perhaps hinting towards a coffin, in a motorized wheelchair. As Mark Taylor-Batty points out, those few hundred audience members with tickets ‘were invited to engage with the character of an ageing writer surrounded by the darkness of his impending demise, performed by an ageing writer who had recently survived not only cancer but a nearlethal bout of pemphigus vulgaris, both of which had taken their toll on his once hardy frame, and audibly on his voice’ (2014: 188). Reviews naturally picked up on the melding of Pinter’s biographical details with Beckett’s narrative of age and loss (Alan Cowell in the New York Times titled his review ‘Life, Meet Art’, for example). Yet as Billington remarked of what in his review he called the ‘least sentimental reading’ of this play that he could recall, ‘this is a performance, not an exercise in self-revelation’ (2006). While the haunted glances over his shoulder as Rickson’s death bell literally tolled audibly foregrounded Pinter’s own physical frailty, and similarly the stoic, almost unblinking defiance Pinter brought to Krapp’s face might have brought to mind what John Stokes calls ‘the terrible bravery that drove the writer to become an actor once more’ (2009: 216), it is the performative and connotative nature of all of these combinations that have ensured this production’s legacy. Pinter called this production his ‘swan song’, his own last reading, and there is a sense in the production of his own theatre history coming full circle, back to Beckett, to those early encounters,



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even to that furtive stolen copy of Murphy, for example. As Rickson has said in an interview recently, ‘Krapp refers […] to his book that comes out with three library copies which is a bit like the early book […] Harold stole from the library. So I think he warmed to all those sort of ghosts and tributaries’ (2013). The so-called ‘spool school’ that Rickson and Pinter went through in rehearsals to get the performance right, trying an Irish accent for example and discarding it in favour of something that seemed ‘more honest and pure if it’s unmediated Harold’, even if at the same time Pinter was ‘channelling his idol and his comrade’, was, according to Rickson, for a large part a matter of the director ‘often slowing his [Pinter’s] thinking down and getting him to really relish the pauses and the silence. Sometimes I felt his internal clock was quite fast’ (ibid.). This is no small irony for a writer so famous for his pauses and silences, themselves so often attributed to a kind of Beckettian legacy. As Knowlson has pointed out, there are also deeply embedded personal associations within this play for Beckett. He began drafting the play only two months after Ethna McCarthy – whom Beckett had adored since student days at Trinity College, Dublin – was pronounced terminally ill with cancer, and McCarthy, whose stunning eyes as the Alba of Dream of Fair to Middling Women are ‘black till the plagal east shall resolve the long night-phrase’ (111), was the first person Beckett sent the newly written play to.12 No doubt Pinter was aware of all these histories, ‘ghosts and tributaries’ as he rehearsed and performed as Krapp. In December 1971 the New York theatre critic Mel Gussow asked Pinter whether he felt as pupil to master in relation to Beckett, and Pinter replied: ‘No, not as pupil to master … I think he’s the most remarkable writer in the world, that’s what I feel. I don’t feel pupil to master, for a start, because I don’t see where I relate to him at all.’ Pinter goes on to say that he does not see where he relates to Beckett because ‘his achievements […] are so far beyond my own that I don’t see any kind of comparison at all. I think he’s a great writer. And I’m certainly not that in the way I understand the term, and I do understand the

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term’ (quoted in Gussow 1994: 29–30). For Pinter the truly great writers are Dostoevsky, Joyce, Proust and Beckett. Nevertheless, and the Proust screenplay work notwithstanding, it is clear that Pinter borrows from – and shares more with – Beckett than he does any of these other authors. In 2009 Peter Boxall, writing about Beckett’s legacies for modern and contemporary novelists, argued that ‘Beckett’s presence in Pinter’s earlier work, for example, can be thought of as a rather static presence, a fixed point, rather than as a source of new dramatic possibilities’ (2009: 10). Boxall goes on to argue that in later years Beckett’s work found expression via Pinter’s more explicitly politically engaged work in ways that might on the face of it seem inimical to Beckett’s own artistic practice. The foregoing readings of aspects of Beckett’s importance to Pinter do, admittedly, perhaps rely a little on what Boxall calls a reading of Beckett as ‘historically marooned’, as a figure who ‘marks the extended termination of modernism’ (ibid.), stranded still prior to his legacies. Between Pinter and Beckett there is, however, a deep relationship of variable indebtedness still yet to be fully historicized that is perhaps somewhat evened out, averaged, by a vocabulary of ‘earlier work’ and ‘static presence’. Rickson has stated that ‘meaning embedded in form and rhythm is a great thing they share’ (2013: 99), and of course any such ‘meaning’, ‘form’ or ‘rhythm’ can be a protean thing, changeable across either author’s oeuvre much as it can be focused according to a given director’s vision. Beckett was various presences for Pinter, and these presences changed over time before Pinter strove to inhabit a number of them in his final stage performance. Perhaps it is better to say that Becket was a full constellation for Pinter, an orienting presence ever revolving and shifting but always reliable.

Notes Introduction 1 2 3 4

See McMullan, McTighe, Pattie and Tucker 2014. See Tucker 2014. See McMullan 2014. See McTighe 2013 as well as McMullan and McTighe 2014.

Chapter 1 1 Theatre Archive Interviews. 2 Ibid. 3 Including, for example, Taylor (1962), Brown (1968), Lacey (1995), Rebellato (1999b), Shellard (2000), Rabey (2003), Billington (2007b), Sierz (2008) and Pattie (2012). 4 Theatre Archive Interviews. 5 Ibid.

Chapter 2 1 In a letter to Rosset of 2 April 1957, Jérôme Lindon claimed that it was he who suggested that Rosset handle American performance rights (cited in Beckett 2014: 41 n.4). 2 See Beckett’s letter to Rosica Colin ‘after’ 18 January 1957: ‘But I shall not authorize a bowdlerized edition [of Endgame]. If I had known that Faber were going to bring out Godot in the Lord Chamberlain’s text I should have refused my auth[orization]. But they did this without consulting me. If it can only be published in England in an expurgated form, I prefer not to be published there at all’ (Beckett 2014: 16). 3 According to the Radio Times issue 1746, 26 April 1957, p. 47; http://

210 Notes genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/cc7443ffcc744aa0b71d1c64a4ce5456 (accessed 1 April 2015). 4 Material throughout from the Lord Chamberlain’s archives at the British Library, particularly the correspondence files as follows: LCP CORR 28 December 1957/578 and LCP CORR February 1958/215. The analysis of Waiting for Godot that Troubridge refers to and in which he calls for the ‘elimination of words of Joycean grossness’ is found in LCP CORR July 1954/6597. 5 The Beckett published letters included ‘[sic]’ after the number 5 as quoted above, indicating that Beckett had mis-numbered the sequence, but the inclusion of ‘[sic]’ is itself an editing error since Beckett was responding to the five principal objections from the Lord Chamberlain as cited by Devine. The missing number 4 is what would become the ‘the swine’ for ‘the bastard’ exchange that Beckett at this point had no ‘easy’ answer for so it was omitted. 6 Such defensiveness from the Lord Chamberlain’s office is belied by the file card in the LCP archive that is marked in red ink ‘Refused February 1958’, amended in pencil to the side ‘Later passed’. 7 It would be Alan Schneider who set the ‘standard of fidelity’ for the American Krapp’s Last Tape. 8 See further, McMullan 2014, and the website ‘Jocelyn Herbert and Samuel Beckett: An Exhibition’: http://blogs.reading.ac.uk/staging-beckett. 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’ [He would like it spoken with the speed of a machine gun] (AuclairTamaroff 1986: 75). 10 We should note at this point that the excisions and alterations called for by the Lord Chamberlain in 1958 were still in effect when the RSC petitioned to licence the play for a London revival for the 1964 season at the Aldwych, where it planned to stage Endgame in repertory with Pinter’s The Birthday Party. Michael Hallifax, writing for director Donald McWhinnie on 1 July 1964, proposed ‘bunch’ for ‘botch’; ‘leak’ for ‘relieve myself ’; and to reinstate ‘arses’. ‘Swine’ in reference to the deity was to be retained. Unsigned notes on the correspondence are as follows: ‘I think we had better let this one go – it is a replacement although it is still rude’; and in response, ‘yes, it’s still offensive but in this sort of play I suppose it will pass’. The RSC Aldwych would continue to become something

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of a competing venue to the Royal Court in the post-Devine years, hosting: Roger Blin’s Théâtre de France production of Oh les beaux jours on 3 April 1965; Beckett’s staging for the Schiller Theater, Berlin, of Das letze Band on 29 April 1970; and the following year a Schiller twin bill, Beckett’s stagings of Endspiel and Das letze Band from 29 April to 1 May 1971, these in addition to the MacGowran–Magee Endgame that the RSC opened on 9 July 1964 in the Devine era and is cited above (see also the University of Reading ‘Beckett in the UK’ performance web page: https:// www.reading.ac.uk/staging-beckett/Venues.aspx?p=pspace-1567137020). 11 Beckett’s manuscript notebook prepared for Beckett’s production of Happy Days at the Royal Court Theatre in June 1979 has been edited by James Knowlson (1985) and published by Faber and Faber, London and Grove Press, New York. A full account of Beckett’s Happy Days rehearsals at the Royal Court is included in Fehsenfeld and McMillan (1988). See also Knowlson 1987. Beckett’s work with Footfalls at the Royal Court is discussed in detail in Beckett 1999.

Chapter 3 1 Beckett’s Schiller Theater productions of Endspiel and Das letzte Band played in Peter Daubeny’s World Theatre Seasons at the Aldwych Theatre in 1970 and 1971 and his production of Warten auf Godot was also staged at the Royal Court in 1976. 2 This precedent would continue in the 1990s after his death with a notable upsurge in the West Endification and Festivalization of his work in London. During the 1980s productions of his drama returned to the National, the Young Vic and the Old Vic and even spread to alternative London locations with the Manchester Royal Exchange’s tour of Waiting for Godot, featuring Max Wall at the Roundhouse. 3 Riverside Studios is approximately 300 metres from Lower Mall, with Lower Mall on the west side of Hammersmith Bridge. 4 Email to Matthew McFrederick, 24 April 2015. 5 It is clear from a letter to Rick Cluchey of 30 July 1979 that Beckett knew Peter Gill was Artistic Director of Riverside Studios and David Gothard was its Programme Director and Administrator.

212 Notes 6 Beckett wrote to Alan Schneider early to mid-May 1978: ‘Still hopes of Happy Days with Billie next summer, at Court or perhaps Riversdale Studios, but nothing firm so far’ (Harmon 1998: 370). Beckett was obviously thinking of Riverside yet his mistake may be connected to the last home of W. B. Yeats. Indeed this production of Happy Days was directed by Beckett at the Royal Court, in what would be the last time his drama would return to Sloane Square until 2006 with Harold Pinter’s performance in Krapp’s Last Tape. 7 To date Riverside Studios has not been the subject of a published history, although the work of Dario Fo and Tadeusz Kantor at the Studios has been discussed in Kantor Was Here: Tadeusz Kantor in Great Britain and Dario Fo and Franca Rame’s Theatre Workshops at Riverside Studios, London. 8 Riverside Studios is located five miles from where Waiting for Godot was first performed at the Arts Theatre and three and a half miles from Beckett’s consistent London home at the Royal Court. 9 As well as Cluchey’s persistence, news of the BBC’s withdrawal from a proposed remake of Eh Joe, set to feature Whitelaw and Cluchey, led to Beckett offering his support to San Quentin’s endeavours. Their tour was scheduled to start at the Peacock Theatre in Dublin, which would have appeared as the most practical place to rehearse, though Beckett’s refusal to return to Dublin meant a viable alternative space had to be found. San Quentin also toured to the Oxford Playhouse, the Young Vic and the Arts Theatre as part of their 1980 UK and Ireland tour. 10 David Gothard kindly gave me materials concerning Beckett’s time at Riverside from his personal archive. These materials as well as his enthusiasm and energy have contributed to the detail of this chapter and his support is greatly appreciated. 11 Binchy began her article by asserting: ‘Beckett looks 54 not 74; he looks like a Frenchman, not an Irishman, and he certainly looks more like a man about to go off and do a day’s hard manual work rather than direct one of his own plays for a cast which looks him as a messiah come to rehearsal’ (Binchy 1980). 12 Email to Matthew McFrederick, 9 September 2014. 13 Cluchey recalled one evening after rehearsals that Beckett also met Harold Pinter at Riverside and that Pinter had arranged for them to leave for

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dinner in a limousine (email from Rick Cluchey to Matthew McFrederick, 24 April 2015). 14 Email to Matthew McFrederick, 30 September 2014. 15 These photographs were exhibited as part of ‘#7 Rehearsing/Samuel Beckett’, Chelsea Space, 16 John Islip Street, London, 25 March–29 April 2006. 16 Harris’s photograph is the cover image of the present book. 17 With Endgame for instance these rehearsals could draw on the practical experience he had of observing past productions at the Royal Court (1957, 1958 and 1976), Studio des Champs-Elysées (1964), the Royal Shakespeare Company (1964) and when he directed Endspiel at the Schiller Theater Werkstatt in 1967. 18 For further details see Gontarski 1993: 144. 19 Email to Matthew McFrederick, 30 September 2014. 20 Beckett outlined his concern to Cluchey in a letter on 9 May 1984, stating: ‘I regret – to put it mildly – that our understanding has not been observed. I.e. that the general description B. directs B. (as proclaimed on front of big program) should not include Godot but be modified in this case to some more accurate formula such as “Directed by W.A. in consultation with the author”. Walter does not get the great credit he deserves for this production’ (1984b). 21 Interview with Matthew McFrederick, 4 February 2014. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Conversation with Matthew McFrederick, February 2014. 25 Chaikin went on to direct Waiting for Godot at the Taper Too Theatre, Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles (1990) and at Atlanta Seven Stages (1992) and a new production of Texts for Nothing with Bill Irwin at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, New York (1992). 26 See Beckett 1980. 27 I’ll Go On played at Riverside Studios from 22 July to 10 August 1986.

Chapter 4 1 Queen Victoria ordained in 1893 that the Borough of Leeds should enjoy city status. The London Gazette, no. 26374, 21 February 1893: 944.

214 Notes 2 The building was loaned rent-free to the Leeds Theatre Trust initially for a period of ten years. The arrangement was extended further following a public petition in 1978, upon perceived risk of closure and cessation of activities. 3 The playhouse auditorium remained on campus and it was split into two lecture theatres with a dividing wall being built just behind the line of the original front stage. A large lecture theatre maintains the seating rake of the original auditorium, and a second substantial but smaller lecture theatre occupies what was the stage and backstage area. The sports hall behind these continues in that function, and was expanded and augmented with a swimming pool in 2009. 4 The theatre’s café would later adopt the name ‘Wild Oats’, in punning memory of that first production. 5 The West Yorkshire Playhouse building footprint sits squarely upon the location of the inner courtyard of the Quarry Hill project. 6 Since Happy Days, Not I and Krapp’s Last Tape in 1993, there has been only one other production of a Beckett play by the West Yorkshire Playhouse, that of the Talawa Theatre’s production of Waiting for Godot, directed by Ian Brown in 2012. 7 Samuel Beckett had died in December 1989, shortly before the opening of the West Yorkshire Playhouse. It is possible that he had been made aware of intentions to perform one of his plays there. 8 Robert Bowerman to Mark Taylor-Batty, telephone conversation, 9 September 2014. 9 This anecdote comes from personal memory, as I was one of the students who met with Scales that night in 1993. 10 Scales adopted some of what she learned about Beckett’s life to structure her character’s backstory. Beckett’s own father was a quantity surveyor. 11 In the early 1990s, this might have been meant to indicate a middle-class existence of limited financial means. 12 Pamela Howard to Mark Taylor-Batty. Email of 5 June 2014. 13 The Archives of the West Yorkshire Playhouse are stored at the Brotherton Library, Special Collections, University of Leeds. 14 Robert Bowerman to Mark Taylor-Batty, telephone conversation, 9 September 2014.

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Chapter 5 1 Examples of Beckett productions in established South Bank theatres include: Happy Days, National Theatre, 1975; Waiting for Godot, Old Vic, 1982; Rockaby, National Theatre, 1982; Waiting for Godot, National Theatre, 1987; Waiting for Godot, Old Vic, 1997; Happy Days, Young Vic, 2014. 2 The immediate precedent was the pairing of Robin Williams and Steve Martin whose Waiting for Godot at the Lincoln Center in New York, full of improvisatory mayhem, had produced a mixed response but big box office.

Chapter 6 1 Beckett himself resisted the label ‘absurdist’, and preferred not to have his work paired with that of English absurdist N. F. Simpson, explaining that ‘I simply prefer right and wrong to be unrelieved’ (Beckett 2014: Letter to Donald McWhinnie, 23 December 1957, 79). 2 Some actors have flourished under Beckett’s methods. Billie Whitelaw records how the playwright’s precise and meticulous positioning of her body in Footfalls released a ‘surge of energy’ when she achieved the right shape; see Whitelaw 1995: 144–7. 3 See Bradby 2001: 180–200, for a detailed comparison of this production with Walter Asmus’s more faithful Gate Theatre 1999 production. 4 For further details on the proposed and imposed cuts, and the negotiations surrounding them, see Nicholson 2011: 46–50, and Beckett 2011: 479–90. 5 Hall’s claim in his autobiography that Hobson’s sympathetic appreciation was gained thanks to his sending the critic a copy of Watt, on agent Peggy Ramsay’s advice, is unconvincing, given Hobson’s longstanding admiration for avant-garde dramatists such as Ionesco and Adamov, and the fact that he first mentions Watt in a second review a week later, in which he judges the play’s linguistic architecture to be of ‘a higher and subtler kind’ than the novel’s (Hall 1993: 105, and Hobson 1955e, 14 August).

216 Notes 6 For detailed analysis of Snow’s set and his original designs, see Worth 2001: 26–9. 7 See e.g. G. S. Fraser (1956a, 1956b), 10 February and 13 April, and Tompkins (1956).

Chapter 7 1 More recent productions of the play have celebrated their success in circumventing this perceived constraint. For example, Hull Truck Theatre’s production in 2012 (as part of a double bill presented with Lee Hall’s Spoonface Steinberg) used the following in its Education Pack released to the media: ‘The production marks the first time plays by Lee Hall (Billy Elliott) and Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot) will have been performed together as a double bill. Previously, the Beckett Estate has only allowed the work of Harold Pinter to be performed in this way’ (Hull Truck Theatre 2012). 2 Cluchey’s performance was with the San Quentin Drama Workshop and was eventually performed in the UK during 1980, where Beckett directed some rehearsals of the piece (along with Endgame) at the Riverside Studios in London. It was performed at the Young Vic and the Arts Theatre during July and August of that year prior to a transfer to Dublin. 3 Most notably, John Hurt performed the role in 2001 for the ‘Beckett on Film’ project directed by Atom Egoyan. He reprised the role for the theatre in 2011 (using the audio tapes from the 2001 production). Harold Pinter was cast in the role for a Royal Court production directed by Ian Rickson in 2006 in order to mark the theatre’s fiftieth anniversary. The production was reproduced as a film for DVD release in 2007 and broadcast on BBC4 in 2009. 4 John Elsom, in the same article – an account of his meeting with Max Wall in the 1970s – also draws attention to similarities between Beckett’s and Wall’s fondness for arbitrary language play: ‘“Spoo-oo-ll” And who used that word with langorous derision? Beckett. “Stoo-oo-ll” And who massacred that term with a melancholy affection? Wall’ (Elsom 1983: 264).

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Chapter 8 1 The production ran from 14 to 19 March 1994 with design by Hildegard Bechtler, lighting by Jean Kalman with Simon Mills as assistant, photography by Neil Libbert, and was stage-managed by Chantal Hauser. There were two performances each night, at 19:30 and 21:30, with an additional 23:30 performance on 19 March. 2 See Gontarski 1999. 3 Running from 22 October to 13 November 1997 the programme was co-produced with Archa Theatre, Arte Carnumtum, the Belfast Festival and Hahn Produktion Reithalle Munich, and toured to Belfast, Munich, Barcelona, Budapest and Prague. 4 In both parts of Beckett Shorts lighting was by Paule Constable, sound by Tim Foster, design by Vicki Mortimer, voice work by Andrew Wade, costume by Lynette Mauro. Jondon was stage manager, with Amelia Ferrand-Rook as deputy. Flip Tannor managed the production. 5 Dwan in conversation with Tubridy 2013. 6 The Royal Court production ran from 9 to 18 January and was designed by Alex Eales, with lighting by James Farncombe, and sound by David McSeveney. Matthew McFrederick was assistant director, and Cath Binks was stage manager. The show transferred to the West End, playing at the Duchess Theatre from 3 to 15 February as a Royal Court and Mighty Mouth production in association with Cusack Projects Ltd. Nica Burns, chief executive of Nimax Theatres that owns the Duchess Theatre, ensured that ticket prices at the Duchess remained the same as those at the Royal Court. 7 Abrahami’s double bill was made possible by a James Menzies-Kitchen award. The production ran from 15 July to 7 August. It featured Amanda Drew as Play’s W1, Anna Hewson as W2 and John Hopkins as M. Lighting was by Katharine Williams, with décor by Colin Richmond. 8 Dwan in conversation with Tubridy 2015. 9 Dwan in conversation with Tubridy 2013. 10 From London, Asmus’s and Dwan’s Beckett Trilogy toured extensively to places including Belfast, Birmingham, Manchester, Galway, Hong Kong, New York, Paris and Perth, receiving very strong reviews.

218 Notes

Chapter 10 1 Besides Beckett, the productions marking the anniversary season included Told by an Idiot and the Lyric Hammersmith co-production of a brand new stage version of Sarah Waters’ novel Tipping the Velvet, C. S. Lewis’s classic The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe directed by Andrew Panton, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible directed by associate artist John Dove in his fifth Miller production for the Lyceum company, a joint production by the Lyceum and the National Theatre of Scotland of a new stage comedy I am Thomas based on Thomas Aitkenhead, the seventeenth-century Edinburgh student who became the last person in Britain to be executed for blasphemy, a new adaptation of The Iliad by Chris Hannan and directed by Mark Thomson, and a brand new comedy by Scots makar Liz Lochhead Thon Man Moliere (or whit got him intae aw that bother...) based on the life story of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (known as Molière) and directed by Tony Cownie. 2 Philip Hope-Wallace calls Peter Hall’s 1955 production of Godot at the Arts Theatre Club in London ‘a play to send the rationalist out of his mind and induce tooth-gnashing among people who would take Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen and Lear’s nonsense exchanges with the fool as the easiest stuff in the world’ (this statement by Hope-Wallace is attributed to two articles, ‘Waiting for Godot Review’ on Tuesday 17 May 1955 in The Guardian, n.p., and ‘Two Evenings with Two Tramps “Waiting for Godot”’ in Manchester Guardian on 5 August 1955, n.p.); similarly Bernard Levin described the same 1955 production as ‘a remarkable piece of twaddle’ (quoted in Coughlan 2013); Anna McMullan stated in an interview for The Telegraph on 14 July 2015 that ‘British critics were initially more confused by it than the French […] But then Tynan and a number of other significant critics began to write about the play. It’s difficult to remember now, but nothing like it had been seen before. It began to change the way people thought about theatre’ (quoted in Daisy Bowie-Sell 2013). Allen Wright mentions an unintentional compliment by The Scotsman correspondent (whom he does not name) of the 1956 Godot production at the Athenaeum Club that compares Beckett’s writing to Picasso: ‘If instead of the brush and palette Picasso and his school had been equipped by nature with the pen “Waiting for Godot” is the sort

Notes

3 4

5

6

7

219

of thing that might have been expected from them’ (quoted in Wright 1971a). While it was originally meant in a derogatory fashion, this commentary rings true of Beckett’s work all these decades later and for rather different reasons. Wright refers here to the 1956 production of Godot at Athenaeum Theatre Club. Theatre Workshop Edinburgh was founded in 1965. In the last eleven years under the artistic direction of Robert Rae, it has established itself as Scotland’s premier small-scale professional producing theatre. In 2000, Theatre Workshop became the first professional producing theatre in Europe to include professional disabled actors in all main house productions. For more information see www.theatre-workshop.com. Sculptor/mechanic Eduard Bersudsky and theatre director Tatyana Jakovskaya in St Petersburg formed Sharmanka Kinetic Theatre in 1988. Sergey Jakovsky joined the team in his early teens and is now sound and lighting designer. Sharmanka has been performing its mechanical ballet in Glasgow since 1995 in addition to regular international touring commitments and major one-off commissions such as The Millennium Clock at the Royal Museum in Edinburgh. Eduard Bersudsky was the recipient of a Creative Scotland Award in 2005. For more information see www.sharmanka.com. Edinburgh: 19:30, 1st–3rd, 6th and 7th (signed performance 7th), Theatre Workshop; Cumbernauld: 19:45, 8th, Cumbernauld Theatre; Peebles: 19:30, 10th, Eastgate Theatre; Dunkeld: 20:00, 15th, Birnam Arts Centre; Castle Douglas: 19:30., 17th, Lochside Theatre; Glasgow: 19:30, 21st–23rd (signed performance 22nd), The Arches. Dundee: 19:45, 2nd, Dundee Rep; Banchory: 19:30, 9th, Woodend Barn; Stornoway: 20:00, 13th, An Lanntair Arts Centre; Inverness: 19:30, 15th and 16th, Eden Court Theatre; St Andrews: 20:00, 19th, The Byre Theatre; East Kilbride: 19:30, 21st, East Kilbride Arts Centre; Glasgow: 19:30, 23rd, Gilmorehill.

Chapter 11 1 See for instance Fletcher et al. 1978: 190.

220 Notes 2 Tynan also described the French production of Endgame that visited the Royal Court as ‘portentously stylized [that] piled on the agony until I thought my skull would split’. See Tynan 1957. 3 What so angered Bray was the sentence ‘Pinter did not write for Oh! Calcutta!, but Samuel Beckett provided a sketch’ (Nathan 1990: 35). 4 The pair also met again in July 1969, a month after Oh! Calcutta! opened in New York (Baker 2013: 32). Pinter also met with Beckett again a month after the opening of the London production (ibid.: 37). 5 In the end Polanski did not make these films for Oh! Calcutta! 6 Although the year is not given, the reference to Pinter being in New York makes 1967 the likely year, as this period coincides with the time Pinter stayed from January to May (Baker 2013: 24–5). 7 In Damned to Fame, Knowlson mistakenly gives the surname as Barrett (1996: 566). 8 There is also archival evidence to suggest that Beckett was threatening to withdraw permission for the proposed London opening earlier than the date of this letter. 9 Early in the conception of Oh! Calcutta! Tynan wrote to McCarthy, inviting her to submit a sketch. He also outlines his plan to make the sketches anonymous, but ends the letter by saying ‘we shan’t do this unless the authors want it’ (Tynan 1994: 371). 10 The accompanying gramophone record of Oh! Calcutta! is not a verbatim recording of the show, and only features songs by the group The Open Window that were used to accompany certain sketches. Breath is not included. 11 The article also claims insider knowledge by claiming ‘The first faint cry according to Beckett was to be a baby’s wail. The second was a final gasp of a dying man. Then after a few seconds came again the cry of a child.’ 12 Examples include Pattie 2000: 41 and Fletcher et al. 1978: 190. 13 See for instance The Guardian, 2 May 1970 (Anon. 1970c) and ‘Beckett’s New Gambit: A Quick Breath of Futility’, Western Daily Press, 21 August 1970 (Anon. 1970b).

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Chapter 12 1 This Malone meurt exposition continues the same letter that is partially published in Various Voices in which Pinter discusses Godot and ‘necessity’. 2 This correspondence is held at the British Library and comprises some thirty-eight items. See BL Add MS 88880/7/2. 3 Schneider did go on to direct the play in 1967 at the Booth Theatre New York. In that production Edward Winter played McCann. Winter went on to play Pozzo four years later in Schneider’s Godot at the Sheridan Square Playhouse in Greenwich Village. A range of other actors have performed in works by both authors. Interviewed for the opening of Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes at the Ambassadors in London, Stephen Rea, for example, discussed his performing in McWhinnie’s 1976 Endgame at the Royal Court, at which Beckett was present for rehearsals. Rea recalled ‘an evening in which Beckett played Chopin on the piano’ and also Billie Whitelaw asking Beckett where she should look and apparently receiving the reply ‘Inwards’. Rea describes Pinter as ‘a great and individual writer who was authentically and beneficially influenced by Beckett’ (Observer Review, 15 September 1996: 10). 4 For a detailed discussion of the Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable adaptations see Feldman 2014. 5 A speech Pinter later sent on to Beckett, who responded with thanks. 6 Shortly before the first of those, in 1965, Hall had directed The Homecoming’s premiere at the Aldwych and found himself in the unfortunate position of having to defend the play to one Margaret Thatcher MP, then in the role of opposition spokeswoman on Housing and Land, a remit that appears to have not prevented her having a keen eye on the arts. Thatcher had forwarded a constituent’s letter objecting to public funds being used to finance what was the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production. In his reply Hall does a stellar job of defending public funding in contemporary arts (basically a model of crossfertilization both cultural and practical between classic and contemporary works), and goes on to defend Pinter as a great author, already in 1965. See BL Add MS 88880/6/1 fol. 76. 7 Esslin’s daughter, Monica, attended the college. 8 They eventually settled on the simpler, neutral ‘come here’.

222 Notes 9 For a further unpacking of the yellow in Vermeer’s painting and the significance of the colour within broader Modernism please see, for example, Doran 2013. Doran does not discuss Beckett in this connection, however. 10 Similarly in Murphy Beckett deflates Proust’s visual poetics with ‘The lemon of the walls whined like Vermeer’s’ (Beckett 2009c : 141). 11 While the Proust screenplay has never been filmed (by July 1975 costs were estimated at £7.5m, up by £2m from two years prior, and the project was still looking for funding in 1978), it has been broadcast on BBC radio. Reviewing that ‘curious hybrid’ in 1997 Mary Bryden was alert to the multivalent compromises and caveats inherent in the broadcast, pointing to, for example, the ‘strange double effect’ the reading adopted of having ‘Pinter himself […] read aloud the framing of each scene’. Ultimately, ‘Pinter’s film adaptation would be carefully and containedly ravishing, and this radio adaptation merely advertised that loss’ (1997: 186–7). 12 See Knowlson 1996: 442–3 and Rickson 2013.

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Index À la recherche du temps perdu (Proust, Marcel) 201, 203–5 see also Proust screenplay Abrahami, Nathalie xvii, 137 Accident (Losey, Joseph) 201 Act Without Words I (Beckett, Samuel) 110, 161, 172 see also Acte sans paroles Act Without Words II (Beckett, Samuel) 172 Acte sans paroles (Beckett, Samuel) 22 see also Act Without Words actors/acting 81–5, 110, 112–13 cultural significant actors 81–4, 99, 118–19 disabilities and 171 Krapp’s Last Tape and 113, 115–18, 120–1 West Indian accents and 145–6 adaptations xiv–xv Albery (Noel Coward) Theatre 78 All That Fall (Beckett, Samuel) 180, 199, 200 Allen, Peter 169 An Sgoil Dhubh (A Dark School) (MacIlleathain, Donaidh) 158 Anderson, Lindsay 75 Anger and After (Taylor, John Russell) 6 Anouilh, Jean 16 L’Invitation au Château (Ring Around the Moon) 16 Appleyard, Brian 41 archives xiii–xiv Beckett Archive xii–xiii database xiii, xix–xx Theatre Archive Project 3 theatre collections xii–xiv Arcola Theatre 76

Armand, C. 129 Arnold, Andy 173–4 Ars Poetica (Horace) 127 Arts Council 12, 14 Arts Theatre 77–8 Ashcroft, Peggy 87, 88, 95–6 Ashes to Ashes (Pinter, Harold) 221 n.3 Asmus, Walter 139 Dwan, Lisa and 139 Footfalls and xvii, 36, 129, 135–6, 139 Not I and xvii, 135–6, 139 Rockaby and xvii, 36, 135–6, 139 Waiting for Godot and 44, 47–8, 139 Assmann, Jan 6 Atwell, Winifred 94 Aubrey, James 168 audiences 85–6 Barber, John 188 Barbican, the 76, 100 Barnes, Clive 102 Barrault, Jean-Louis 78 Basement Tapes, The 173 Bassett, John 184–5, 187–9, 190–1 Bateson, Timothy 91, 94 Bausch, Pina 130 Baxter, David 162 Beaumont, Binkie 5 Beckett, Edward 126, 127, 138 Beckett, Samuel xv, 17 Bray, Barbara and 201, 202–3 Cézanne, Paul and 92 Devine, George and 26–7, 29–35, 37 legacy 104 McCarthy, Ethna and 207

244 Index openness at rehearsals and 41–4 paintings of 43–4 photographs of 43, 44 Pinter, Harold and 198–9, 201, 205 Proust screenplay and 202–3, 205 rehearsals 44–50, 53–5, 88–9 Riverside Studios and 44–50, 53–5 theatre career 37–8 Vermeer, Johannes and 204–5 Beckett Archive xii–xiii Beckett Estate xv, 80, 100, 109, 125, 126–7, 134 ‘Beckett on Film’ 198 Catastrophe and 198 Happy Days and xvii Krapp’s Last Tape and 216 n.3 Beckett Shorts (Mitchell, Katie) 129–35 ‘Beckett / 3’ 36 Beckett Time 174 Behan, Brendan 19 Bersudsky, Eduard 171–2 Billington, Michael Footfalls and 126, 127 Krapp’s Last Tape and 206 Pinter, Harold and 200 Waiting for Godot and 74, 78–9, 82 Binchy, Maeve 41–2 Birthday Party, The (Pinter, Harold) 198, 199, 221 n.3 black theatre see Talawa Theatre Company Blin, Roger 22–3, 36, 198–9 Bond, Edward 104 Sea, The 74 Bowerman, Robert 60, 63, 69 Boxall, Peter 208 Boyd, Cathie 174 Boyd, Michael 171 Bratton, Jacky: Making of the West End Stage, The 73–4

Bray, Barbara 179–80, 201 Pinter, Harold and 201 Proust screenplay and 201, 202–3, 205, 222 n.11 Breath (Beckett, Samuel) 177–92 Brecht, Bertolt: Mother Courage 19 Brennan, Clare 145 Brewster, Yvonne 142, 151 Brimson Lewis, Stephen 78–9 Britishness 143–54 Brooke, Paul 168 Brooks, Dorien 17 Brown, Ian 141, 149, 151, 153 Brown, Mark 172 Brown, Warren 183 Bruce, Brenda 28–9 Bryden, Mary 222 n.11 International Reception of Samuel Beckett, The 20 Buffong, Michael 142, 152 Bull, Peter 8–11, 19, 91, 92, 94, 103 Burden, Hugh 92 Burgess, Guy 148 Burman, Lionel 18 Burn, Tam Dean 170 Bury, John 96 Butler, Robert 131–2, 134 Butterworth, Jez: Jerusalem 76–7 Cairney, John 161–2 Calder, John 162, 163 Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography, The (Postlewait, Thomas) 40–1 Campbell, J.: ‘Staging Embers: An Act of Killing’ 134 Caretaker, The (Pinter, Harold) 74, 197–9 Carnegie, John 164 Caron, Leslie 87 Carr, Walter 167, 168 Cascando (Beckett, Samuel) 36 Castle, John 171

Index Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Williams, Tennessee) 19 Catastrophe (Beckett, Samuel) 53, 198 Cavendish, Dominic 137, 144, 147, 148, 154 censorship 24–7 Cézanne, Paul 92 Chabert, Pierre 67, 114, 116–17 Chaikin, Joe: Texts 51–2 characters, history of 197–8 Charles, Katie 125 choreography 130–3, 135, 139, 140 Christiansen, Rupert 132 Churchill, Caryl 104 Citizen’s Theatre 166–7 Clapp, Susannah 75, 83 Cluchey, Rick 39–40, 49, 110, 115, 170 Cochrane, Claire 76 Collins, David 168 Come and Go (Beckett, Samuel) 36 Compagnie Renaud-Barrault 36 Cooke, Nigel 130, 134 Cooper, Gordon 161 Cooper, Neil 173–4 Coveney, Michael 81, 83, 84 Cox, Brian 157–8, 159 Crimp, Martin 104 cultural memory 6–8, 20 Cumper, Patricia 141, 142, 147–8, 151–2 DaDa Fest 171 Dallmeyer, Andrew 59, 173 Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (Knowlson, James) 180 dance 139 Daneman, Paul 91, 92, 93 D’Arcy, Jake 169 database xiii, xix Davies, Gareth 172–3 Davies, Siobhan 130, 131, 132 Davis, Tracy C.: Economics of the

245

British Stage, 1800–1914, The 75 Deep Blue Sea, The (Rattigan, Terence) 95 dehumanization 32 Dench, Judi 58 Denford, Cathy 60, 69 Dennison, Brendan 170–1 Devine, George 21–2, 29, 33, 34, 35, 101–2 Endgame and 25–7 Fin de partie and 22 Happy Days and 28–9, 101 Play and 30–1, 32–3 West End, and the 75 dialogue, anti-literary nature of 32–3 ‘Dialogue on the work of Samuel Beckett’ (Prince, Eric) 71 Dobie, Alan xvi, 89, 98, 100–1 Dormer, Richard 100–1 Dorney, Kate 3–4 Douglas, David: ‘Sniping at the Festival’ 160–1 Dream of Fair to Middling Women (Beckett, Samuel) 195, 207 Dreamer in the Kremlin, The (Bersudsky/Jakovskaya) 171 Duchess Theatre 78 Duggan, Patrick 147, 148, 149–50, 151 Dunbar, Karen 173–4 D’Urban, Clive 165 Dwarfs, The (Pinter, Harold) 195, 205 Dwan, Lisa xvii, 36, 14, 135–9 Economics of the British Stage, 1800–1914, The (David, Tracy C.) 75 Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, The (Brown et al.) 158 Edinburgh International Festival 160–2 Edmondson, Ade 81–2, 84

246 Index Eh Joe (Beckett, Samuel) 77 Ellis, Vicky 150 Embers (Beckett, Samuel) 130, 134–5, 199 Enchanted, The (Giraudoux, Jean) 90–1 Encore (Beckett, Samuel) 16 Endgame (Beckett, Samuel) 34, 35, 85, 110, 207 see also Fin de partie Bersudsky, Eduard and 172 Billington, Michael and 200 Boyd, Michael and 171 Castle, John and 171 censorship and 24–7 Cluchey, Rick and 170 Cooper, Gordon and 161 costumes 171 Dennison, Brendan and 170–1 Devine, George and 25–7 Galie, Christine and 161 Gambon, Michael and 83 Garcia, Terry and 170–1 Hall, Peter and 34 Hart, Janis and 171 Held, Lawrence and 170–1 Howell, Rob and 79 Knaifel, Alexander and 172 lighting 171 MacGowran, Jack and 27, 34, 35 MacLennan, Dolina and 171, 172 Magee, Patrick and 34, 35 Mandell, Alan and 45, 46 Masson, Forbes and 171 McBurney, Simon and 77 McCall, Phill and 171 McConnell, Ronnie and 171, 172 Mitchell, Katie and 130, 134 music 172 publication of 23, 27 Rae, Robert and 171–2 Rea, Stephen and 221 n.3 reviews 83, 130, 161, 171–2, 178–9

Riverside Studio rehearsals and 44–6 Robson, Garry and 171, 172 Royal Court Theatre and 24–7, 36, 178–9 Rylance, Mark and 77, 83 San Quentin Drama Workshop and 40, 44–6, 170–1 set design 79, 171, 172 Shaban, Nabil and 171, 172 Sharmanka Theatre and 171–2 Short, Raymond and 171, 172 sound 171, 172 Stewart, Richard and 170 Thorpe, Bud and 45 Thurgeson, Don and 161 Tynan, Kenneth and 178–9 Warchus, Matthew and 79 Whitelaw, Billie 221 n.3 Wilson, Jan and 171 Worcester Players and 161 Yakovsky, Sergey and 171 Engel, Susan 125 English Stage Company 21–2 Enough (Beckett, Samuel) 51, 52, 123 Enthoven theatre collection xiii Erll, Astrid 7–8 Memory in Culture 6 Esslin, Martin 21–2, 200–1 Faber and Faber 23, 27 Footfalls 128 Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot, The 89 Featherstone, Vicky 138 Fenton, Leonard 162 Fin de partie (Endgame) (Beckett, Samuel) 22–4 see also Endgame Finney, Albert 36, 58 Fisher, Gillian 146 Floy, Gregory 168 Footfalls (Beckett, Samuel)

Index Asmuss, Walter and xvii, 36, 129, 135–6, 139 Dwan, Lisa and xvii, 36, 135, 136, 138–9 Engel, Susan and 125 Gillett, Debra and 130 Gontarski, S. E. and 128 Labeille, Daniel and 136 lighting xvii, 80, 135–6 Mitchell, Katie and 130, 133 publication of 128 reviews 125, 126, 127, 136, 139 Riverside Studios and 51, 52 Royal Court Theatre and 36 set design 80 Shaw, Fiona and 80, 100, 124–9 Stevenson, Juliet and 130, 133 Warner, Deborah and 80, 100, 124–9 Whitelaw, Billie and 36, 51, 52, 215 n.2 Worth, K. and 128 Frampton, Ian 161 Francis, Benjy 144 Fry, Christopher 16 Fuchs, Elinor 112 Gaelic 158 Gaillie, Kay 173 Galie, Christine 161 Gambon, Michael xvi, 77, 83, 85, 114–15 Garcia, Terry 170–1 Gardner, Lyn 114 Garrick Theatre 128 Gascoigne, Bamber 31 Gaskill, William 34, 36 Gate Theatre 52–3 Geliot, Michael 162 Gence, Denise 67 Ghost Trio (Beckett, Samuel) 110 Gielgud, John 84–5 Gigi (Loos, Anita) 87 Gill, Peter 39

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Gillet, Debra 130, 133 Giraudoux, Jean: Enchanted, The 90–1 Glover, Julian xvi, 98 Go-Between, The (Losey, Joseph) 201 Godot Company 172–3 Goetz, Ruth and Augustine: Heiress, The 95 Goldstein, Mick 195–6 Gontarski, S. E. 128 Goodman, John 33 Gothard, David 38, 53 Greater London Council (GLC) 54 Greenwich Theatre 76 Gunter, John 97 Gwilym, Mike 168 Hack, Keith 166–7, 168–9 Hagen, Ute 63 Hall, Lucy 99 Hall, Peter 33–6, 87–90, 101–4 Enchanted, The and 90–1 Endgame and 34 Gigi and 87 Happy Days and xvii, 87, 88, 94–6, 99 Lesson, The and 90 musicality and 89–90, 97 No Man’s Land and 200 Pinter, Harold and 87, 200 Waiting for Godot and xvi, 3, 11, 33–4, 87, 88, 89–91, 93, 97–9, 100–1, 218 n.2 Hanson, Barry 166–9 Happy Days (Beckett, Samuel) xvii, 37 Abraham, Nathalie and xvii Arnold, Andy and 173–4 Ashcroft, Peggy and 87, 88, 95–6 ‘Beckett on Film’ version xvii Bowerman, Robert and 63, 69 Bruce, Brenda and 28–9 Bury, John and 96 Chabert, Pierre and 67

248 Index Devine, George and 28–9, 101 Dunbar, Karen and 173–4 Gence, Denise and 67 Hall, Lucy and 99 Hall, Peter and xvii, 87, 88, 94–6, 99 Herbert, Jocelyn and 28, 29 Hobbs, Carys 174 Howard, Pamela and 57, 66–8 Hunt, Albert and 71 Kelly, Jude and 57, 62, 64–6 Kendal, Felicity and xvii, 87, 99–100 Kokkas, Yannis and 67 Linehan, Rosaleen and xvii Meurville, Sylvie de and 67 Mortimer, Vicki and xvii National Theatre and 78, 102–3 Neville, John and 96 Pinter, Harold and 198 Prince, Eric and 71 programme notes for 71, 72, 94–5 regional audiences and 61 rehearsals and 88 Reisz, Karel and xvii reviews 66, 96, 99–100, 102, 174 Royal Court Theatre and 28 Scales, Prunella and 57, 61–6, 68 set design xvii, 28, 29, 66–8, 96, 99–100, 174 Stevenson, Juliet and xvii Webb, Alan and 96 West Yorkshire Playhouse and 57, 59, 60, 61–6, 70–1 Whitelaw, Billie and 36, 37, 63 Young Vic and 78 Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival 138 ‘Happy Days’ Samuel Beckett Festivals xv Harrigan, Michael 165 Harris, Chris 43, 44 Hart, Janis 171 Hayes, Tony 168

Haygarth, Tony 167, 168 Haymarket Theatre 74–5, 78–9 Haynes, Jim 162–3 Heiress, The (Ruth and Augustus Goetz) 95 Held, Lawrence 48–9, 170–1 Herbert, Jocelyn 21, 35, 38, 53 Herren, Graley 110 Hickling, Alfred 149 Hicks, Greg 103 Hobbs, Carys 174 Hobson, Harold 6, 15–16, 90–1, 93–4, 102, 104 Homecoming, The (Pinter, Harold) 201, 221 n.3 Hopkins, Bill 160 Horace: Ars Poetica 127 Hothouse, The (Pinter, Harold) 194–5, 205 Howard, Alan xvi, 97, 98, 103 Howard, Pamela 57, 66–8 Howarth, Michael 173 Howell, Rob 79 Hunt, Albert 71 Hunt, Robyn 174 Hurt, John xvi, 77, 85, 115, 216 n.3 inanimate objects 112–14 International Reception of Samuel Beckett, The (Bryden, Mary) 20 Introduction to Dutch Art (Wilenski, Reginald) 204–5 Ionesco, Eugène 4, 5 Lesson, The 16, 19, 90 Irwin, Bill 33 Jackson, Anthony 173 Jakovskaya, Tatyana 171 Jarman, Derek 79 Jellicoe, Ann 3–5 Sport of My Mad Mother, The 104 Jerusalem (Butterworth, Jez) 76–7 Johnson, David 143, 145–6

Index Jung, Carl Gustav 129 Kane, Sarah 104 Kelly, Jude 57, 58, 60–1, 62, 64–6 Kelly, Tricia 60, 69–71 Kemp, Roger 169 Kendal, Felicity xvii, 87, 99–100 Kent, Stephen: Texts 51–2 Kerr, J. 162 Kind of Alaska, A (Pinter, Harold) 198 King Lear (Shakespeare, William) 103 Kingsley, Ben xvi, 97, 98 Kissoon, Jeffery 146, 147 Knaifel, Alexander 172 Knowlson, James 69, 179, 182, 187, 191 Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett 180 Pinter, Harold and 199 Kokkas, Yannis 67 Krapp’s Last Tape (Beckett, Samuel) xii, xvi, 107–13, 120–1 actors/acting and 113, 115–18, 120–1 Arnold, Andy and 173 Bowerman, Robert and 60, 69 Chabert, Pierre and 114, 116–17 Cluchey, Rick and 40, 115 comic effect and 69 Dallmeyer, Andrew and 173 Denford, Cathy and 60, 69 dialogue and 117–18 emotion and 115–16 fringe theatre and 118 Gambon, Michael and xvi, 114–15 Hurt, John and xvi, 77, 115, 216 n.3 Lakeside Arts Centre package and 120 Magee, Patrick and xvi, 27, 101, 111, 115, 119

249 McWhinnie, Donald and 101, 199 musicality and 116–18 New Ambassadors Theatre and 79 Page, Anthony and 36 Pinter, Harold and xvi, 114, 120, 198, 206–7, 216 n.3 reviews 109, 114, 115, 118, 119–20, 178–9, 206 Rickson, Ian and 206–7 Riverside Studios and 53 Royal Court Theatre and 27–8, 36, 179 San Quentin Drama Workshop and 40 set design 79 Sheffield Playhouse and 109 tapes/tape recorder and 111–17, 121 Tynan, Kenneth and 178–9 Wall, Max and xvi, 51, 53, 119 Warner, John and 118 Warrilow, David and xvi, 53, 119–20 West End, and the 77 West Yorkshire Playhouse and 57, 60, 69, 71

Labeille, Daniel 136 Lahr, Bert 167, 177 Lakeside Arts Centre 120 Lambert, Peter 4–5 Landscape (Pinter, Harold) 94, 198 Lane, Nathan 33 Laocoön (Lessing, G. E.) 127–8 Laurenson, James 89–90, 100–1 Laws, Catherine 128 Leeds 57–9 Leeds Playhouse 57–8, 59, 60, 72 Lefton, Sue 170 Lessing, G. E.: Laocoön 127–8 Lessness (Beckett, Samuel) 198 Lesson, The (Ionesco, Eugène) 16, 19, 90 Leveaux, David 53–4

250 Index Levin, Brian 160 Levy, Jacques 182, 189 Libera, Antoni xvi, 53 lighting xvii, 80, 135–6, 140, 171 Lindon, Jérôme 126 Linehan, Rosaleen xvii L’Innommable (The Unnamable) (Beckett, Samuel) 195, 196, 199 L’Invitation au Château (Ring Around the Moon) (Anouilh, Jean) 16 Littler, Emile 102 Littlewood, Joan 19, 75 Lonsdale, Michaël 210 n.9 Look Back in Anger (Osborne, John) 5, 19, 103, 175, 178 Lord Chamberlain’s office 23–6 Losey, Joseph 201 Accident 201 Go-Between, The 201 Proust screenplay and 201, 222 n.11 Servant, The (1963) 201 Lyttleton Theatre 131 Macaulay, Alastair 89–90 McBurney, Simon 77 McCall, Ewan 163 McCall, Phill 171 McCarthy, Ethna 207 McCarthy, Mary 181, 220 n.9 Macauley, Alistair 97 McConnell, Ronnie 171, 172 McDougall, Gordon 163–6 McGovern, Barry 52 MacGowran, Jack 27, 33, 34, 35, 84 MacIlleathain, Donaidh: An Sgoil Dhubh (A Dark School) 158 McKellen, Ian 74, 82–3, 84 McKevitt, Michael 168 MacLennan, Dolina 171, 172 MacLeod, Michelle 158–9 MC93 Maison de la culture de la

Seine-Saint-Denis at Bobigny 126–7 McMillan, David 169 McMillan, Joyce 164, 171–2 McTighe, Trish: Staging Beckett in Ireland and Northern Ireland xix McWhinnie, Donald xvi, 36, 101, 199 Magee, Patrick 84 Krapp’s Last Tape and xvi, 27, 101, 111, 115, 119 Making of the West End Stage, The (Bratton, Jacky) 73–4 Malone meurt (Malone Dies) (Beckett, Samuel) 196, 199 Mandell, Alan 42, 45, 46 Manikum, Philip 165 Manning, Mary 27 Marowitz, Charles 160 Marshall, E, G. 167 Martin, Jean 94, 199 Martin, Steve 215 n.2 Masson, Forbes 171 Mathias, Sean 74 Matias 48 Mayall, Rik 81–2, 84 Memory in Culture (Erll, Astrid) 6 Mercier, Vivian 152 Meurville, Sylvie de 67 Meyer, Tony 168 Miller, J. Pat 50 Minihan, John 43 Samuel Beckett: Centenary Shadows 43 Samuel Beckett: Photographs 43 Mitchell, Katie 129–35 Molière 166 Molloy (Beckett, Samuel) 199 More Pricks Than Kicks (Beckett, Samuel) 205 Morley, Robert 9, 11, 103 Mortimer, Penelope 182 Mortimer, Vicki xvii Mosher, Gregory 41

Index Mother Courage (Brecht, Bertolt) 19 Murphy (Beckett, Samuel) 194–5, 207 music 127–8, 139 Endgame and 172 Krapp’s Last Tape and 116–18 Waiting for Godot and 91, 94, 97 music-hall 17 myth of Beckett 5 Nadeau, Yvan 169 national boundaries xxvii National Theatre 30, 76, 78, 102–3 Never Enough Silence (Hunt, Robyn) 174 Neville, John 96 New Ambassadors Theatre 79 Night School (Pinter, Harold) 198 Nightingale, Benedict 99 1956 and All That (Rebellato, Dan) 6 No Man’s Land (Pinter, Harold) 200 Not I (Beckett, Samuel) Abrahami, Nathalie and 137 Asmuss, Walter and xvii, 135–6, 139 Beckett, Edward and 138 Denford, Cathy and 60 Dwan, Lisa and xvii, 36, 135, 137–9 Featherstone, Vicky and 138 Kelly, Tricia and 60, 69–71 lighting xvii, 135–6 Mitchell, Katie and 130, 133 Nigel Cooke and 130 Page, Anthony and 33, 36 reviews 133, 138, 139 Royal Court Theatre and 33, 36 Stevenson, Juliet and 130, 133 Tandy, Jessica and 31 West Yorkshire Playhouse and 57, 60, 69–71 Whitelaw, Billie and 32, 33, 133, 137–8 O’Casey, Sean: Plough and the Stars, The 60

251

Oh! Calcutta! (Tynan, Kenneth) 177–92 Levy, Jacques and 182, 189 Pinter, Harold and 181–2 reviews 188 Oh les beaux jours (Beckett, Samuel) 36 see also Happy Days Ohio Impromptu (Beckett, Samuel) 172 O’Keefe, John: Wild Oats 58 Old Vic 76, 99 Olivier, Laurence 84–5, 180 Osborne, John: Look Back in Anger 5, 19, 103, 175, 178 O’Toole, Fintan 136, 139 Page, Anthony 33, 36 painting 127–8 paintings 43–4 Paris 16–17 Paterson, Bill 157, 159 Peter Hall Company 97, 103 Phillips, Tom 43–4 ‘Samuel Beckett’ 43 photographs 43, 44 Piccadilly Theatre 98–9 Pickup, Ronald 84 Piece of Monologue, A (Beckett, Samuel) 130, 134 Pinter, Harold xvi, 104, 193–7, 205, 207–8, 212 n.13 Accident screenplay and 201 All That Fall and 200 Ashes to Ashes 221 n.3 Birthday Party, The 198, 199, 221 n.3 Bray, Barbara and 201 Caretaker, The 74, 197–8 Catastrophe and 198 Dwarfs, The 195, 205 Go-Between, The screenplay and 201 Hall, Peter and 87, 200 Homecoming, The 201, 221 n.3

252 Index Hothouse, The 194–5, 205 Kind of Alaska, A 198 Krapp’s Last Tape and xvi, 114, 120, 206–7, 216 n.3 Landscape 94, 198 Lessness and 198 Malone meurt and 196 McWhinnie, Donald and 199 Murphy and 194–5, 207 Night School 198 No Man’s Land 200 Oh! Calcutta! and 181–2 Proust screenplay and 193, 200, 201–3, 205, 222 n.11 radio and 199–200 Room, The 194, 205 Rough for Radio II and 198 Schneider, Alan and 199 Servant, The screenplay and 201 Silence 94, 201 Slight Ache, A 199 Waiting for Godot and 196 Play (Beckett, Samuel) Abrahami, Nathalie and 137 Devine, George and 30–1, 32–3 Gascoigne, Bamber and 31 Lefton, Sue and 170 National Theatre and 30 reviews 170 Royal Court Theatre 36 Russell, Ann and 170 Salaman, Toby and 170 Stafford-Clark, Max and 170 Tynan, Kenneth and 30–1, 179 Whitelaw, Billie and 30 Plough and the Stars, The (O’Casey, Sean) 60 poetry 127–8 Polanski, Roman 181 politics 13–14 Postlewait, Thomas: Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography, The premediation 7–8

Priestley, J. B. 13, 14 Prince, Eric 71 ‘Dialogue on the work of Samuel Beckett’ 71 Happy Days programme notes 71 Pringle, Stewart 149, 154, 155 production failures xvii production successes xvii Proust, Marcel 203–4 À la recherche du temps perdu 201, 203–5 see also Proust screenplay Proust (Beckett, Samuel) 95 see also Proust screenplay Proust screenplay 193, 200, 201–4, 205, 222 n.11 Quarry Hill, Leeds 57–9 Queen’s Theatre 78 Quilley, Denis 103 race see Talawa Theatre Company Race Equality Unit 142 Rae, Robert 171–2 Ramage, Gerald 168 Rancière, Jacques 85–6 Randall, Paulette 142 Rattigan, Terence: Deep Blue Sea, The 95 Rea, Stephen 221 n.3 Reading University 200 Rebellato, Dan 160 1956 and All That 6 Redgrave, Michael 84–5 rehearsals 53–4 see also Riverside Studios documenting 40–4 Endgame and 44–6 Happy Days and 88 journalists and 41–2 openness and 41–3 painting 43–4 photographing 43, 44 Waiting for Godot and 46–50

Index Reisz, Karel xvii remediation 7–8 Renaud, Madeleine 36 Rich, Frank 178 Richardson, Ralph 197 Rickson, Ian 206–7, 208 Rigby, Terence 98, 100–1 Rigdon, Kevin 100 Rigg, Diana 58 Riverside Studios 37, 38, 48–9, 76 Catastrophe and 53 Endgame and 44–6 Enough and 51, 52 Footfalls and 51, 52 history of 39 Krapp’s Last Tape and 53 Leveaux, David and 53–4 photographs and 43, 44 rehearsals and 41–50, 53–5 Rockaby and 51, 52 San Quentin Drama Workshop and 40, 42–50 Texts and 51–2 Waiting for Godot and 46–50 Robbe-Gillet, Alain 112 Robinson, Patrick 146, 147 Robson, Garry 171, 172 Rockaby Arnold, Andy and 173 Asmuss, Walter and xvii, 36, 135–6, 139 Dwan, Lisa and xvii, 36, 135, 136–7, 138–9 Gaillie, Kay and 173 Gillett, Debra and 130, 133 Labeille, Daniel and 136 lighting xvii, 135–6 Mitchell, Katie and 130, 133 reviews 139 Riverside Studios and 51, 52 Royal Court Theatre and 36 Whitelaw, Billie and 51, 52 Room, The (Pinter, Harold) 194, 205 Rosset, Barney 23

253

Rough for Radio II (Beckett, Samuel) 198 Rough for Theatre I (Beckett, Samuel) 173 Rough for Theatre II (Beckett, Samuel) 172–3 Roundabout Theatre Company 33 Roundhouse 76, 191 Roxborough, Richard xvi Royal Court Theatre 21–2, 29–36, 37–8, 76, 101–2 ‘Beckett / 3’ and 36 Cascando and 36 Come and Go and 36 Endgame and 36 Fin de partie and 22–3 Footfalls and 36 Happy Days and 27–9, 36 Krapp’s Last Tape and 27–9, 36 Not I and 33, 36 Oh les beaux jours and 36 Play and 36 Rockaby and 36 That Time and 36 Waiting for Godot and 33, 36, 97 Royal Lyceum Theatre 166–8 Royal Shakespeare Company 33–5, 102, 210 n.10 Russell, Ann 170 Rylance, Mark 76–7, 83 Salaman, Toby 170 ‘Samuel Beckett’ (Phillips, Tom) 43 Samuel Beckett: Centenary Shadows (Miniham, John) 43 Samuel Beckett: Photographs (Minihan, John) 43 Samuel Beckett Theatre 123–4 San Quentin Drama Workshop 39–40, 42–3 Endgame and 40, 44–6, 170–1 Waiting for Godot and 46–50 Scales, Prunella 57, 61–6, 68, 71 Schaeffer, Stasi 174

254 Index Schiller Theatre 45, 48, 89, 97 Schneider, Alan 22, 89, 123–4, 136, 199 Scottish theatre 157–60 Act Without Words I and 161 Beckett Time 174 Cairney, John and 161–2 Calder, John and 162, 163 Citizen’s Theatre 166–7 Edinburgh International Festival 160–2 Endgame and 161, 170–2 Geliot, Michael and 162 Hack, Keith and 166–7, 168–9 Hanson, Barry and 166–9 Happy Days and 173–4 Haynes, Jim and 162–3 McCall, Ewan and 163 McDougall, Gordon and 163–6 Never Enough Silence and 174 Play and 170 politics and 166 Royal Lyceum Theatre 166–8 Scottish Theatre Company 170 Sharmanka Theatre 171 short plays and 172–3 The Arches 160 The Lyceum Theatre 157–8, 159 Theatre Workshop Edinburgh 171 Traverse Theatre 163–6, 169, 170 Waiting for Godot and 157–8, 159, 163–71 Wright, Allen and 175 Scottish Theatre Company 170 Sea, The (Bond, Edward) 74 Servant, The (Losey, Joseph) 201 set design see also lighting Brimson Lewis, Stephen 78–9 Bury, John 96 Collins, David 168 Endgame and 79, 171, 172 Footfalls and 80 Gunter, John 97 Hall, Lucy 99

Happy Days and xvii, 28, 29, 66–8, 96, 99–100, 174 Hart, Janis 171 Herbert, Jocelyn 28, 29 Hobbs, Carys 174 Howard, Pamela 57, 66–8 Howell, Rob 79 Krapp’s Last Tape and 79 Mortimer, Vicki xvii Rigdon, Kevin 100 Sharmanka 172 Snow, Peter 91–2 Waiting for Godot and 33, 48, 78–80, 91–2, 97, 100, 144, 168 Shaban, Nabil 171, 172 Shainberg, Lawrence 43 Sharmanka Theatre 171 Shaw, Fiona 80, 100, 128–9 Shaw-Porter, David 170 Sheddon, John 163, 165 Sheffield Playhouse 109 Short, Raymond 171, 172 short plays 123–4, 139–40, 172–3 see also Footfalls; Not I; Play; Rockaby Act Without Words I 110, 161, 172 Act Without Words II 172 Acte sans paroles 22 Breath 177–92 Cascando 36 Catastrophe 53, 198 Come and Go 36 Embers 130, 134–5, 199 Ohio Impromptu 172 Piece of Monologue, A 130, 134 Rough for Radio II 198 Rough for Theatre I 172–3 Rough for Theatre II 172–3 That Time 36, 130, 134 Silence (Pinter, Harold) 94, 201 Sinden, Donald 58 Slight Ache, A (Pinter, Harold) 199 ‘Sniping at the Festival’ (Douglas, David) 160–1

Index Snow, Peter 91–2 Sobrevento, Grupo 172 spectators 85–6 Spencer, Charles 99, 114 Sport of My Mad Mother, The (Jellicoe, Ann) 104 Stafford-Clark, Max 170 Staging Beckett in Ireland and Northern Ireland (McTighe, Trish/Tucker, David) xix ‘Staging Beckett: The Impact of Productions of Samuel Beckett’s Drama on Theatre Practice and Cultures in the United Kingdom and Ireland’ project xiii, xix–xx ‘Staging Embers: An Act of Killing’ (Campbell, J.) 134 state funding 12, 54, 120, 142, 159–60, 164 state intervention 14 Stevenson, Juliet xvii, 130, 133 Stewart, Patrick 74, 82–3, 84 Stewart, Richard 170 Studio 54 33 Talawa Theatre Company 142–6 Waiting for Godot and 141, 144–55 tallawah 143 Tanztheater 131 Taylor, John Russell: Anger and After 6 Taylor, Paul 82, 98, 125, 130 Taylor-Batty, Paul 206 Texts (Chaikin/Kent) 51–2 That Time (Beckett, Samuel) 36, 130, 134 The Arches 160 The Lyceum Theatre 157–8, 159 The Open Window 189 theatre 161–3 see also Scottish theatre Theatre Archive Project 3

255

theatre collections xii–xiv theatre critics 15–16, 52 Théâtre de Babylone and 78, 166 Theatre de Complicite 77 Théâtre de l’Odéon 78 Theatre de Lys 123–4 Theatre Royal Haymarket see Haymarket Theatre theatre studies 103 Theatre Workshop 19 Theatre Workshop Edinburgh 171 theatres 76 see also Riverside Studios; Royal Court Theatre; West End, the; West Yorkshire Playhouse Arcola Theatre 76 Barbican, the 76, 100 Citizen’s Theatre 166–7 commercial sector and 5, 12–14, 74, 76, 77 curtains 79 Edinburgh International Festival 160–2 Garrick Theatre 128 Gate Theatre 52–3 Greenwich Theatre 76 Leeds Playhouse 57–9, 60, 72 London 13, 61 Lyttleton Theatre 131 music-hall 17 National Theatre 30, 76, 78, 102–3 Old Vic 76, 99 Piccadilly Theatre 98–9 post-war 5–16, 18–20 regional 13 Roundhouse 76, 191 Royal Lyceum Theatre 166–8 Samuel Beckett Theatre 123–4 Schiller Theatre 45, 48, 89, 97 Sharmanka Theatre 171 Sheffield Playhouse 109 stagnation and 5–6 Studio 54 33

256 Index The Arches 160 The Lyceum Theatre 157–8, 159 Théâtre de Babylone 78, 166 Theatre de Complicite 77 Théâtre de l’Odéon 78 Theatre de Lys 123–4 transition and 6–7 Traverse Theatre 163–5, 169, 170 vaudeville 17 Young Vic 76, 78 Thomson, Mark 157, 159, 170 Thorpe, Bud 45 Thurgeson, Don 161 Tóibín, Colm 84 translation 23 Traverse Theatre 163–5, 169, 170 Tucker, David: Staging Beckett in Ireland and Northern Ireland xix Tynan, Kenneth 6, 15–16, 91, 104, 178, 192 Endgame and 178–9 Look Back in Anger and 5 Oh! Calcutta! 177–92 Play and 30–1, 179 Waiting for Godot and 178 University of Reading xii Unnamable, The (L’Innommable) (Beckett, Samuel) 195, 196, 199 Upton, Andrew xvi Vale, Allison 101 vaudeville 17 Vermeer, Johannes 204–5 View of Delft 203–4 Victorian and Albert Museum xiii View of Delft (Vermeer, Johannes) 203–4 Waiting for Godot (Beckett, Samuel) xvi, 16, 17, 73, 85, 110, 160, 166

Allen, Peter and 169 Arts Theatre Club and 90–4, 103 Asmus, Walter and 44, 47–8 Atwell, Winifred and 94 Aubrey, James and 168 Barrault, Jean-Louis and 78 Bateson, Timothy and 91, 94 Beckett, Samuel and 11–12, 78 black productions of 144 see also Talawa Theatre Company Blin, Roger and 198 Brimson Lewis, Stephen and 78–9 British theatre and 19 Brooke, Paul and 168 Brooks, Dorien and 17 Brown, Ian and 141, 149, 151, 153 Bull, Peter and 8–11, 19, 91, 92, 94, 103 Burden, Hugh and 92 Burgess, Guy and 148 Burman, Lionel and 18 Burn, Tam Dean and 170 Carr, Walter and 167, 168 Christian symbolism and 93 Citizen’s Theatre and 166–7, 168–9 Cluchey, Rick and 49, 110 Collins, David and 168 Cox, Brian and 157–8, 159 cultural memory and 7–8, 20 Cumper, Patricia and 141, 147–8, 151–2 D’Arcy, Jake and 169 D’Urban, Clive and 165 Dallmeyer, Andrew and 59 Daneman, Paul and 91, 92, 93 Dobie, Alan and xvi, 89, 98, 100–1 Dormer, Richard and 100–1 Duggan Patrick and 147, 148, 149–50, 151 Edmondson, Ade and 81–2, 84 existentialism and 17–18 Floy, Gregory and 168

Index Francis, Benjy and 144 Glover, Julian and xvi, 98 Gunter, John and 97 Gwilym, Mike and 168 Hack, Keith and 166–7, 168–9 Hall, Peter and xvi, 3, 11, 33–4, 87, 88, 89–91, 93, 97–9, 100–1, 218 n.2 Hanson, Barry and 166–9 Harrigan, Michael and 165 Hayes, Tony and 168 Haygarth, Tony and 167, 168 Haymarket Theatre and 74, 75, 78–9 Held, Lawrence and 48–9 Hicks, Greg and 103 homosexuality and 169 Howard, Alan and 97, 98, 103 Ireland, Kenny and 169 Jarman, Derek and 79–80 Jellicoe, Ann and 3–4 Kemp, Roger and 169 Kingsley, Ben and xvi, 97, 98 Kissoon, Jeffery and 146, 147 Lahr, Bert and 167, 177 Laurenson, James and 89–90, 100–1 Leeds Playhouse and 59, 60, 72 Manikum, Philip and 165 Marshall, E. G. and 167 Martin, Jean and 94 Martin, Steve and 215 n.2 Mathias, Sean and 74 Matias and 48 Mayall, Rik and 81–2, 84 McDougall, Gordon and 163–6 McKellen, Ian and 74, 82–3, 84 McKevitt, Michael and 168 McMillan, David and 169 Meyer, Tony and 168 Miller, J. Pat and 50 Morley, Robert and 9, 103 music and 91, 94, 97 Nadeau, Yvan and 169

257 Page, Anthony and 33 Paterson, Bill and 157, 159 Pickup, Ronald and 84 Pinter, Harold and 196 producing 11–12 programme notes for 72, 97 publication of 23 Quilley, Denis and 103 Ramage, Gerald and 168 reception of 3–4, 10–11, 17, 20 reviews xxv, 74, 78–80, 81–4, 89–91, 91, 92–4, 97–8, 101, 144–50, 152–3, 154, 155, 164–6, 168–9, 178, 218 n.2 Richardson, Ralph and 197 Rigby, Terence and 98, 100–1 Rigdon, Kevin and 100 Robinson, Patrick and 146, 147 Roxborough, Richard and xvi Royal Court Theatre and 33, 36, 97 Royal Lyceum Theatre and 166–8 San Quentin Drama Workshop and 46–50 Scottish Theatre Company and 170 set design 33, 48, 78–80, 91–2, 97, 100, 144, 168 Shaw-Porter, David and 170 Sheddon, John and 163, 165 Snow, Peter and 91–2 Stewart, Patrick and 74, 82–3, 84 Talawa Theatre Company and 141, 144–55 The Lyceum Theatre and 157–8, 159 Théâtre de Babylone and 166 Théâtre de l’Odéon and 78 Thomson, Mark and 157, 159, 170 touring and 19–20, 94 tramps and 112 Traverse Theatre and 163–6, 169 tree and 79–80, 144, 150

258 Index Tynan, Kenneth and 91, 178 Wale, Terry and 169, 170 Weaving, Hugo and xvi Williams, Robin and 215 n.2 Wilson, Richard and 163, 165 Winter, Edward and 221 n.3 Woodthorpe, Peter and 90, 91, 92, 94 Worton, Michael and 169 Wright, Allen and 163–4, 175 Wale, Terry 169, 170 Wall, Max xvi, 51, 53, 119 Warchus, Matthew 79 Wardle, Irving 96, 126 Warner, Deborah 80, 100, 124–9 Warner, John 118 Warrilow, David xvi, 53, 119–20 Watson, Moray 158–9 Watt (Beckett, Samuel) 194–5 Weaving, Hugo xvi Webb, Alan 96 West End, the 73–81 actors and 81–5 Albery (Noel Coward) Theatre 78 Arts Theatre 83–4 audiences and 85–6 Duchess Theatre 78 Haymarket Theatre 74–5, 78–9 New Ambassadors Theatre 79 Oh! Calcutta! and 191 Peter Hall Company 97 Queen’s Theatre 78 set design and 79–81 space and 78 West Yorkshire Playhouse 57–9, 60–1 Happy Days and 57, 59, 60, 61–9, 70–1, 72

Krapp’s Last Tape and 57, 60, 69, 71 Not I and 57, 60, 69–71 productions 60–1 Waiting for Godot and 59, 60, 141 White, Michael 183 Whitelaw, Billie Endgame and 221 n.3 Enough and 51, 52, 123–4 Footfalls and 36, 51, 52, 123, 215 n.2 Happy Days and 36, 37, 63 Not I and 32, 33, 36, 133, 137–8 Play and 30 Rockaby and 51, 52, 123 Wild Oats (O’Keefe, John) 58 Wilenski, Reginald: Introduction to Dutch Art 204–5 Williams, Bill 14 Williams, Robin 215 n.2 Williams, Tennessee 87 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof 19 Williamson, Nicol 33 Wilson, Jan 171 Wilson, Richard 163, 165 Winter, Edward 221 n.3 Woodthorpe, Peter 90, 91, 92, 94 Worcester Players 161 Worth, K. 128, 133 Worthen, W. B. 126 Worton, Michael 169 Wright, Allen 163–6, 168–9, 175 Yakovsky, Sergey 171 ‘Yellow’ (Beckett, Samuel) 205 Young, B. A. 96 Young Vic 76, 78