Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Dedication
- The Remains of the Modern and the Exhaustion of Thematics: An Introduction
- Theory Matters
- Texts Matter
- Performance Matters
- 9 ‘That's the Show’: Beckett and Performance
- 10 Reinventing Beckett
- 11 Staging Beckett: Voice and/in Performance (Company, What Where and Endgame)
- 12 Beckett and the ‘Idea’ of Theatre: Performance Through Artaud and Deleuze
- 13 Greying the Canon: Beckett in Performance, Beckett as Performance
- 14 ‘I think this does call for a firm stand’: Beckett at the Royal Court
- Index
11 - Staging Beckett: Voice and/in Performance (Company, What Where and Endgame)
from Performance Matters
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 May 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Dedication
- The Remains of the Modern and the Exhaustion of Thematics: An Introduction
- Theory Matters
- Texts Matter
- Performance Matters
- 9 ‘That's the Show’: Beckett and Performance
- 10 Reinventing Beckett
- 11 Staging Beckett: Voice and/in Performance (Company, What Where and Endgame)
- 12 Beckett and the ‘Idea’ of Theatre: Performance Through Artaud and Deleuze
- 13 Greying the Canon: Beckett in Performance, Beckett as Performance
- 14 ‘I think this does call for a firm stand’: Beckett at the Royal Court
- Index
Summary
I of whom I know nothing, I know my eyes are open because of the tears that pour from them unceasingly. In know I am seated, my hands on my knees, because of the pressure against my rump, against the soles of my feet? I don't know. My spine is not supported. I mention these details to make sure I am not lying on my back, my legs raised and bent, my eyes closed. (The Unnamable)
Use of the second person marks the voice. That of the third that cankerous other. Could he speak to and of whom the voice speaks there would be a first. But he cannot. He shall not. You cannot. You shall not. (Company)
Voice, at once or alternately seducer and assailant, comforter and adversary, has been stageable since its dramatic appearance in Molloy, where in some respects it remained constrained, unembodied on the page if not performed in the imagination. It made its escape, its liberation en plein air, with the radio play All That Fall in 1957 and Embers, written in 1957 as well but performed by the BBC only in 1959 (both now regularly performed as stage works, the former recently staged by Out of Joint in 2015–16 as ‘A theatrical journey into darkness’, with audience members blindfolded). Almost concurrently Beckett began a further technological exploration of voice on stage as the recorded voices of Krapp-past in 1958. From 1957 onward, then, Voice moved freely from page to stage, the line dividing Beckett's prose narratives from his radio texts and stage monologues grew fainter, was at times imperceptible, as Beckett began to explore the performative possibilities of Voice as thoroughly as he had explored its fictive possibilities in the post-war suite of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, and such experiments would continue through Rockaby, That Time and What Where as well as in the television plays. Liberated from whatever restrictions the page imposed, Voice would never again be content to sit mute, and it makes appearances again in the last two theatrical projects that sustained Beckett's interest: the adaptation of the novella Company to the stage and his revisions of What Where, first for television, and then again for the stage, and yet again for television, but it comes to the fore in Beckett's own stagings, as early as 1967, for his Endspiel (Endgame), as well.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Beckett MattersEssays on Beckett's Late Modernism, pp. 203 - 222Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2017