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Light, Sound, Movement, and Action in Beckett's Rockaby
- from The Stage
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- By Enoch Brater, Dramatic Literature at the University
- Edited by S. E. Gontarski
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- Book:
- On Beckett
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 05 May 2013
- Print publication:
- 15 December 2012, pp 292-298
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- Chapter
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Summary
Rockaby, which had its world premiere performance in Buffalo, New York, on 8 April 1981, continues Beckett's recent preoccupation with a small-scale play written specifically for a prerecorded voice in conflict with live stage action. A strange mixture of the carefully controlled and the spontaneous, the drama, whose sole protagonist is a woman dressed in black and whose only scenery is a rocking chair, restricts its subject matter and directs our attention instead to the formal elements of the play as performance. Light, sound, movement, and action therefore must be understood within the context established by this deliberately circumscribed stage space, an acting area in which a single image is expressed, explored, and advanced. Clear, articulate, definite, and precise, the visual impact becomes progressively haunting in its lonely simplicity. Simultaneously remote yet urgent in its personal appeal, a human shape is transfixed by the strong and pitiless light of a cold lunar glare. Much is made out of almost nothing.
What Rockaby gives up in breadth it makes up in fineness. The closely valued harmonics in the interplay of all that is visual and verbal, the use of light, the rocking of a chair that is controlled mechanically, the function of movement to emotionalize meaning, and the incorporation of electronics in the form of a magnetic recording tape are developed tactfully and richly.
12 - Tom Stoppard’s Brit/lit/crit
- from PART 3 - CULTURE AND CONTEXT
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- By Enoch Brater
- Edited by Katherine E. Kelly, Texas A & M University
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard
- Published online:
- 28 May 2006
- Print publication:
- 20 September 2001, pp 203-212
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- Chapter
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Summary
Stoppard’s use of the literary past - naming names, mixing and matching time and place and trope, and manhandling familiar quotations - runs the theatrical gamut from farce to parody to show(off)manship to somber intellectual inquiry. As successful productions of his plays have shown, especially when persuasively performed and articulated on the London stage, such territories are rarely, if ever, exclusive. Yet untangling the rich mixture of discourses, a heady allusive style that embraces quick wit, the surprising turn of phrase, and a bit more than a nodding acquaintance with relativity, quantum physics, and the provability (or lack thereof) of Fermat’s last theorem, has proved to be both a delight to his audiences and a challenge to dramatic criticism. In this chapter I would like to trace the development of Stoppard’s engaging “Brit/lit/crit” as well as consider its implications for the kind of audience that continues to be attracted to his plays.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Stoppard’s early and spectacular work, already shows the telltale signs of what would quickly become an idiosyncratic and highly eclectic dramatic voice. Let the world take note: Shakespeare’s Hamlet would never be quite the same again. When the Fringe was still the fringe, two minor characters took center stage and turned the English-speaking theatre’s most famous revenge tragedy upside down and inside out. Actors were suddenly hankering to play Rosencrantz and gentle Guildenstern (or is it the the other way around?), roles formerly assigned as consolation prizes for not making it big-time. Philosophically, of course, this retooling of Hamlet’s endgame offers its audience no such dumbing-down: death is no longer the “consummation devoutly to be wished,” but rather the price you pay for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, then realizing it too late, just when the curtain’s about to fall. To be is in this unenviable stage situation simply – and fatally – not to be, reckoning closed and story ended.